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This study conducted an online experiment with 384 participants to explore the mechanisms through which viewers form initial impressions of strangers based on their emotional self-disclosure in social media profiles. The findings revealed that positive emotional expressions fostered a higher degree of interpersonal liking and trust than negative emotional expressions. The relationship between emotional valence and interpersonal liking was partially mediated by perceived appropriateness and perceived similarity. Judgments of interpersonal trust were fully mediated by the perceived appropriateness and perceived similarity of emotional expressions. The study further discovered an interaction between emotional valence and intensity, such that the effect of emotional valence on perceived similarity became more pronounced when emotional intensity was high. The findings underscored the significant influence of emotional expressions on the development of interpersonal liking and trust on social media. The study also specified two inferential processes (perceived appropriateness and perceived similarity) underlying these effects and highlighted the moderating role of emotional intensity. The theoretical and practical implications were also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If one wants to study privacy from an intercultural perspective, one must first validate whether there are any cultural variations in the concept of “privacy” itself. This study systematically examines cultural differences in collective privacy management strategies, and highlights methodological precautions that must be taken in quantitative intercultural privacy research. Using survey data of 498 Facebook users from the US, Singapore, and South Korea, we test the validity and cultural invariance of the measurement model and predictive model associated with collective privacy management. The results show that the measurement model is only partially culturally invariant, indicating that social media users in different countries interpret the same instruments in different ways. Also, cross-national comparisons of the structural model show that causal pathways from collective privacy management strategies to privacy-related outcomes vary significantly across countries. The findings suggest significant cultural variations in privacy management practices, both with regard to the conceptualization of its theoretical constructs, and with respect to causal pathways.

Context collapse occurs on social media platforms when different groups are mixed into one audience. To advance the understanding of the extensive and complex coping strategies people use to address context collapse, this study makes a conceptual distinction between passively adapting by sharing context-free, general information (context adaptation) and rebuilding contexts to satisfy the diverse needs of impression management (context restoration). This study in-depth interviewed 51 WeChat users (30 working professionals and 21 college students) in urban China. The results identified strategies for context restoration through reconstructing contextual boundaries on psychological, relational, spatial, and temporal dimensions. These findings highlight individual (effort minimization, self-consciousness, and privacy concerns) and audience factors (the heterogeneity and activeness of the audience) in determining the adoption of specific strategies. This study emphasizes the subjectivity and agency of users in relation to the social media ecosystem and develops a theoretical spectrum systematically situating users' coping behaviors for mitigating context collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we extended and tested the privacy calculus framework in the context of a hypothetical AI-based contact-tracing technology for application during the COVID-19 pandemic that is based on the communication privacy management and contextual integrity theories. Specifically, we investigated how the perceived privacy risks and benefits of information disclosure affect the public's willingness to opt in and adopt contact-tracing technologies and how social and contextual factors influence their decision-making process. Four hundred eighteen adults in the United States participated in the study via Amazon Mechanical Turk in August 2020. A percentile bootstrap method with 5,000 resamples and bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals in structural equation modeling was used for data analysis. The participants' privacy concerns and perceived benefits significantly influenced their opt-in and adoption intentions, which suggests that the privacy calculus framework applies to the context of COVID-19 contact-tracing technologies. Perceived social, personal, and reciprocal benefits were identified as crucial mediators that link contextual variables to both opt-in and adoption intentions. Although this study was based on a hypothetical AI-based contact-tracing app, our findings provide meaningful theoretical and practical implications for future research investigating the public's technology adoption in contexts where tradeoffs between privacy risks and public health coexist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the processes of seeking information online and evaluating this information. We hypothesized that individuals' social network, in-out group categorization, and cultural proclivity would influence their online information-seeking behavior. Also, we tested whether individuals differentiated information values based on the information source. A total of 78 students from two universities in different geographical regions of Singapore participated in a collaborative information-seeking exercise using a computer-mediated collaborative system. The information-seeking data were analyzed with multivariate p* network analysis. The findings of this study showed that interpersonal social networks, in-out group distinctions, and individuals' cultural proclivity significantly affected the information exchange process between different groups. However, it was found that individuals did not differentiate the values of information according to whether the source of the information was within their social network or school. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships between communication styles, social networks, and learning performance in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community. Using social network analysis (SNA) and longitudinal survey data, we analyzed how 31 distributed learners developed collaborative learning social networks, when they had work together on the design of aerospace systems using online collaboration tools. The results showed that both individual and structural factors (i.e., communication styles and a pre-existing friendship network) significantly affected the way the learners developed collaborative learning social networks. More specifically, learners who possessed high willingness to communicate (WTC) or occupied initially peripheral network positions were more likely to explore new network linkages. We also found that the resultant social network properties significantly influenced learners' performance to the extent that central actors in the emergent collaborative social network tended to get higher final grades. The study suggests that communication and social networks should be central elements in a distributed learning environment. We also propose that the addition of personality theory (operationalized here as communication styles) to structural analysis (SNA) contributes to an enhanced picture of how distributed learners build their social and intellectual capital in the context of CSCL.

Car use contributes significantly to environmental pollution, leading people to rethink their transport habits. Previous studies on car use reduction relied on established theories related to values and self‐regulation to examine this decision. In this paper, we offer an alternative approach and examine the intention to reduce car use through the prism of identity theory, and propose environmental and moral identities, together with environmental concern, as the main antecedents to the importance of car use reduction and intention to reduce car use. Further, we consider ride‐sharing intention as an outcome of the decision to reduce car use. The proposed conceptual model is tested on a sample of consumers from the United Kingdom using an online consumer panel. The results offer partial support for the influence of moral identity, environmental identity, and environmental concern on the importance to reduce car use and intention. The links among the importance of and intention to reduce car use, along with ride‐sharing intentions, are supported. Finally, managerial implications are discussed, and future research directions are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the process of collaborative information seeking in intercultural computer-mediated communication (CMC) groups. The authors conducted a field experiment in which 86 students from three distant universities (one in the United States, two in Singapore) participated. The students participated in a collaborative learning practice in which they socially recommended information using a CMC system. The results demonstrate that the social context--that is, preexisting social networks, groups, and intergroup boundaries--significantly constrained the flow of information across intercultural CMC groups. The authors also found that the influence of the social context on CMC collaboration could be moderated by other contingent factors such as national culture and individuals' outcome expectancies of Internet use. The authors present the results from testing their hypotheses using multivariate p* and Quadratic Assignment Procedure network regression analyses and conclude with a discussion of the findings and implications for future research. Keywords: social network analysis; computer-mediated communication; information seeking; national culture; outcome expectancy; multivariate p* analysis

With the rapid development of computer-based information systems in China, securing organizational systems as information assets is central to achieving a strategic advantage. Because information security (IS) experts with database access are the weakest link in the IS chain, scholarly contributions are needed in this important area. The interpretations of widespread data breaches committed by organizations' information security experts have significant grounding. Drawing on social control theory, we propose a research framework to examine formal control, informal control, and self-control systems that can affect IS professionals' perceptions and IS behaviors in Chinese IT organizations. We use in-depth interviews with IS professionals in Wuhan, Beijing, and Shenzhen to answer research questions relating to the research framework. The study's primary contribution is to go beyond the extant IS research, which concentrates on sanction-based deterrence, and identify multiple dimensions rooted in social control perspectives. Based on interviews with practitioners and researchers, this study further advances our understanding of IS control deviance using information management and communication-related approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through using Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) method, this study proposes a new approach to ethical consumer categorization. Based on a survey using national survey data of more than 1,000 people in the United States and Malaysia, this study found three common ethical consumer groups based on ethical sensitivity in both countries—moral enthusiast, moral interested, and moral indifferent. In addition to the aforementioned commonalities, we found national differences in consumer profiles: the U.S. sample also shows a moral progressivist group inclined to liberal ethics, while the Malaysia sample shows a moral intuitionist group with a relativistic approach in ethical decision making. The results indicate that ethical consumer profiling based on MFT has a sufficient level of criterion validity as it helps predict moral outrage, pro‐business attitudes, and boycott intentions in response to corporate irresponsibility. The study also demonstrates cross‐cultural differences in moral foundations and moral judgments in the context of ethical consumerism and corporate social irresponsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cybersecurity breaches are on the rise. Extant literature in the development of strategies to enhance IT users' online protective behaviours has neglected users' cognitive processing of cybersecurity risk information. This study demonstrates a cause–effect elaboration procedure based on the concept of construal fit to influence online users' cybersecurity risk perceptions. Using online experiments (N  = 534), the construal fit between elaboration of causes vs effects of cybersecurity risks and perceived temporal distance (distant vs near) was manipulated. The results revealed that a construal fit between the elaboration of 'effects' (vs 'causes') and temporally 'near' (vs 'distant') cybersecurity risks enhanced users' risk perceptions, which in turn predicted protective behavioural intentions. Ensuring construal fit is a novel, cognition-based approach to safeguard IT users against online threats. Our findings enrich existing staged theories used to investigate cybersecurity risk perceptions and suggest to practitioners that heightened cyber risk perception can effectively be induced by simultaneously enhancing the concreteness of IT users' construal of cybersecurity incidents and emphasizing on its negative consequences (vs causes). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was aimed to contribute to understanding how networked yet fragmented online actors create meaning in digital media–enabled movements like #MeToo. By drawing upon a multidimensional framing analysis, this study investigated how personal action frames, collective action frames, and issue-specific frames were adopted in #MeToo movement in China, and it also shed light on how different groups of social actors respond to sexual harassment issues on Sina Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. This study employed computational content analysis to extract frames from a huge amount of traceable data (i.e., 16,187 Weibo posts) and uncovered seven specific types of frames categorized as personal experiences and emotional commentary (as personal action frames), injustice and opposition (as collective action frames), and problem definition, treatment recommendation, and related news (as issue-specific frames). The results revealed that personal action frames and collective action frames were widely adopted by females and ordinary users, whereas issue-specific frames were more commonly applied by males and organizational users. These empirical findings enhance our understanding of meaning construction with regard to digital media–enabled movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]