Telematics and Informatics 35 (2018) 282–292

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Telematics and Informatics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tele

Would you change your mind? An empirical study of social impact

T
theory on Facebook☆
⁎
Jung-Hua Changa, Yu-Qian Zhub, , Shan-Huei Wangc, Yi-Jung Lib
a
Institute of Marketing Communication, National Sun Yat-sen University, 70 Lienhai Rd., Kaohsiung City 80424, Taiwan, ROC
b
Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, No. 43, Keelung Rd., Sec. 4, Da’an Dist., Taipei
City 10607, Taiwan, ROC
c
Department and Graduate Institute of Business Administration, National Taiwan University, College of Management Floor 9, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt
Road, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

AR TI CLE I NF O AB S T R A CT

Keywords: The purpose of this research is to investigate how attitude change happens on social media and
Social impact theory explore the factors key to persuasion. We apply social impact theory to investigate the effects of
Attitude changes persuader immediacy or relationship closeness, message persuasiveness, and perceived suppor-
Facebook tiveness on attitude change on Facebook. Using 2016 Taiwan President election as the backdrop,
Online communication
313 Taiwan President election voters were invited to participate in the survey. Results show that
persuader immediacy is not significantly related to attitude change or attitude maintenance,
while message persuasiveness and supportiveness are significantly related to both attitude
change and maintenance, which in turn, predict one’s intentions to vote for the opposite political
camp.

1. Introduction

Imagine that in an election year, you originally side with the Republicans. However, you see frequent messages and posts ad-
vocating the Democrats on your Facebook page; would you change your mind to vote for the Democrats or would you maintain your
original stance? What if the opposite messages and posts are shared from your close friends or family members, would this make it
more likely for you to change your mind?
Attitude change is a complicated processes (Gawronski and Bodenhausen, 2006). Tremendous psychological research has in-
tended to clarify the reasons of attitude change. For instance, a stream of related research focused on evaluative conditioning. Several
studies demonstrated that people would change their attitude as a result of repeated pairing of an attitude object with positive or
negative stimuli (Baccus et al., 2004; Dijksterhuis, 2004; Hermans et al., 2005). Another stream of research about attitude change
focused on the processes of decision making and post-consumption, such as elaboration likelihood model (ELM) (Petty and Cacioppo,
1986; Petty et al., 1983) and theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959; Gawronski and Strack, 2004). These
theories, however, have mostly focused on individuals and the messages of persuasion, and largely ignored an important factor of
people’s attitude change: social contexts. Context stimuli could serve as a key influencer on individuals’ attitudes (De Houwer et al.,
2001), therefore, how individual’s change their attitude within their social context constitutes a valuable research question to tackle,
especially in this age when social media has pervaded our lives.

☆
This research was supported by The Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan, Funding ID: MOST 105-2410-H-011 -010 -MY2.
⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: junghua1006@gmail.com (J.-H. Chang), yzhu@mail.ntust.edu.tw (Y.-Q. Zhu), shanhueiwang@gmail.com (S.-H. Wang),
M10309217@mail.ntust.edu.tw (Y.-J. Li).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.11.009
Received 31 July 2017; Received in revised form 16 October 2017; Accepted 23 November 2017
Available online 26 November 2017
0736-5853/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
J.-H. Chang et al. Telematics and Informatics 35 (2018) 282–292

Social impact theory (Latané, 1981; Nowak et al., 1990) describes how individuals influence and are influenced by each other.
Latané (1981) defined social impact as individual’s feelings, thoughts, or behavior influenced by the real, implied, or imagined
presence or actions of others. In the age of social media, it is easier than ever for individuals to be influenced by others, as social
media as become an indispensible activity of people’s lives and the main source of information for many. Messing and Westwood
(2014) contend that social media has fundamentally altered the context in which news reading occurs, providing a venue that
promotes exposure to news from politically heterogeneous individuals, and which serves to emphasize social value rather than
partisan affiliation. However, how exactly does attitude change happen on social media? What factors are key to persuasion? To
clarify these questions, in this study, we use Facebook to investigate how people change their attitudes through the influences from
their Facebook friends in Taiwan’s 2016 presidential election.
In Taiwan, Facebook is the most popular social media. According to Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC) (2014), the top
5 social media in Taiwan are Facebook (95.8%), Google + (24.7%), Pixnet (20.7%), Xuite (12.7%), and Plurk (8%). In 2016, Taiwan
has 18 million active Facebook users, which is 78% of the total population, making Facebook an ideal platform to study social
persuasion. We invited voters to participate in our survey before 2016 Taiwan President Election. Specifically, all participants
(voters) were asked to answer the questions about their original attitude toward the parties and the candidates, the social influence of
Facebook, their current attitude, and the intention of voting for the opposite party.
In sum, the purposes of this study are to investigate the effect of social impact on individual’s attitude change through Facebook
with 2016 Taiwan President election voters as the research objects. While prior research has explored social impact on attitude
change, most research was conducted in the offline context. With the increasing popularity of social media worldwide, how per-
suasion and attitude change happen in social media poses interesting and important questions to answer. This question becomes even
more pertinent given that we are in an era in which people tend to pick their media according to their own political inclination and
media exposure is likely to enhance your existing stance, Facebook provides a powerful platform that promotes exposure to news
from politically heterogeneous individuals, and help counter political polarization and selective exposure (Messing and Westwood,
2014). Therefore, this research contributes novel insights to the attitude change and social impact fields in the digital environment.
In the following sections, we would brief introduce our research background, review related literature and develop the research
framework. Next, the methodology section described about how we test our hypotheses. Finally, conclusion, practical implications
and research limitations were discussed.

2. Research background, theory and hypotheses

2.1. The Facebook election: 2016 Taiwan President election

The Internet, and social media in particular has become more than an online communication tool (Jin and Villegas, 2006; Johnson
and Neath, 1999; Villiard and Moreno, 2012), but also a tool for political communications (Gadekar et al., 2011; Jackson, 2007;
Raoof et al., 2013). In fact, Facebook, the popular social media worldwide, seems to be a main online tool for political campaign
(David et al., 2016; Kim, 2016; Wills and Reeves, 2009). For example, in the 2008 U.S. President election, several studies found that
Facebook users intended to influence one’s political belief and participation by sharing their own beliefs, and their preferences for
specific candidate and party (Johnson and Perlmutter, 2010; Vitak et al., 2011; Woolley et al., 2010). Similarly, in Japan, scholars
found a positive relationship between formal and informal social network and political participation (Ikeda and Richey, 2005).
In the 2016 Taiwan President election, Facebook was used as a main online tool of communication to spread political views and to
influence potential voters’ attitudes. Therefore, an interesting question is when Facebook users receive opposite political views
whether voters would change their mind to vote for opposite party, or they would firmly stand on original side? To clarify this
question, we focused on Facebook users’ attitude toward 2016 Taiwan President election. More specifically, we applied social impact
theory to examine why and why not Facebook users change their attitude toward candidates of different parties. We examined two
attitudes as results of social persuasion on Facebook: first, we examine the attitude towards one’s own political camp, whether it has
remained or weakened, for example, from strongly support to slightly support, as a result of social impact from Facebook. Second, we
examine the attitude towards the opposite camp, whether it has changed (e.g., from strongly disapprove to slightly disapprove) due to
messages posted by friends advocating for the opposite camp on Facebook.

2.2. Theories of attitude change

Attitude is a psychological tendency to evaluate a given entity with some degree of favor or disfavor (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993).
Two different attitudes are always distinguished and discussed in prior studies, namely implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes
(Gawronski and Bodenhausen, 2006; Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Petty et al., 2006). Implicit attitudes are a stable evaluation
represented a long-term socialization experiences. In contrast, explicit attitudes are conceived as more recently acquired attitudes
that coexist with the old, presumptively stable, and implicit attitudes (Gawronski and Strack, 2004; Petty et al., 2006). The mea-
surement of individual’s explicit attitude is quite straightforward, such as “you like X” or “you dislike X,” to simply measure one’s
positive or negative affective reaction toward objective(X). In this study, apparently, we only focus on explicit attitude.
Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2006) argued that propositional evaluations which build the basis for attitudes are the inferences
derived from any kind of propositional information that is considered relevant for a given judgment. In other words, propositional
evaluations depend on truth values (Gawronski and Bodenhausen, 2006; Strack and Deutsch, 2004). For example, ELM, a well-known
theory of persuasion, suggests that individuals would change their attitudes per external cues. Under conditions of low cognitive

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elaboration, attitudes are more likely to be influenced by peripheral cues; in contrast, under conditions of high cognitive elaborations,
attitudes are more likely to be influenced by central cues (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986; Petty et al., 1983). On the other hand,
sometimes individuals change their attitudes because two cognitions are dissonant with each other (Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959;
Gawronski and Strack, 2004). Gawronski and Strack (2004) argued that people resolve cognition dissonance either by explicitly
rejecting one of the inconsistent propositions as false or by finding an additional proposition that resolves the inconsistency.
We can see that external information plays an important role in attitude change. In this study, we applied a contemporary theory
of social influence, social impact theory (Latané, 1981) to account for whether individuals change their attitudes when they receive
the information from and interact with others through social media. We review and discuss social impact theory in the following
section.

2.3. Social impact theory

Social impact is defined as any influence on individual feelings, thoughts, or behavior that is exerted by the real, implied, or
imagined presence or actions of others (Latané, 1981). In other words, social impact theory intends to reflect how individuals
influence and are influenced by each other over time. Latané argues that social impact is experienced by an individual as a function of
the strength, immediacy, and number of sources of impact. Strength depicts one’s or group’s authority or power of persuasion.
Immediacy means the closeness in space or time between individual and others. Finally, number of sources is how many people would
influence individual (Latané, 1981).
Social impact theory provides a useful framework for understanding how individuals are affected by their social environment. A
wide variety of research areas have applied social impact theory to account for the academic issues or practical phenomena, such as
the impact of a mere social presence on consumers’ attitudes and behaviors (Argo et al., 2005), social influences on language change
(Nettle, 1999), the reciprocal influence of majorities and minorities (Latané and Wolf, 1981), the effect of user generated content on
social media (Mir and Zaheer, 2012), and a dynamic process of change in private attitude to public opinion (Nowak et al., 1990).
However, social impact theory was constrained by a critical limitation: it is a static theory. More specifically, although it could
explain why individuals would be influenced by others, the reciprocal effects of individuals on their social environment and the
dynamic consequences was not considered by the original theory (Nowak et al., 1990). Based on social impact theory, Nowak et al.
(1990) used the computer simulation technique and three antecedents, immediacy, persuasiveness, and supportiveness, to depict
attitude change in a social environment with interactive and reciprocal relationship.
In Nowak et al.’s model (1990), immediacy is defined as distances between individuals with specific spatial locations to illustrate
individuals involve some relationship with one another. The second variable, persuasiveness, is a strength variable. It refers to the
extent to which individuals are motivated and successful in influencing people who initially disagree with them. Finally, suppor-
tiveness means to resist attitude change, individuals would seek similar opinions, attitudes, and behaviors as them to reinforce or
maintain their original attitudes (Nowak et al., 1990). In this study, we applied Nowak et al.’s model to account for how individuals
change their attitudes by the social impact with a reciprocal or interactive relationship.

2.4. Attitude changes and social influences

Immediacy. As mentioned above, immediacy could be defined as the distances between individuals and others or groups. In this
study, we propose that when Facebook users see messages on Facebook advocating for the opposite party from people they are close
to, the likelihood of change in political attitude is higher. First, a close relationship is a strong tie, which implies that individuals share
similar life style and resource. In a strong tie, partners communicate and interact frequently (Granovetter, 1973). It is reasonable to
postulate that individuals’ political attitude would be more likely influenced by the interaction with close friends. Second, individuals
usually perceive more trust to a close relationship over a distance one (Liu and Chang, 2016). When individuals receive the opposite
messages from their close friends on Facebook, because of trustworthiness, the credibility of the messages is higher than other
messages from a distant relationship. It therefore increases the persuasiveness of the messages to cause the likelihood of change in
political attitudes. Finally, prior study has indicated that the influences from a close relationship on individuals are greater than a
business relationship (Constantine-Paton et al., 1990). In contrast, a distant relationship is a weak tie, individuals would not spend a
lot of time to interact with the weak tie partners (Granovetter, 1973). The likelihood of change in political attitude by weak tie
partners is quite low. Therefore, we develop the following hypothesis.
H1: When the information advocating for the opposite party is from people who one is close to, it would a) positively affect one’s
change in political attitudes toward the opposite party, and b) negatively affect one’s maintaining of political attitudes toward one’s
one camp.
Persuasiveness. Persuasiveness refers to the extent to which individuals are successful influenced by others who initially have
different opinions, thoughts, or beliefs with them. In other words, it is a competing circumstance among two different beliefs. In the
traditional mass media environment, readers are more likely to exhibit selective exposure, i.e., people tend to pick their media
according to their own political inclination, e.g., conservatives would watch Fox news, and liberals read New York Times etc. Social
media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically heterogeneous individuals,
in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan affiliation, and are therefore a powerful tool to counter polarization and
selective exposure (Messing and Westwood, 2014). On Social media, if you see a friend who you think of as smart/intelligent/
sensible, or maybe a friend you would like to know more about and develop a closer relationship with recommended an article or post
his/her own thoughts that are different from yours, it is likely that you, being interested in what your friend think about and why he/

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she thinks that way, try to figure out the rationale behind these posts on social media. We assume that persuasive messages would
positively affect attitude change, but negatively influence attitude maintenance. First, when Facebook users receive messages ad-
vocating for the opposite party with high persuasiveness, it may cause cognitive dissonance. More specifically, receiving highly
persuasive messages, arguments, or opinions of opposite party via Facebook would lead to cognitions are dissonant from one’s
original stance, i.e. cognitive inconsistency. In order to resolve cognitive inconsistency, individuals either reject explicitly the in-
consistent information as false or find additional information to resolve the inconsistency (Gawronski and Strack, 2004). In other
words, in order to resolve cognitive dissonance, individuals are likely to change their political attitudes. Second, highly persuasive
political messages are central cues that directly affect the strength and quality of the argument. ELM indicates that under conditions
of high elaboration, individual’s attitudes are more likely to be influenced by the quality of arguments (Kruglanski and Thompson,
1999; Petty et al., 1983). High persuasiveness of the argument increases the likelihood of change in individual’s political attitudes and
leads to doubt of one’s own political belief. Accordingly, we propose the following hypothesis.
H2: The persuasiveness of messages advocating for the opposite camp would a) positively influence changes in political attitudes
toward the opposite camp, but b) negatively affect maintenance of political attitudes toward one’s own camp.
Supportiveness. To resist the opposite opinions, individuals may seek additional arguments, opinions, or messages which are
similar their opinions to support them (Gawronski and Strack, 2004; Nowak et al., 1990). When individuals constantly receive
supportive messages or arguments, their original beliefs would be reinforced, which helps them to resist cognitive inconsistency.
Therefore, individuals may not change their political attitudes; rather, they would maintain their original political beliefs. Thus, we
propose the following hypothesis.
H3: Supportive messages advocating for one’s own camp would a)negatively influence one’s change in political attitudes and b)
positively affect one’s maintaining of political attitudes.

2.5. Attitude change and behavioral intention

Despite the gap between attitudes and behavioral intention, attitudes are still a valuable predictor for future behavior (Ajzen and
Fishbein, 1977; Glasman and Albarracín, 2006; Smith et al., 2008). For example, Glasman and Albarracín (2006) performed a meta-
analysis to examine whether individuals’ attitudes guide their future behavior. They found that attitudes would more strongly
predicted future behavior when individuals had direct experience with the attitude object and reported their attitudes frequently.
Accordingly, it is reasonable to assume when individuals change their political attitudes, their intention of voting for opposite party is
increased. When individuals choose to maintain their original political stance, then it is likely that they do not intent to vote for the
opposite party.
H4: Change in political attitudes toward the opposite camp will positively influence the intention of voting for the opposite party.
H5: Maintenance of political attitudes toward one’s own camp will negatively influence the intention of voting for the opposite
party.
To summarize, we postulate that several factors of social influences are positively related to individual’s attitude change. More
specifically, we argue that on social media, the immediacy of the persuader and persuasiveness of the messages are positively related
to one’s attitude change, and negatively influences attitude maintenance. Supportiveness from one’s own camp, however, is nega-
tively related to attitude change while positively related to attitude maintenance. Fig. 1 below depicts our research framework.

Fig. 1. Research framework.

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Table 1
Demographic information of the sample.

Number of People Percentage

Age 20–30 75 24.0%

31–40 161 51.4%
41–50 43 13.7%
51–60 28 8.9%
61–70 6 1.9%
Gender Female 158 50.5%
Male 155 49.5%
Education College 225 71.9%
Graduate school 55 17.6%
High school 31 9.9%
Middle school 2 0.6%
Industry Manufacturing 84 26.8%
Electronics and Information Technology 48 15.3%
Freelance 33 10.5%
Services (including Finance, health care, transportation, retail and wholesale, consulting etc) 86 27.5%
Military, police, and public education 17 5.4%
Government services 15 4.8%
Students 12 3.8%
Agriculture 4 1.3%
Unemployed (including retirees) 14 4.5%

3. Methods

3.1. Procedures and participants

Survey data collection was commissioned to Pollster, an online market research firm in Taiwan with over two hundred thousand
members. Pollster sent out 2000 online solicitations to random samples of their nation-wide panel of adults over 18 who had agreed
to participate in Pollster’s research projects. Participants were compensated with “survey cash,” which could be converted into a
monetary compensation. As our research participants were voters that used Facebook, we screened out respondents that: 1) did not
use Facebook; 2) were not eligible to vote; 3) were not exposed to political discussions on Facebook.
Since there are two major political camps in Taiwan: the pan-green parties lead by the Democratic Progress Party (DPP), and the
pan-blue parties lead by the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT), we divided our participants into two groups, the pan-
green party advocates and the pan-blue party advocates, based on their last voting record or political inclination in 2012. If one
rooted for the candidates from the pan-green camp, we categorized him/her as the pan-green sample, and vice versa. We developed
two sets of questionnaires for the two camps, with changed referents for their party inclination. Specifically, we asked pan-green
participants about their opinions of the posts or discussions on their Facebook page advocating the pan-blue camp, such as how
persuasive the arguments are, their relationship with the people who are showing their support for the opposite camp, as well as if
they see people from their own camp posting messages advocating their own political camp. We did the same for the pan-blue
participants and ask about their opinions of the posts or discussions on their Facebook page advocating the pan-green camp. We then
asked about their attitudes toward their original political camp to see if their attitude remained the same, as well as their attitude
toward the opposite camp to see if their attitude changed through Facebook posts and discussions.
We received 337 responses, with a response rate of 16.9%, of which 313 were complete and valid. Table 1 below captures the
demographic information of our sample. We have slightly more female participants (50.5%), than male (49.5%), with the majority of
them aged between 31 and 40. Most of them have received college education (71.9%). As of industry, the two biggest industries are
services (27.5%) and manufacturing (26.8%).

3.2. Measures

Measurement items were adapted from prior research when available. Original English measurements underwent two-way
translations to ensure translation quality and meaning equivalency. The details of measures are described below.
Immediacy measures are from Burke and Kraut (2014) and Lin and Utz (2015). We use three items: 1. My relationship with the
people who posted messages advocating for the opposite camp is (5-point Likert Scale from very close to very distant); 2.I feel
emotionally close to the people who posted messages advocating for the opposite camp (5-point Likert Scale from strongly agree to
strongly disagree); 3. My frequency of interaction with the people who posted messages advocating for the opposite camp is (5-point
Likert Scale from Always to Never).
To assess participants’ perceived persuasiveness of the posts by advocates of the opposite camp on Facebook, four items with a 5-
point Likert scale (ranging from 0 for “Strongly disagree” to 5 for “Strongly agree”) modified from Dillard et al. (2007) were applied.
The items are: 1. On average, the posts by advocates of the opposite camp on Facebook are persuasive; 2. On average, the posts by
advocates of the opposite camp on Facebook are compelling; 3. On average, the posts by advocates of the opposite camp on Facebook

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are logical; 4. On average, the posts by advocates of the opposite camp on Facebook are plausible.
Based on Nowak et al. (1990), we developed measures for participants’ perceived supportiveness of one’s own camp on Facebook.
Specifically, 5 items with responses scored on a Likert 5-point scale, ranging from 1 for “Never” to 5 for “Always,” measured
supportive activities of one’s own political camp on Facebook. Items are: My Facebook friends who are in the same political camp
with me will 1) post news, messages or videos in support of my political camp; 2) share personal experiences in support of my
political camp; 3) express personal opinions in support of my political camp; 5) send Facebook private messages in support of my
political camp; 6) click “Like” on content in support of my political camp.
To measure attitude change toward the opposite political camp, we used scales from Gibson et al. (2003). The participants were
asked to evaluate the opposite political camp. Specifically, we ask them to evaluate, based on information from Facebook, their
feelings toward the presidential candidate from the opposite political camp, as well as general feelings toward the opposite political
camp using the feeling thermometer ranging from 0 to 100 to express their feelings. While a score below 50 means unfavorable
feelings, 50 or above indicate favorable and warm feelings toward the group. The participants’ attitude maintenance toward their
own political camp was also assessed using the scales from Gibson et al. (2003) with two items measuring the participants’ feeling
toward their own political camp and its candidate.
Finally, since in Taiwan’s presidential election, voters need to cast votes for both the president and the party, intention to vote for
the opposite camp was measured by asking the participants what their voting choices would be for the president and the party if
tomorrow were election day. For those who picked the candidate from the opposite, other than their original political camp 4 years
ago, we entered the value “1”, indicating a change in political voting inclination. For those who picked the candidate from their
original political camp as before, we entered “0”, indicating no change in voting inclination.

3.3. Control variables

Since offline political discussion and the exposure to mass media are both important influencers of people’s political attitude
change (De Vreese and Boomgaarden, 2006; Klofstad et al., 2013; McLeod et al., 1999; Torcal and Maldonado, 2014; Zhang et al.,
2010), we controlled for these two sources of political attitude change. Specifically, we asked the respondents about 1) their fre-
quency of being exposed to political news and events (such as watching TV) in their daily offline life, and 2) to estimate the
percentage of people the respondents interact frequently in real life(such as coworkers, family members and close friends) that they
perceive as holding different political views than they do. We included these two measures as control variables to attitude change and
maintenance. In addition, we also controlled for the respondents’ age, gender, education, and income to their intentions to vote for
the opposite camp.

4. Analysis and results

4.1. Reliability, validity, and correlations

We analyzed our data using Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis with SmartPLS 2.0 M3 (Ringle et al., 2014). We gauged the
adequacy of the measurement model using several indices of reliability and validity. First, factor loadings were examined to establish
convergent and discriminant validity. All items loaded satisfactorily to their corresponding constructs, with loadings ranging from
0.85 to 0.96, exhibiting satisfactory convergent reliability. We then assessed internal consistency of each scale with composite
reliability, for which the lowest value was 0.86. Furthermore, the average variance extracted (AVE) for all constructs exceeded Chin’s
(1998) guideline of 0.5. The results are summarized in Table 2 below.
We examined discriminant validity in two ways. First, the square root of average variance extracted (AVE) for each construct
should be larger than the inter-construct correlation (Barclay et al., 1995). Second, factor correlations should be less than 0.80 for
discriminant validity (Kling, 2001). The correlation matrix in Table 3 showed that all constructs’ square root of AVE are greater than
the construct correlations, and no factor correlation is greater than 0.80. Thus, discriminant validity requirements are met. Inter-
estingly, the correlation matrix also shows that attitude maintenance and attitude change are only weakly correlated (−0.17),
indicating that these are two independent constructs.

4.2. Structural model results

This study applied Partial Least Square technique to test our hypotheses. Fig. 2 and Table 4 present the structural model results.
Hypothesis 1a and 1b argued that when the information advocating for the opposite party is from people who one is close to, it would
positively affect one’s change in political attitudes toward the opposite party, and negatively affect one’s maintaining of political
attitudes toward one’s one camp. However, the results show that immediacy, or the closeness of relationships is not associated with
either attitude change or attitude maintenance. Thus, H1a and H1b are not supported.
Hypothesis 2a and 2b postulated that persuasive messages advocating for the opposite camp would positively influence changes in
political attitudes toward the opposite camp, but negatively affect maintenance of political attitudes toward one’s own camp. As the
results show, persuasiveness is both positively related to attitude change and negatively related to attitude maintenance. Therefore,
H2a and H2b both received support.
Hypothesis 3a and 3b stated that supportive messages would negatively influence change in political attitudes and positively
affect maintaining of political attitudes. These hypotheses were partially supported as supportiveness is positively related to attitude

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Table 2
The loading, CR, and AVE of constructs.

Loading (all loadings significant at p < .01 level) CR AVE

Immediacy 0.96 0.88

Item 1 0.92
Item 2 0.95
Item 3 0.95
Persuasiveness 0.97 0.90
Item 1 0.95
Item 2 0.95
Item 3 0.96
Item 4 0.94
Supportiveness 0.95 0.78
Item 1 0.91
Item 2 0.91
Item 3 0.9
Item 4 0.84
Item 5 0.85
Attitude toward one’s own camp 0.94 0.89
Item 1 0.94
Item 2 0.94
Attitude toward the opposite camp 0.92 0.85
Item 1 0.92
Item 2 0.93
Intentions to vote for the opposite camp 0.86 0.76
Item 1 0.86
Item 2 0.88

Table 3
Mean, standard deviation, correlation of constructs and square root of AVE.

1 2 3 4 5 6 Mean S.D.

1. Immediacy 0.94 3 0.75

2. Persuasiveness 0.42** 0.95 2.6 0.91
3. Supportiveness 0.32** 0.14* 0.88 3.05 0.77
4. Attitude change 0.23** 0.49** 0 0.94 2.23 1.14
5. Attitude maintenance 0 −0.20** 0.20** −0.17** 0.92 3.52 1.16
6. Intentions to vote 0.01 0.25** −0.09 0.42** −0.51** 0.87 0.35 0.42

Diagonal is the square root of AVE.

* p < .05.
** p < .01.

maintenance, however, it failed to be a significant predictor of attitude change.

Finally, we examine the relationship between change/maintenance in political attitudes and intentions to vote for the opposite
camp in H4 and H5. The results show that attitude change toward the opposite camp positively influences the intention of voting for
the opposite party, while maintenance of political attitudes toward one’s own camp negatively influences the intention of voting for
the opposite party. Therefore, H4 and H5 are both supported.
For control variables, offline media exposure is positively related to attitude maintenance (beta coefficient = 0.15, P < .01).
However, it is not significantly related to attitude change. This is understandable as people tend to pick their media according to their
own political inclination (Messing and Westwood, 2014). Thus, media exposure is likely to enhance your existing stance due to
selective exposure. The results also showed that the higher the percentage of people that you know in real life being from the opposite
camp, the more likely you are to change your attitude (beta coefficient = 0.10, P < .01), and less likely to maintain your original
stance(beta coefficient = −0.22, P < .001), indicating that real life personal relationship still plays an important role in political
attitude change and maintenance. Finally, among age, gender, education, and income, education and age turned out to be marginally
significant negative predictors of intentions to vote for the opposite camp (beta coefficient = −0.07, P = .09 for education, beta
coefficient = −0.07, P = .06 for age). Table 4 below summarizes our results.

5. Discussion and conclusion

In this study, we explored whether individuals would change their attitudes through social influences from social media. To
examine our research framework, we selected 2016 Taiwan President election voters to be the research object, and focused on how
social influence from a popularity of social media, Facebook, changes voters’ political attitude. This study setting is unique in that
unlike mass media, where the audience tends to pick channels that fit their own inclination, which typically offer opinions that are

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Fig. 2. Structural model results Note: *P < .05; **

P < .01; ***
P < .001.

Table 4
Summary of results.

Hypotheses Coefficients Result

Immediacy - > attitude change (H1a) 0.04(n.s) Not supported

Immediacy - > attitude maintenance (H1b) 0.05(n.s) Not supported
Persuasiveness - > attitude change (H2a) 0.48*** Supported
Persuasiveness - > attitude maintenance (H2b) −0.25*** Supported
Supportiveness- > attitude change(H3a) −0.07(n.s.) Not supported
Supportiveness- > attitude maintenance(H3b) 0.19*** Supported
Attitude change- > intentions to vote(H4) 0.32*** Supported
Attitude maintenance- > intentions to vote(H5) −0.52*** Supported
Control variables Coefficient P value

Offline media exposure – > attitude change −0.06 .24

Offline media exposure – > attitude maintenance 0.15 < .01
Percentage of offline people you interact with from opposite camp – > attitude change 0.1 .02
Percentage of offline people you interact with from opposite camp – > attitude maintenance −0.22 < .001
Age – > intentions to vote for the opposite camp −0.07 .06
Gender – > intentions to vote for the opposite camp −0.04 .36
Education – > intentions to vote for the opposite camp −0.07 .09
Income – > intentions to vote for the opposite camp 0.06 .18

*** P < .001.

mostly partisan and help one to strengthen their initial belief, Facebook offers a unique mixture of different opinions from different
walks of people, with whom one may or may not be very close with. This provides a unique opportunity for people to be exposed to
different view-points and opinions, which they will probably not be able to be exposed to in their typical mass media choices.
Our results showed that Facebook messages and posts from people one is close to would positively affect political attitude change
(H1a) and negatively affect political attitude maintaining (H1b). However, these two hypotheses were not supported. There are two
possible explanations. The first possible reason is relationship harmony. When individuals receive opposite arguments from their
close friends or family members, arguing with them on Facebook, sometimes, means that the relationship may be damaged.
Therefore, to maintain a harmonious relationship, they may avoid arguing with their close friends or families who have opposite
political attitudes but instead turn a blind eye to these arguments and quietly keep their own political stance.
The second possible reason may be the high involvement of people in politics and election. For most voters, 2016 Taiwan
President election was the most important political event of the year. They care and involve deeply in this critical political issue,
which means that they would take the central route of persuasion proposed by ELM (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986; Petty et al., 1983).
Voters would see their relationship with the persuader as a peripheral cue, rather a central cue. They would pay more attention to the

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quality of the argument instead. Therefore, the effect of a close relationship is not significant, because people tend to choose central
cues in decision making that they deem as important. Our empirical results demonstrated that persuasive information (central cues)
positively affected participants’ political attitudes; confirming that people took the central route of persuasion.
Supportive arguments are not a significant negative predictor of political attitude change. This may be due to the fact that we
controlled for exposure to media. People are more likely to exhibit selective exposure in their daily life (e.g., picking the newspaper
and channels that are in line with their own political inclination), thus receiving more supportive arguments from their real life
exposure rather than from social media. Hence, the influence of supportive arguments may be overshadowed by those from real life
media exposure. Finally, the positive relationship between attitude change and intention of voting for opposite party as well as the
negative relationship between attitude maintaining and intention of voting for opposite party are confirmed.

5.1. Theoretical contribution

Our findings contribute to extant literature in three ways. First, prior studies have demonstrated the effects of social influences on
attitude change (Latané, 1981; Nowak et al., 1990) mostly in the off-line context. This study investigated how attitude change
happens on social media and explored the factors key to persuasion. Therefore, we enriched our understanding of the social impact
theory and its applicability in the internet age under a social media context. Second, contrary to prior belief, our findings revealed
that in the digital environment, individuals’ political attitude would not be influenced by others just because they have a close
relationship. This suggests that the relationship between immediacy and attitude change may be moderated by some other factors,
such as individuals’ involvement in the topic. This helps to provide a more refined view of social impact theory in different contexts.
Finally, instead of just focusing on attitude change, we investigated both attitude change toward the opposite party and attitude
maintenance toward one’s original inclination, and found that these two are only weakly correlated and are largely independently
developed. Thus, denigrating your opponent does not necessarily translate into support for yourself. Therefore, we contributed by
providing a more nuanced account of attitude change and attitude maintenance.

5.2. Practical implications

Social media is usually a useful tool for communicating or sharing information. Many prior studies on social network have argued
for the importance of strong ties (Borgatti, 2005; Freeman, 1978; Granovetter, 1973); however, in this study, we found that in the
social media environment, the influence of strong ties (i.e., people who one interacts frequently with, such as one’s good friends,
family members, or close coworkers) is not significantly higher on attitude change than that of weak ties (i.e., people who one does
not interact frequently with or have a close relationship with, such as casual acquaintances, celebrities one follows, or a friend’s
friends). Identifying and mobilizing strong ties for everyone can be a daunting and nearly impossible task; whereas finding weak ties
for the intended audience is almost effortless since social media is built on weak ties and anyone could be connected to anyone within
six(or less) degrees of separation. Therefore, we suggest that when campaign managers intend to diffuse positive word-of-mouth or
arguments, they can leverage and count on the power of weak ties to propagate the message, for example, opinion leaders or
celebrities with a lot of followers can be a very effective channel for delivering messages, whether it is original message, reposted
message, or simply a click of the “Like” button. In addition, casual acquaintances can be as effective as one’s close relationships, so
campaign managers should actively encourage everybody to share their stance, as every post, every repost and every “Like” has the
potential to reach and influence not only one’s friends, but also a friend’s friends, when the repost and the “Like” is carried over.
According to our findings, message persuasiveness is the key predictor of whether people from the opposite camp would change
their attitude. In today’s political communication, it seems that sensible, well-grounded and unbiased messages often have to fight
their way against the eye-ball catching, biased, emotion-appealing messages, or even exaggeration, distortion and fake messages. Our
findings give us some rays of hope as it shows people are still willing to read, reflect, and make their own judgment based on reason
and facts. Accordingly, we will suggest that business and campaign managers to work on the quality of the deliberation, to construct
reasonable and logistic messages based on facts. Avoid messages that are exaggeration, distortion, or fake, which may serve to
reinforce and mobilize your existing advocates, but could severely damage your chance of persuasion to people from the opposite
camp. Worse, those unpersuasive messages would lead individuals who have opposite opinions to strengthen their original attitudes.

5.3. Limitations and future research

There are several limitations in this research. First, we had a small sample size that is cross-sectional. Therefore, causality between
our variables cannot be fully substantiated. Further research based on longitudinal data is needed to confirm the direction of
causality. Second, even though we demonstrate that a strong tie relationship would not influence on attitude change or maintaining,
we do not confirm that this is a universal phenomenon or unique one in the social media environment. Future research could compare
the effect of strong tie relationships on online and offline environment to confirm the effectiveness of close relationship on attitude
change. Third, we only focused on one social media platform, Facebook, as our research target to examine the research framework. It
is unknown whether our findings could be replicated on other different social media platforms. Future research therefore could focus
on other social media, especially end-to-end encrypted instant messaging apps like WhatsApp, where close one-to-one political
discussions are more likely to happen, and examine the effect of social influence on users’ attitude change. Finally, in this study, we
used Taiwan President election as our research objective. However, focusing on election might cause the issue of external validity and
may not be generalizable to other issues such as brand attitude change. Hence, future research, based on digital and social network

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environment, could apply social impact theory to test the effect of social impact on individuals’ attitude toward other issues.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2017.11.009.

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