Social Psychology Research On Network Populism

The rising of new media, such as micro-blog, offers great chances to the masses topay more attention to the society and express themselves freely.And new media hasgrowing to be the platform for the pubic to express their their opinions.In recent years,aseries of public events had triggered the supervision enthusiasm of public opinion onnetwork,while it had presented a kind of populism sentiments,which has been spreading onnew media.We could see how network populism works in many hot public events,such as “thepolice killed college students” event,“the disfigured girl event”,“gang-rape case by Li”and so on.The public tend to go against the elites and authority,and judge facts in binaryopposite thinking:official and civilian,the rich and the poor,the elite and the mass withoutany patience to clarify the truth.The populist expressed their discontent and anger withextreme words,which intensified the contradictions between different social classes.Different from the previous study on populism,the paper is making a cross-field studybased on social psychology and journalism communication,and investigates both the individualpsychology and group psychology of network populism comprehensively.According to thebasic research and analysis,the paper put the opinion that network populism is a kind of rageoutlet of the mass group and the irrational expression of mass needs and ideals.In the last partof the paper,the author tries to offer some advices to deal with the mass psychologyphenomenon,so as to contribute to the construction of the rational and harmonious net opinionenvironment.