ANI |
Updated: May 11, 2021 18:56 IST
Ohio [US]May 11 (ANI): People are more convinced by the actual messages contained in social media posts than by the number of other people who have viewed the post, a new study finds.
Researchers found that when people watch YouTube video Whether they were for or against the use of e-cigarettes, their conviction was not directly affected by the fact that the video showing it was viewed by more than a million people compared to less than 20.
The key to persuasion is that the viewer’s perception of the message is honest and trustworthy.
“There is no bandwagon effect in which people are convinced by a video just because many other people watch it,” said Hyunyi Cho, lead author of the study and a professor of communications at Ohio State University.
“The message itself is most important to persuasion.”
The research will appear in the June 2021 issue of Psychology of Communication.
The study involved 819 demographically diverse American adults ages 18-35.
Most of them were showing two YouTube video for or against vaping. Pro-vaping video advertising for brands of e-cigarettes. Anti-collision video are public service announcements issued by anti-smoking non-profit organizations.
However, the researchers manipulated the number of views the participants viewed in order to video. Participants saw around 10, 100, 100,000 or 1,000,000 views.
Participants rated the persuasiveness of video to them: whether they influenced their curiosity about e-cigarettes, positive attitudes towards e-cigarette use, and future e-cigarette use.
The results showed that participants were more convinced when they rated as more honest and trustworthy. Amount view that the video had no direct impact on their level of persuasion.
Participants were also asked how much they thought video Indicating they watched will affect other young people.
The results showed that it was the participants who watched video – do they think video reliable and honest – is directly related to their estimate of video‘ impact on others.
“People focus more on factors related to themselves – how they feel about the video – when considering how much impact the video has on others,” Cho said.
“They focus less on other focus factors – such as views – as a reason why a video might be persuasive.”
In addition, the study participants did not think that mass media would have as far reach as social media.
Some participants saw video under fake TV conditions and not under YouTube conditions. Overall, the TV condition participants estimated video there will be less view compared with participants of the YouTube condition.
“Social media can be seen as more pervasive than mass media like television because sites like YouTube do not share the same geographic boundaries as social media,” Cho said. the masses can have”.
Overall, the results suggest that YouTube’s popularity shouldn’t be equated with video and other social media posts with numbers of people finding their messages persuasive or being persuaded by them, Cho said.
“We can choose to watch a video on YouTube because it has so many viewbut that’s different from whether we’re convinced by the message,” she said. (ANI)
