社会危机背景下的联结行动说服策略研究 ——基于社交媒体中的用户生成内容文本分析

近年来的社会危机事件表明,社交媒体平台已成为传播信息、开展联结行动的主流社会报道工具。基于决策与推理的双系统说服模型—启发式与系统式处理,本文通过微博平台定量地探讨了联结行动中积极分子的用户生成内容(UGC)与公众参与间的复杂关系。借鉴道德判断和认知加工文献,视道德呼吁内容为启发式线索,功利呼吁内容为系统式线索,考察其重要性,并从情绪唤醒的角度研究了社会危机中常见的两种消极离散情感:焦虑和悲伤。利用两个不同社会危机期间(2016年魏则西事件和2018年泰国沉船事件)的数据集,结合机器学习算法与负二项回归模型,发现两类呼吁性内容均可刺激普通用户作为扩散者参与联结行动。同时,嵌入在UGC中的悲伤情绪增加了道德呼吁的重要性,而焦虑情绪则促进了功利呼吁的正向影响。实证结果对联结行动的行动者、危机管理者和应急救援部门都具有重要的现实意义。

Research on connective action persuasion strategies in the context of social crisis:Text analysis of user-generated contents in social media

In recent years,the deep-seated contradictions of political,economic,cultural and other aspects in society gradually emerged,various types of social crisis-prone.During large-scale crises,relying heavily upon a battery of social media,multiple actors(e.g.,advocates,supports and amplifiers)come together informally,engage in co-participation and co-production of user-generated content(UGC)and build emergent and organic relationships,forming connective action.Driven by an issue of mutual interest,connective action is approached as new forms of collective engagement,in which online platforms are deemed as main positions.Many social media users engage in connective action proactively to express collectively grievance with regard to a certain social problem or to react toward a certain threatened change.With activists(including advocates and supports)continually creating a massive amount of UGC to catalyze public interest and scaling up the momentum of the action over time,they are constantly seeking out better strategies to persuade ordinary users to convert into their amplifiers in order to ensure the success of connective action.Activist-developed persuasive messages are considered as one crucial component to spur public engagement in connective action settings,since it can be shared with and recognized by others who in turn repeat these networked sharing activities through a social media feature.That is sharing.Although prior works have pinpointed the importance of the interaction among actors and acknowledged the necessity of the indepth apprehension of UGC generated by activists,they mostly were conducted by qualitative methodologies,rather than quantitative methods.Aiming to fill the theoretical gap,this paper sets out to contribute new insight by answering the following research questions:(1)Would different types(e.g.morality appeal and utilitarian appeal)of UGC content expressed by activists evoke public engagement on the context of social crisis?(2)What role does negative discrete emotion common to social crisis(i.e.,anxiety and sad)play in the relationship between appeal content and public engagement?Building upon the heuristic-systematic model(HSM),we develop the conceptual framework,which encompasses two decision-making modes(i.e.,systematic processing and heuristic processing)and one important consideration(i.e.,the moderating effect of the mobilizing ability of cognitive resources).Drawing on the literature about moral judgement and cognitive processing,we approach morality appeal content as the heuristic processing and utilitarian appeal content as the systematic processing and examine their importance.We also study the moderating roles of two distinct negative emotions,anxiety and sad,in terms of their cognition arousal.To test the framework,we offer a content analysis of the unique datasets from two social crises event in the“Sina Weibo”platform(the Chinese largest micro-blogging website):the Weizexi event in 2016,and the Thailand boat sink in 2018.Combining machine learning algorithms with negative binomial regression analysis,this paper shows that both types of appeal content can spur ordinary users to engage in connective action as amplifiers.And sad-embedded in UGC increases the importance of morality appeal,whereas anxiety-embedded in UGC facilitates the influence of utilitarian appeal.Our empirical findings contribute to the body of extant literature and carry important practical implications for the decision-making of activists,crisis managers,and emergency rescue departments.