態度一致性與情緒喚起對線上謠言判斷之影響

Abstract

隨著社群媒體的普及，社群媒體已經成為新聞最主要的來源之一，然而，它的特性也讓謠言、假新聞比以往傳播的更快、更遠。本研究的主要目的為探討讀者與訊息之間的態度一致性與訊息的情緒喚起程度如何影響社群平台使用者對於線上謠言的感知可信度和分享意圖。我們希望透過此研究，釐清態度一致性與情緒喚起對於線上謠言判斷的影響，並了解是什麼樣心理特質的人容易受到這些因素所影響。在過去的研究中發現，人們傾向於選擇閱讀與自己有著相同立場的訊息，學者認為這是基於確認偏誤（confirmation bias）所產生的現象。在本研究中我們推測，人們對於線上謠言的感知可信度和分享意圖也會受到確認偏誤的影響，當人們與訊息的態度一致性越高，感知可信度和分享意圖也會越高。我們也推測這樣的現象對於認知閉合需求（need for cognitive closure）高的人會更加明顯。另一方面，情緒喚起（emotional arousal）是媒體常用來吸引讀者的策略，高情緒喚起的媒體在網路上有更強的傳播力。因此我們推測，當線上謠言的情緒喚起程度越高，人們的感知可信度和分享意圖也會越高。另外我們也推測這樣的效果對於情緒感染易感性（susceptibility to emotional contagion）高的人會更強。本研究採用實驗法來驗證我們的假設，實驗一的結果顯示，態度一致性越高，感知可信度和分享意圖也會越高，而且認知閉合需求高的人在高態度一致性時會比認知閉合需求低的人產生更高的感知可信度。實驗二的結果則顯示，情緒喚起對於感知可信度和分享意圖並沒有顯著的影響，這樣的結果並不符合我們的假設，因此在內文中我們也會針對這個現象來做解釋。

With the popularity of social media, social media have become one of the main sources of news. However, the characteristics of social platforms also let rumors and fake news spread faster and farther. Online rumors and fake news often edited with specific stance and emotional writing style. Individuals’ judgements of messages may be affected by the consistency between their prior attitudes and messages stances toward the issue, namely attitudinal congruence between individual and message. The emotional arousal of messages, that is, the degree of which messages trigger individuals’ emotion, may also affected individual’s judgements of messages. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of attitudinal congruence between readers and messages and the effect of emotional arousal of messages on readers’ perceived credibility and sharing intention. Several researchers find people tend to exposure to attitude-consistent news, we proposed that people’s credibility evaluation and sharing intention of online messages would show similar phenomenon because of attitudinal congruence between people and messages. Additionally, we proposed need for cognitive closure as a moderator on the effect of attitudinal congruence. Moreover, we proposed that people tend to trust and share online rumor with high level of emotional arousal. We also proposed that people with high susceptibility to emotional contagion would be affected by emotional arousal more greatly. We adopted experimental method to test our hypotheses. The empirical results show that under high attitudinal congruence condition, perceived credibility and share intention were higher, and the effect of attitudinal congruence on perceived credibility would be stronger for high need for cognitive closure people. Unexpectedly, we find emotional arousal did not affect both perceived credibility and share intention, we have explained these results in this paper.