Expressive authenticity as a behavioral buffer: how advertising recognition shapes engagement in social commerce

Abstract

With the widespread adoption of social e-commerce platforms, users are increasingly exposed to branded content that blends commercial persuasion with personal expression, raising important questions about how users psychologically respond to such content in terms of engagement-related behavioral tendencies. This study investigates how advertisement recognition influences users' willingness to participate, and examines the moderating role of expressive authenticity as well as the boundary conditions introduced by platform-level advertising disclosures. Using a multi-source dataset that combines objective content features from 600 beauty brand collaboration posts on the Xiaohongshu platform with users' subjective perception ratings, hierarchical regression and group analyses were conducted to test the proposed relationships. The results show that advertisement recognition significantly reduces participation willingness, consistent with the activation of persuasion knowledge. Expressive authenticity positively predicts participation willingness and attenuates the negative effect of advertisement recognition when explicit advertising labels are absent. However, this buffering effect disappears when official platform advertising labels are present, indicating that institutional disclosure alters users' processing of authenticity-related cues. These findings suggest that expressive cues can mitigate persuasion-related resistance only under specific disclosure conditions, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of psychological responses to native advertising in social media contexts.