Research On Internet Psychology And Behavior In Online Mass Incidents

In recent years, due to the popularization and development of internet technology, the forces of netizens in china have seen significant growth. This has led to an increasing number of internet group events highlighted by the posts of netizens who, driven by a variety of motives, may exert a major impact on the development and outcome of the event. The participation of netizens is conducive to the solution of the event on the one hand while on the other, their possible extreme behaviors may do great harm to the persons involved and even lead to violence in the real world. So, studied psychology and behavior of netizens in the event has certain theoretical and practical significance.The thesis is divided into five parts. Part one is Introduction and Summary which explains the reason and significance of the choice of the topic and the study approach. It also touches upon the status quo of relevant literature in this field. Part Two includes an analysis of such factors as venue, participation means and characteristics of netizens in internet group events since2003. Part Three is case study which deals with individual and group psychological characteristics and also development of the general psychological process of netizens. Part Four analyzes extreme behaviors by netizens such as verbal abuse and human flesh search and explores the psychological motivation behind such behaviors. Part Five puts forwards suggestions on the construction of psycho-social prevention and divert mechanism based on the overall analysis and study.This paper takes the netizen of the internet group events as the research subject, applies three methods, literature review, analysis of case and theoretical analysis, and explores their mental process and behaviors. It is a bit of some new achievement in this area. There are three concepts in this paper:First, internet group events often happen in the visual communities, the main participants are male at the age between18and30years old, they release articles, follow others’articles and leave comments on news or videos online. Among all the internet events, social events are the mostly easily one to attract netizens’attentions, and they are likely to become internet group events.Second, netizens show their mental process such as curiosity, boredom and conformity. There are many differences between these psychological traits of different netizens. Those events are divided to three steps, brewing, outburst and retreat. The change of each step is highly related to netizens’relative deprivation and sympathies.Third, netizens have extremely behaviors during the internet group events, such as verbal violence and people hunting. Verbal violence is caused by hostile and aggressive catharsis, people hunting is caused by heroism and altruism. Therefore, building full social mechanism of prediction, expression and persuasion is very necessary to reduce internet group events. The important thing is to persuasion of netizens’negative emotion and to enhance mental healthy education.In this thesis, the subject has been fully researched and discussed in detail and it has a practical and academic significance, but there are also some limitations.