Department of Journalism, School of Humanities and Arts, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China.
Research Institute of Social Development, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 17;19(9):e0308745. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308745. eCollection 2024.
Social confidence functions as a vital spiritual force in fostering the positive and healthy evolution of society. This paper explores how social media exposure contributes to the construction of social confidence within the framework of Media-system Dependency Theory. The research unveils the following key findings: (1) Social media exposure positively facilitates social confidence; (2) Group efficacy and group cohesion, perceived as manifestations of cognitive divergence between "efficacy" and "collective" within collective efficacy, both serve as mediating mechanisms influencing the impact of social media exposure on social confidence. The Channel Testing of Causality confirms that group cohesion plays a significantly more crucial role as a pathway compared to group efficacy; (3) The differentiated impact of social media exposure, encompassing Tencent WeChat and Sina Weibo, materializes in distinct components of social confidence and follows different influence pathways.
社会信心是促进社会积极健康发展的重要精神力量。本文探讨了社交媒体接触如何在媒介系统依赖理论框架内促进社会信心的构建。研究揭示了以下主要发现：（1）社交媒体接触对社会信心有积极的促进作用；（2）群体效能感和群体凝聚力作为集体效能感中“效能”和“集体”认知分歧的表现，都作为中介机制影响社交媒体接触对社会信心的影响。因果关系的渠道测试证实，群体凝聚力作为一种途径，比群体效能感发挥更关键的作用；（3）社交媒体接触的差异化影响，包括腾讯微信和新浪微博，体现在社会信心的不同组成部分，并遵循不同的影响途径。
