Third Person Effect And Social Networking:Research On The Influencing Factors Of Users' Communication Behaviors In Social Media Environment

The popularity of smart phones and the development of mobile Internet has brought the rise of social media platforms.As the representatives of social media applications,Microblog,WeChat have already been involved in the lives of Chinese Internet users.The advancement of media technology has being creating a new media environment.Compared to the traditional mass media environment,the channels of audience accessing to information and the ways of information disseminating,have been changed to a certain degree.Especially,the interactivity of social media gave birth to a series of unique user communication behaviors in the social media environment.In this context,making the typical positive and negative information as a starting point,this article attempts to study the specific influencing factors of users' behaviors in social media environment,which using "the third-person effect" as the interpretation of the framework.The "third-person effect" hypothesis describes a widespread bias in mass communication that people often perceive others as being more susceptible to media information than themselves,and that this perceptive bias leads to audience's follow-up media behaviors.Another purpose of this paper is to explore the changes of "third-person effect" hypothesis in follow-up behavior level in the social media era in order to achieve the purpose of expanding the theoretical content.In the present study,a questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the college students in Shanghai.The results showed that,on the cognitive level,when the users receive negative information,"third-person effect perception" will appear.After receiving the positive information,the first-person effect perception can be predicted,but at the behavioral level,the third-person effect perception can not predict the follow-up behaviors such as publishing resistive comments,refusing to transmit and reporting,while "first-person effect perception" can predict leaving a like,transmitting and other follow-up behaviors,but it has little predictability on supportive comments.In addition,the study also found that varieties such as information significance,self-esteem,subjective understanding have predictability on user's communication behaviors.