弹幕对主流媒体信任的影响：用户 - 媒体匹配视角

In the new media era, the mainstream media in China confronts the pressing problem of how to develop and take advantage of external resources to fulfil its own transformation. Recently, the official media has been taking part in various new media platforms such as Weibo, Bilibili, TikTok, and aims to communicate mainstream values more effectively. Can these practices actually change the official and serious impression of the official media and improve the official media’s impacts and credibility? To our knowledge, there’s no research to date addressing this issue. In this context, the present research focuses on a specific new media technology, i.e., Danmaku, and investigates whether Danmaku could promote mainstream media trust and its potential social psychological mechanisms, from the perspective of social psychology. Different from prior research on the consequences of Danmaku from the perspective of media characteristics or users’ traits, the present research integrates these two perspectives and explores the role of users’ need of affiliation on the relationship between Danmaku and mainstream media trust and the indirect paths of emotion and affect. Through two experimental studies (study 1, n=182; study 2, n=165), and tested the effects of Danmaku on users’ perceived media trust in the contexts of life-type and technology-type news videos, respectively. In both studies, we manipulated whether Danmaku comments were coming with the news video and measured participants’ emotion, perceived psychological distance with media and media trust. The findings showed consistently that: (1) Users’ need of affiliation positively moderates the relationship between Danmaku and mainstream media trust. Specifically, Danmaku can only enhance media trust for users with high level of need of affiliation. For users with low level of need of affiliation, it even can decrease users’ perceived media trust, especially for technology-type news. The above moderating effect is much more significant for the life-type news and political news, compared with the technology-type news. (2) Danmaku can influence media trust indirectly through the dual paths of emotion (positive vs negative emotion) and affect (the psychological distance between users and media) and it depends on the typology of news that whether positive or negative emotion is evoked by Danmaku. More specifically, Danmaku could influence users’ perceived media trust indirectly not only through increasing the psychological distance between media and users, but also through promoting users’ emotional experience. Compared with the life-type news video without Danmaku, the life-type news video with Danmaku could induce more positive emotions and thus facilitate users’ perceived media trust, whereas with regard to the news videos relevant to technology, Danmaku could induce more negative emotions and thus reduce users’ perceived media trust.These findings suggest that we should value the importance of fit between media resources (including new media technology and news typology) and users’ psychological needs in the transformation of mainstream media in the new media era.