Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Context and Match Between Context and Framework Components

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
A Multidisciplinary Framework of Information Propagation Online

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Complexity ((BRIEFSCOMPLEXITY))

  • 291 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter tackled three major aspects of the social context: culture, narratives, and language; social comparison of beliefs and norms; and the structure and composition of one’s social network. These factors may have an impact not only on sharing behavior directly, but also on motivations and reactions to narratives and information. Culture, whether conceptualized as cross-national dimensions or culture-specific narratives, may impact how a particular piece of information is viewed, for instance. Comparisons between one’s own beliefs and that perceived to be held by one’s social group may influence how socially acceptable it is to state a particular belief. Echo chambers of people with the same belief may become more extreme. Indeed, these contextual factors also interact with each other, such that culture can be associated with structural differences in social networks. Although the reviewed studies have complex results with regards to social network ties, connections matter and are imperative to the spreading of information. This research also suggests that community structures, the composition of the community (homogeneous or diverse), perceptions of the specific audience, and network size are important factors in the spread, propagation and virality of information online.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Acar, A., & Deguchi, A. (2013). Culture and social media usage: Analysis of Japanese Twitter users. International Journal of Electronic Commerce Studies, 4, 21–32.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amoozgar, M., & Ramezanian, R. (2013). A computational model and convergence theorem for rumor dissemination in social networks. The ISC International Journal of Information Security, 5, 141–154. Retrieved from arXiv:1211.6244v4 [cs.SI] 21 October 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bakshy, E., Rosenn, I., Marlow, C., & Adamic, L. (2012). The role of social networks in information diffusion. In WWW ’12: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web. New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2187836.2187907

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Barasch, A., & Berger, J. (2014). Broadcasting and narrowcasting: How audience size affects what people share. Journal of Marketing Research, 51, 286–299. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0238

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, T. (2015). Cultural studies and the culture concept. Cultural Studies, 29, 546–568.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boucher, H. C. (2011). The dialectical self concept II: Cross-role and within-role consistency, well-being, self-certainty, and authenticity. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42, 1251–1271.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boutz, J., Benninger, H., & Lancaster, A. (2018). Exploiting the Prophet’s authority: How Islamic State propaganda uses hadith quotation to assert legitimacy. Conflict and Terrorism Studies, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2018.1431363

  • Chew, P., & Turnley, J. G. (2017, October). Rethinking sentiment analysis and ‘master narratives’: An alternative unsupervised text analytics approach using ‘information space differences’. Paper presented at the 2017 Annual Conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas, Santa Fe, NM. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9096/da1540534e56947be1ef7216e333c534b896.pdf

  • Choi, I., & Nisbett, R. (2000). Cultural psychology of surprise: Holistic theories and recognition of contradiction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 890–905.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Choi, K. S., Im, I., & Hofstede, G. J. (2016). A cross-cultural comparative analysis of small group collaboration using mobile Twitter. Computers in Human Behavior, 65, 308–318.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chu, S., & Kim, Y. (2011). Determinants of consumer engagement in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) in social networking sites. International Journal of Advertising, 30, 47–75. https://doi.org/10.2501/IJA-30-1-047-075

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cialdini, R. B., Demaine, L. J., Sagarin, B. J., Barrett, D. W., Rhoads, K., & Winter, P. L. (2006). Managing social norms for persuasive impact. Social Influence, 1, 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510500181459

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591–621.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cialdini, R. B., Kallgren, C. A., & Reno, R. R. (1991). A focus theory of normative conduct: A theoretical refinement and reevaluation of the role of norms in human behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 24, 201–234.

    Google Scholar 

  • Darke, P. R., Chaiken, S., Bohner, G., Einwiller, S., Erb, H.-P., & Hazlewood, J. D. (1998). Accuracy motivation, consensus information, and the law of large numbers: Effects on attitude judgment in the absence of argumentation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 1205–1215.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dubois, D., Bonezzi, A., & De Angelis, M. (2016). Sharing with friends versus strangers: How interpersonal closeness influences word-of-mouth valence. Journal of Marketing Research, 53, 712–727. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0312

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Flaxman, S., Goel, S., & Rao, J. M. (2016). Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80, 298–320.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gelfand, M. J. (2012). Culture’s constraints: International differences in the strength of social norms. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 420–424.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gelfand, M. J., Nishii, L. H., & Raver, J. L. (2006). On the nature and importance of cultural tightness-looseness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 1225–1244.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gelfand, M. J., Raver, J. L., Nishii, L., Leslie, L. M., Lun, J., Lim, B. C., et al. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332, 1100–1104.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gelfand, M. J., Severance, L., Lee, T., Bruss, C. B., Lun, J., Abdel-Latif, A.-H., et al. (2015). Culture and getting to yes: The linguistic signature of creative agreements in the United States and Egypt. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36, 967–989.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Halverson, J. R., Goodall, H. L., & Corman, S. R. (2011). Master narratives of Islamist extremism. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Halvey, M. J., & Keane, M. T. (2007). Exploring social dynamics in online media sharing. In WWW ’07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (pp. 1273–1274). New York: ACM. ISBN: 978-1-59593-654-7.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Harrington, J. R., & Gelfand, M. J. (2014). Tightness-looseness across the 50 United States. PNAS, 111, 7990–7995.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heine, S. J., Lehman, D. R., Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1999). Is there a universal need for self-regard? Psychological Review, 106, 766–794.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ho, D. Y. (1976). On the concept of face. American Journal of Sociology, 81, 867–884. https://doi.org/10.1086/226145

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Isenberg, D. J. (1986). Group polarization: A critical review and meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 1141–1151.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, Y.-H., Cohen, D., & Au, W.-T. (2010). The jury and abjury of my peers: The self in face and dignity cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 904–916. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017936

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leung, A. K.-Y., & Cohen, D. (2011). Within- and between-culture variation: Individual differences and the cultural logics of honor, face, and dignity cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 507–526.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levinger, M. (2018). Master narratives of disinformation campaigns. Journal of International Affairs, 71, 125–134.

    Google Scholar 

  • Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224–253.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morling, B., & Lamoreaux, M. (2008). Measuring culture outside the head: A meta-analysis of individualism collectivism in cultural products. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12, 199–221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Myers, D. G., & Lamm, H. (1976). The group polarization phenomenon. Psychological Bulletin, 83, 602–627.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Na, J., Koskinski, M., & Stillwell, D. J. (2015). When a new tool is introduced in different cultural contexts: Individualism-collectivism and social network on Facebook. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 46, 355–370.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nolan, J. M., Schultz, P. W., Cialdini, R. B., Goldstein, N. J., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). Normative social influence is underdetected. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 913–923.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oeldorf-Hirsch, A., & Sundar, S. S. (2015). Posting, commenting, and tagging: Effects of sharing news stories on Facebook. Computers in Human Behavior, 44, 240–249.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Paluck, E. L., & Shepherd, H. (2012). The salience of social referents: A field experiment on collective norms and harassment behavior in a school social network. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 899–915.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Papacharissi, Z. (2017). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology and politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peng, K., & Nisbett, R. E. (1999). Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction. American Psychologist, 54, 741–754.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pfeffer, J., & Carley, K. M. (2013). The importance of local clusters for the diffusion of opinions and beliefs in interpersonal communication networks. International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 10, 13400022.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pfeffer, J., Zorbach, T., & Carley, K. (2014). Understanding online firestorms: Negative word-of-mouth dynamics in social media networks. Journal of Marketing Communications, 20, 117–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527266.2013.797778

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rohner, R. P. (1984). Toward a conception of culture for cross-cultural psychology. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 15, 111–138.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schimmack, U., Oishi, S., & Diener, E. (2002). Cultural influences on the relation between pleasant emotions and unpleasant emotions: Asian dialectic philosophies or individualism-collectivism? Cognition and Emotion, 16, 705–719.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, M. (2017, May 4). In French elections, alt-right messages and memes don’t translate. New York Times, p. 1. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/technology/french-elections-alt-right-fake-news-le-pen-macron.html?_r=1

  • Semaan, B., Robertson, S. P., Douglas, S., & Maruyama, M. (2014). Social media supporting political deliberation across multiple public spheres: Towards depolarization. In CSCW’14, Baltimore, MD. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531605

  • Shifman, L. (2016). Cross-cultural comparisons of user-generated content: An analytical framework. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5644–5663.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sia, C.-L., Tan, B. C. Y., & Wei, K.-K. (2002). Group polarization and computer-mediated communication: Effects of communication cues, social presence, and anonymity. Information Systems Research, 13, 70–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spencer-Rodgers, J., Boucher, H., Mori, S. C., Wang, L., & Peng, K. (2009). The dialectical self-concept: Contradiction, change, and holism in East Asian cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 29–44.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spencer-Rodgers, J., Peng, K., & Wang, L. (2010). Dialecticism and the co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions across cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 41, 109–115.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spencer-Rodgers, J., Williams, M. J., & Peng, K. (2010). Cultural differences in expectations of change and tolerance for contradiction: A decade of empirical research. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14, 296–312.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stutzman, F. (2006). An evaluation of identity-sharing behavior in social network communities. Journal of the International Digital Media and Arts Association, 3, 10–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behavior in differing cultural contexts. Psychological Review, 96, 506–520.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom. London: J. Murray.

    Google Scholar 

  • Voelkel, J. G., & Feinberg, M. (2017). Morally reframed arguments can affect support for political candidates. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 917–924. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617729408

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359, 1146–1151.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weaver, K., Garcia, S. M., Schwarz, N., & Miller, D. T. (2007). Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: A repetitive voice can sound like a chorus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 821–833.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weng, L., Menczer, F., & Ahn, Y. (2013). Virality prediction and community structure in social networks. Scientific Reports, 3, 2522. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep02522

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wierzbicka, A. (1997). Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German and Japanese. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wood, W. (2000). Attitude change: Persuasion and social influence. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 539–570.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhao, J., Wu, J., Feng, X., Xiong, H., & Xu, K. (2012). Informational propagation in online social networks: A tie-strength perspective. Knowledge and Information Systems, 32, 589–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Susannah B. F. Paletz & Ewa M. Golonka

  2. Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Brooke E. Auxier

Authors
  1. Susannah B. F. Paletz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Brooke E. Auxier
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Ewa M. Golonka
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Paletz, S.B.F., Auxier, B.E., Golonka, E.M. (2019). Context and Match Between Context and Framework Components. In: A Multidisciplinary Framework of Information Propagation Online. SpringerBriefs in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16413-3_5

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16413-3_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16412-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-16413-3

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation