Social Media and Attitude Change: Information Booming Promote or Resist Persuasion?

Frontiers in Psychology

Lili Song³  Hao Li⁵  Yizhi Wang⁶  Yuwan Dai⁶ 

[1] CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, China;Department of Psychology and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China;Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;Plateau Center of Brain Sciences, Tibet University, Lhasa, China;School of Medicine, Tibet University, Lhasa, China;School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China;

关键词: attitude change;    social media;    information overload;    Weibo;    repeated information;    persuasion;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.596071

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Emerging social media platforms such as Twitter and its Chinese equivalent Weibo have become important in information-sharing and communication. They are also gradually becoming stronger in guiding public opinion. When compared with traditional media, these platforms have salient characteristics, such as highly efficient dissemination of information and interactive commentary, which can contribute to information overload. In earlier research, only the effect of social media on attitude change has been studied, but the specific mechanism of this effect in the context of information overload has not been found. To answer this question, we measured the attitude change of participants after they read Weibo posts about street vendors. A 2 (post-attitude: positive posts vs. negative posts) × 4 (reading time: 35 vs. 25 vs. 15 vs. 5 min) experiment was set up, and the Single Category Implicit Attitude Test was used to measure the implicit attitudes. The interaction effect revealed that in both positive and negative posts, less reading time (i.e., information overload) had a stronger influence. Users were more easily persuaded by posts under high overload. Furthermore, the changes in the attitudes of users were not simply stronger with more information. We found three stages, namely, obedience, resistance, and acceptance, with different mechanisms. Therefore, in the positive information overload condition, the attitudes of individuals eventually change in a positive way. In the negative information overload condition, individuals tend to be biased against the group being reported.

【 授权许可】

Unknown