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Vol.21, No.4, 25 ~ 37, 2018
Title
Effects of Initiation and Perceived Similarity on the Evaluation of Online Communities
 
Abstract
Nowadays, it is hard to imagine one's life without smart phones or the internet. Furthermore, not only do people form groups offline, but also online. Based on the cognitive dissonance theory, there have been many studies about how an offline group's initiation affects attitudes toward the group. However, there has not been a study about how an online group's initiation can affect attitudes toward the group. Therefore, this study aims to find out how cognitive dissonance aroused by initiation affects the attitudes toward the online community, which represents groups that are formed online. In addition, this study examined how perceived similarity affects changes in attitude aroused by cognitive dissonance. Participants were assigned to a group in three ways as follows: without a registration process, with a simple registration process, and/or with a complex registration process. Perceived similarity was calculated by the difference between the current body mass index (BMI) and the target BMI of the participant. Attitudes toward the online group were measured by perceived source credibility, perceived information quality, satisfaction, information usefulness, and continuance intention. Contrary to the cognitive dissonance theory, the results showed that when applied to offline social groups, there were conflicting results. There were cases where there was no difference in the evaluation between initiation conditions. However, other cases showed that groups with the most complex registration process were found to have the worst evaluation. People were more favorable toward the group when the perceived similarity was larger. Interestingly, people who had higher perceived similarity had more positive attitudes toward the groups that had been assigned with a registration process compared to the group formed without a registration process. Conversely, people with lower perceived similarity had more positive attitudes toward the group when there was no initiation process. Online communities may use the results of this study to design more suitable registration processes for their communities.
Key Words
Cognitive Dissonance, Initiation, Online Community, Perceived Similarity, 온라인 커뮤니티, 인지부조화, 지각된 유사성, 가입 절차
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