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The more we know, the more likely we may agree?

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posted on 2022-03-30, 15:12 authored by Jie MengJie Meng
Extreme voices are frequently spotted to have a significant effect on public opinions on online forums or social media, but very little is known about when, what, and how to tone it towards softened and how to manage them. To deal with the large volume of extreme opinions, companies, and PR authorities spent heavily on soothing the tension and sheltering customer word-of-mouth from devasting reviews by feeding public overloaded information, dominating public attention and grabbing new headlines, yet very few studies rationalize this assumption. This paper develops simulation experiments to unmask the aforementioned relations, in particular, how information environment (i.e., information preference and noise), individual factors (i.e., acceptance threshold, halo effect), and institutional efforts (i.e., promotion) affect the customer review’s evolution at the aggregate level. The findings suggest that the evolution of opinion in divergence can occur in any preference-held audience whereas the information noise can substantially moderate the information valence and cause the polarized voices to get mild dramatically. In addition, a halo effect on the information source can stir the voice to be amplified by the influencer. The experimental results indicate the significance of understanding information valence and group conformity in conversational contexts and find a few clues of improving communication effects. This research bears high originality in explaining how public opinions evolve in a belief-neutral environment via audience-sensitive, context-bound, objective-manipulated techniques. The findings suggest valuable meanings to review monitor and control in information management.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

Telematics and Informatics

Volume

70

Publisher

Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2022-03-21

Publication date

2022-03-28

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

0736-5853

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Jie Meng. Deposit date: 28 March 2022

Article number

101807

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