As more and more review platforms add social networking services, the majority of platforms have evolved into a binary social-commercial environment. In this particular context, readers assess review posters with dual roles in the decision-making process: friend role and reviewer role. Unlike previous studies from a single-role perspective, this study develops a dual-role model for exploring review helpfulness mechanisms based on role theory. More importantly, this study further investigates whether contextual cues of trust transfer affect the interaction effect of the dual role. We first apply a qualitative methodology by using semi-structured interviews with 32 readers of review platforms to extract the relevant dimensions of the dual role. Then, using actual online review data collected from Pconline.com in China, we conduct an econometric analysis to test our hypotheses. The results confirm the interaction of reviewers’ dual roles and the effect of contextual cues of trust transfer in a dual role-based model. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.