Volume 29, Issue 1
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.26
DETERMINING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF FORWARDING BEHAVIOR OF WEIBO USERS BASED ON COGNITIVE HEURISTICS
Abstract
The mechanism of information dissemination has long been the interest of crisis managers, commercial leaders and news outlets. This paper aims to understand the effects of heuristic factors on the forwarding behavior of Weibo users. Firstly, the authors identified four author-based heuristic cues that affect Weibo users’ decision to forward a post. Then, the concept of information gain was introduced to examine the predictive features of each heuristic cue. The results show that different types of cognitive heuristic factors have varied impacts on Weibo users’ judgement of a post; the heuristic cues identified here greatly affect the judgment by Weibo users. The research findings provide guidance on the prediction of largescale information cascades.
Keywords
Social media, Microblog, Cognitive Heuristics, Information Processing, News Dissemination Behavior.