Context-dependent Online Social Influence: Effect of Majority and Minority Comments on Posters and Lurkers

While participatory websites provide users with two distinctive contexts, such as posting opinions and lurking, not many studies examine how such contexts affect the ways in which users are influenced by peer opinions. In a 2 (context: posting vs. lurking) X 3 (peer-opinion composition: balanced, lopsided, or unanimous) between-subjects experiment, participants (N = 334) revealed their opinions in a public poll or in an anonymous survey. After reading a unanimous opinion in the comments, both posting and lurking groups agreed with the unanimous opinion to a greater extent than reading the balanced opinion. After reading opposing opinions of the numerical majority and the numerical minority of peer groups, posters leaned toward the majority opinion, and lurkers toward the minority opinion. Additional analyses revealed that different mechanisms governed the effects. The moderating effect of group identification and need for cognition implies that normative influence and informational influence underlies the majority effect and minority effect, respectively.