Duality And Paradox Of Individual Adoption Intention In The Online Dating Context

With the rapid development of social networking services,online dating service(ODS)has emerged and opened a new open online dating mode,increasely becoming the main way for people to make love and make friends.Compared with the traditional offline dating,ODS has more purposes and privacy issues,aims to filling people's needs for marriage and contains more individual personal information which may bring more individual privacy concerns.Moreover,the totally strangeness of the online daters make it difficult for users to know their information which bring more deceptions concerns.In terms of the feature of dating effectiveness and privacy concern in the ODS context,individuals may intend or not intend to adopt the service.But,because of relative effectiveness and the openness of users' privacy in the relative scope,many people have strong adoption and non-adoption intentions which make them face a dilemma towards ODS.The influence factors of adoption and non-adoption also have dual features.However,most of existing studies on individual behavior intentions only focused on the positive or negative perspectives.In terms of the business problems and research gap,this study intends to explore individual adoption-related intention and their influential factors.Firstly,this paper systematically analyzed the relevant theories influencing individual behavior intention,such as individual adoption in the ODS context,duality theory,paradox theory,social cognitive theory,valence theory,trust theory,distrust theory and attribution theory,which provide the theoretical basis for the following research.Second,based on social cognitive theory,valence theory,trust theory and distrust theory,this paper discussed the factors influencing individual adoption-related intention preference.This study selected Baidu koubei.com as the object of study,used the web page capture tool to capture users' comments about ODS and conducted the data analysis through content analysis and econometric research methods.Our results confirmed that among the personal factors,perceived benefits and trust were dominant determinants of higher adoption-related intentions.Perceived risks and distrust caused individuals to prefer the lowest level of intention.For environmental attributes,social influence from the perspective of technology usage were associated with individuals' preferences for higher adoption-related intentions,while social influence from the marriage cause the strongest adoption-related intention.The findings provide the basis for further empirical research on users' adoption and non-adoption intentions.Thirdly,based on duality theory,this study further proposed several key constructs such as four perceived benefits,four perceived risks,the trust and distrust of the service and selected daters,positive and negative social influence.Then,based on attribution theory,we proposed a model framework of the paradox of individual adoption and nonadoption.It aimed to explore how the trust and distrust of the service and selected daters affected individual adoption and non-adoption through perceived benefits,risks,and how benefits,risks,positive and negative social influence directly affect the two intentions.Based on the proposed research model,this study used the WarpPLS and SPSS to analyze the collected data.The findings suggest that perceived benefits and risks mediate the effects of the trust and distrust of the service and selected daters;the trust of the service and selected daters positively influence benefits,and the distrust of the service and selected daters positively influence risks,while the trust of selected daters negatively influence perceived risks;perceived benefits and positive social influence positively affect adoption,while risks and negative social influence positively affect non-adoption;perceived benefits and positive social influence negatively affect non-adoption,and perceived risks negatively affect adoption;the relationships between the trust of the service and risks,the distrust of the service and selected daters and benefits,negative social influence and adoption are non-significant.Finally,based on the empirical results,this study examined the conflicts,noncomplementarities and co-existences between individual adoption,non-adoption,dual influential factors to confirm the paradoxes among them.Further,we used WarpPLS and SPSS to test the differential impacts of the dual factors through post-hoc and path comparison analysis.The findings suggest that in the ODS context,the trusts of the service and selected daters have stronger impacts on benefits,while the distrusts of the service and selected daters have stronger impacts on risks;perceived benefits have stronger impacts on adoption,while the effects of perceived benefits and risks have no significant difference;positive social influence has stronger impacts on adoption than non-adoption,while the effects of positive and negative social influence have no significant difference.Moreover,the impacts of the trust and distrust vary with different targets.For perceived benefits,the trust of the service have stronger impacts than the trust of selected daters.For perceived risks,there are no significant differences between the trust of the service and selected daters.The findings of this study extend the understanding of individual adoption-related intention preference,the paradox of adoption and non-adoption intentions,as well as the paradoxes of the dual influential factors.They enrich the extant research on users' behavior and provides the guidance for the managers on how to improve users' positive usage and decline their negative behavior.