Opinion Expression Dynamics in Social Media Chat Groups: An Integrated Quasi-Experimental and Agent-Based Model Approach

Social media chat groups, such as WeChat and WhatsApp groups, are widely applied in online communication. This research has conducted two studies to examine the individual level and collective level’s opinion dynamics in those groups. The opinion dynamic is driven by two variables, people’s perceived peer support and willingness of opinion expression. The perceived peer support influences the willingness of opinion expression, and the willingness influences the dynamics of real opinion-expression. First, the quasi-experimental study recruited twenty-five participants as the observation group and found that decreasing perceived peer support would significantly increase individuals’ expression willingness to protect his/her opinion. To generalize the individual level findings to a collective level, the second study treated the social media chat groups as an undirected fully-connected social network and simulated people’s opinion expression dynamics with an agent-based model. The simulation indicated that (1) with the help of increased willingness of opinion expression, the minority opinion supporters as a collective did not fall silent but continue to express themselves and (2) increasing willingness of opinion expression would maintain the existence of minority opinion but could not help the minority reverse to the majority.