Redundancy in Visual-Verbal Word of Mouth: How Photos Increase Visual Language Use

Gizem Ceylan and Kristin Diehl

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2026, vol. 11, issue 2, 183 - 198

Abstract: With camera-enabled phones, consumers can share their experiences not just in words but also in photos. Drawing on Grice’s conversational maxims, this article asks: Do photos substitute for words, following the maxim of quantity, as “a picture is worth a thousand words” suggests? Or following the maxim of relation, do people communicate redundantly across modalities by expressing visual aspects both visually and verbally? Across two large-scale data sets of more than 6.9 million consumer reviews from Yelp and TripAdvisor, two validation studies with human judges, and a controlled experiment, we find that reviewers generally communicate redundantly: While photos naturally convey visual aspects of experiences, reviewers also communicate these aspects in their text, creating redundancy across modalities. This tendency is heightened when reviewers begin by selecting a photo and when they are concerned about how their message is received by readers.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/740063 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/740063 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jacres:doi:10.1086/740063

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Consumer Research from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().