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Cyberspace has significantly influenced people’s perceptions of social interactions and communication. As a result, the conventional theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism fall short in completely elucidating online prosocial behavior. Based on the social information processing model, we propose an analytical framework to explain the donation behaviors on online platform. Through collecting textual and visual data from Tencent Gongyi platform pertaining to disease relief projects, and employing techniques encompassing text analysis, image analysis, and propensity score matching, we investigate the impact of both internal emotional cues and external contextual cues on donation behaviors. It is found that positive emotions tend to attract a larger number of donations, while negative emotions tend to result in higher per capita donation amounts. Furthermore, these effects manifest differently under distinct external contextual conditions.


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How Facial Expressions of Recipients Influence Online Prosocial Behaviors?—Evidence from Big Data Analysis on Tencent Gongyi Platform

Show Author's information Lihan He1Tianguang Meng2( )
School of Public Policy & Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Abstract

Cyberspace has significantly influenced people’s perceptions of social interactions and communication. As a result, the conventional theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism fall short in completely elucidating online prosocial behavior. Based on the social information processing model, we propose an analytical framework to explain the donation behaviors on online platform. Through collecting textual and visual data from Tencent Gongyi platform pertaining to disease relief projects, and employing techniques encompassing text analysis, image analysis, and propensity score matching, we investigate the impact of both internal emotional cues and external contextual cues on donation behaviors. It is found that positive emotions tend to attract a larger number of donations, while negative emotions tend to result in higher per capita donation amounts. Furthermore, these effects manifest differently under distinct external contextual conditions.

Keywords: big data, facial expression, image analysis, online prosocial behavior, donation behavior

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Received: 23 October 2023
Revised: 09 December 2023
Accepted: 15 December 2023
Published: 31 December 2023
Issue date: December 2023

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