Knowledge Sharing In Virtual Community:The Bystander Effect And Its Underline Mechanism

In recent years,with the rapid development of Internet,knowledge sharing in virtual communities has been gainning scholars' growing interest under various aspects,especially how to break through the negative influence of existing others in virtual communities in order to encourage more virtual communities' users sharing their own knowledge in virtual communities.Compaired with offline knowledge sharing,sharing knowledge in online virtual communities attracted more participants.This characteristic of virtual community is good for knowledge sharing and knowledge creation in one hand,on the other hand,it is easy to give rise to bystander effect.The results of investigation found that in most online communities exists participation inequality phenomenon—that is 90%of users are lurkers who never contribute.The influence of thoes luckers' behavior on other virtual communitiy users' knowledge sharing behavior is still unclear.Knowledge sharing in virtual communities is the process of interpersonal interaction process;and the luckers in virtual communities are bystanders.It is necessary to explore the influence of the luckers on other community uses'knowledge sharing behavior in terms of bystander effect in interpersonal interaction,which is meaningful to alleviate the bystander effect in virtual community knowledge sharing and encourage users sharing knowledge in virtual communinties.The main purposres of present study were:(1)to investigate whether virtual communty knowledge sharing exists bystander effect and the relationship model between the number of bystanders and knowledge sharing behavior;(2)if virtual community knowledge sharing exists bystander effect,we exploered the mediate role of perceived responsibility and evaluation apprehension on the relationship between the number of bystanders and knowledge sharing behavior in two seperate studies;(3)then,the present study investigated the mordirate role of contex variables(such as the emergency of the virtual community postings and the concrete degree of the community postings)and interpersonal relationship variables(such as the relationship between participant and the posting member,and the relationship among participant and the bystanders)in four different studies;(4)finnally,the present study used data-mining technology to mining real data in emuch(a real virtual community)to explore the relationship between the numbers of bystanders and knowledge sharing behaviro in virtual community to provide evidents for previous situational studies.The results of this study were listed in following:1.There was bystander effect in virtual community knowledge sharing process.There exists bystander effect in virtual community knowledge sharing behavior and there is a non-linear relationship between the number of bystanders and knowledge sharing behavior.Compared with more bystanders(14 or 54),psrticipants under less bystander(0 or 1)condition shared lager quantity knowledge in virtual community;whereas,under the condition of 0 or 1 bystander and 14 or 54 bystanders,there was no significant difference between the quantity of knowledge sharing.2.The relationship between the number of bystanders and knowledge sharing behavior was totally mediated by participants' perceived responsibility.There was a significant difference of participants' perceived responsibility between two different bystander conditions.There was a positive correlation between participants' perceived responsibility and the quantity of knowledge sharing.The relationship between the number of bystanders and the quantity of knowledge sharing was totally mediated by participants' perceived responsibility.However,the number of bystanders has no effect on participants' evaluation apprehension,and there was no relationship between participants' evaluation apprehension and the quantity of knowledge sharing.3.The emergency of postings,the concrete degree of postings,the relationship between participant and the posting member,and the relationship among participant and the bystanders moderated the relationship between the number of bystanders and knowledge sharing behavior.The results of four separate studies demonstrated that,as expected,the bystander effect in virtual community knowledge sharing can be reversed by means of cues that the assessment of the postings as emergency,the assessment of the posting as concrete,the in-group relationship between participant and the posting member,and the in-group relationship among participant and the bystanders.The date which we mininged in emuch provide evidences for previous situational studies.The results demonstrated that as the number of people scans a posting increase,it took longer for the posting member to receive help.Additionally,the bystander effect was virtually eliminated and help was received much more quickly when the posting with higher concrete degree and when the posting with higer lever emergency.In one word,the resluts of laboaratory studies and data mining demonstrated that there exists bystander effect in virtual community knowledge sharing.Changing the emergency and the concrete degree of postings is effective to change the bystander effect in virtual community knowledge sharing.