Abstract

Digital platforms have become integral to how individuals interpret health information. Recent informatics studies document widespread exposure to conflicting guidance and increasing reliance on online sources yet provide limited explanation for how such inconsistencies shape individual sensemaking processes (Stimpson et al., 2024; Zhang & Gai, 2026). Sensemaking perspectives in Information Systems (IS) and organizational research have extensively examined equivocality, ambiguity, and breakdowns as triggers of meaning construction, emphasizing processes of cue extraction, plausibility, enactment, and retrospection (Daft & Weick, 1984; Weick, et al., 2005). However, this literature largely treats equivocality as informational uncertainty rather than as misalignment among legitimate authorities. In parallel, health informatics and communication research documents conflicting expert recommendations and their associations with trust erosion and social media use, but remains primarily descriptive or normative (Stimpson et al., 2024; Zhang & Gai, 2026). Consequently, prior work under-specifies how authority incoherence—perceived inconsistency across expert sources—functions as a sensemaking trigger and under what conditions it leads individuals to re-route meaning-making across institutional boundaries. We ask the following. 1) How does perceived authority incoherence influence individuals’ reliance on externalized sensemaking resources, such as online platform-mediated health information? 2) What conditions modify the association between authority incoherence and externalized sensemaking? We will discuss the conceptual model and possibly present preliminary results using HINTS data. Clarifying how individuals make sense of conflicting expert guidance addresses a central challenge in contemporary digital health environments. This study informs ongoing debates on patient engagement, clinical communication, and the governance of digital health information ecosystems (Ienca et al., 2026). This study contributes to IS theory by refining sensemaking scholarship and extending sensemaking perspectives to digitally mediated health contexts.

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