A Study On The Mechanism And Influence Factors Of Mere Exposure Of Social Media Users On Persuasion

The idea that simple repeated exposure increases liking is foundational to social psychology.Mere exposure suggests a straightforward way to influence individual attitude preference,such as promoting intergroup relations and improving attitudes toward a product or politician.However,few studies have extended the mere exposure effect to the persuasion context to examine the effect of prior exposure to only the source on the cognitive component of individual attitudes.With the development of precise push mechanisms on social media platforms,impressive amounts of single,homogeneous users and message repeatedly appear in people’s view,which profoundly affects the formation and change of individual attitudes.However,none of the existing studies have examined the effect of mere exposure to users on individual attitude change on social media platforms.Therefore,in order to expand previous relevant theories and empirical studies,this study collected and compiled social media users and persuasive materials,developed a website similar to Sina Weibo and tried to examine whether and how prior multiple repeated exposure of social media users makes a more persuasive appeal among college students with experience in social media use.In addition,from both source variables and receiver’s trait,this study attempts to reveal the role of the emotional validity of the source and the cognitive needs of the message receiver in the process of the effect of repeated exposure to the source on persuasion.The aim is to gain insight into and predict the formation and change of individual attitudes on social media platforms,thus providing advice and guidance to prevent individuals from being maliciously influenced or manipulated by others.Study 1 used a 2（Number of prior exposures of users:8 times/2 times）×3（Emotional validity of user-posted text:positive/neutral/negative）×2（level of need for cognition:low/high）mixed design.57 college students(36.8%male;M_age=20.26±2.16 years)were required to complete the Need for Cognition（NFC）scale and rate agreement with some arguments the day before the formal experiment.In the formal experiment,all participants first viewed several tweets（daily life events）by some users and then evaluated the degree of agreement with the persuasive message posted by these users.The results of the repeated measures analysis of variance（ANOVA）showed that（1）compared to users with a low number of prior exposures,users with a high number of prior exposures had a better persuasive effect on individuals;（2）the effects of the number of repeated exposure of social media users on persuasive effect was not moderated by the valence of tweets the user posts.That is,regardless of the emotional valence of the text posted by the user,an increase in social media user’s prior exposure frequency led to a greater agreement of individuals with the advocated position;（3）the individual’s need for cognition played a moderating role between the number of repeated exposures of social media user’s and persuasion.Specifically,those who were high on NFC were more easily persuaded by high number of exposure users than those who were low on NFC.Study 2 used a 2（Number of prior exposures of users:8 times/2 times）×3（Emotional validity of user-posted text:positive/neutral/negative）within-subjects design.42 college students(47.6%male;M_age=20.24±2.27 years)completed an experimental procedure similar to the experiment 1 and after rated agreement with the persuasive message,participants were also asked to report the perceived attractiveness of the users.The results of the repeated measures analysis of variance（ANOVA）replicated the main finding of Experiment 1,which was that the higher the number of prior repeated exposures of the users,the better their persuasive effect on individuals.The multilevel structural equation model was built using Mplus 8.3 for multilevel mediation.The results showed that perceived attractiveness played a mediating role in the influence of the number of prior exposures of the user on persuasion.This study conducted two behavioral experiments to reveal the effects of repeated exposure among social media users on individual attitude change and the underlying mechanism.The results supported the perceptual fluency model and affective primacy accounts.Moreover,this study also examined the roles of source variables and receiver’s trait in information recipients in the process of the effects of repeated exposure on persuasive effectiveness,which enriched and expanded the empirical research on the relationship between sources variables and persuasion.