Empirical Study Of Consumer’s Online Spreading Misbehavior Against The Agricultural Product Harm Crisis

In recent years, the agriculture product harm crises happened frequently in China and the food safety issue has caused much social attention. At the same time, with the popularization of the Internet, people can express their opinions when they receive the product harm crises information, which makes great negative influences on the whole industry. Therefore, the phenomenon that information of product-harm spills over is very common. Negative public opinion not only causes serious economic loss to the involved companies but also destroys our national agricultural products’brand images. What’s more, in reality, similar product harm crises may experience different network public opinion evolution. Therefore, it is worth studying what factors influence consumers’misbehavior of spreading and what the mechanism is.This research is aimed to explore the mechanism of consumers’misbehavior of spreading under the background of domestic agricultural product harm crises. Through literature review, case study of the collected internet public opinion during the product harm crises and our own thinking, we propose the theoretical model. The model is based on the paradigm of cognition-emotion-behavior and from the perspective of consumers’ brand cognition, corporate behavior cognition and negative information cognition. Quasi experiment method is used in this research, dada are collected by the on-line and off-line experiments and the hypotheses are examined by SPSS17.0through its descriptive statistical analysis, reliability and validity analysis, regression analysis, and hierarchy regression analysis.Research results are concluded as follows:(1) Consumers brand cognitions before the product harm crises have close relationship with their spreading behavior. The more brand bias, the higher chance to misbehave the spreading.(2) The more difference between consumers’moral evaluation norm and corporate behavior, the more likely for consumers to misbehave the spreading.(3) Consumers who are more similar to the negative reviewers on the internet have more possibility to misbehave the information spreading.(4) Consumers’anger mediates their misbehavior of spreading.(5) During the formation process of anger, consumers’confidence towards the information sources plays partial positive moderation.These findings can not only explain how the consumers’misbehaviors of spreading from the theoretical perspective, which is a new angle for the product harm crises’ negative spillover research, but can also be a useful reference for the companies to formulate crisis emergency management plans when they are in face with the product harm crises.