Research On The Conformity Effect Of User Opinion Expression In Virtual Communities

Virtual communities that connect users through shared interests and similar experiences have flourished in the Internet era where users actively participate in the production and output of online content.The opinions expressed by virtual community members on topics will be affected after the group opinions are formed,and there is a possibility of conformity effect.If the discussion of social focus has the conformity effect of negative information dissemination,it will bring great pressure to the governance of network public opinion.In the context of the above research,firstly,this paper classifies and summarizes the personal and community factors that affect users’opinions in virtual communities based on social cognitive theory and the research results of previous scholars,and builds an evolutionary game model based on this to analyze the conformity effect of the user’s opinion expression in virtual communities.Matlab numerical simulation is used to verify the correctness and stability of the analysis results.It is concluded that:(1)In virtual communities,community factors have a greater impact on the equilibrium state of evolutionary game of user opinion expression than personal factors.(2)The evolutionary stable state in which users express the same views as the group in the virtual community is easier to achieve,that is,the conformity effect is easier to form.(3)Reducing the benefits from the community and increasing the benefits obtained by expressing views different from the group can inhibit the occurrence of conformity effect.This paper further studies the evolutionary game between the virtual community and the government on the supervision and regulation of negative conformity effect,and finds that the occurrence of negative conformity effect in the community can be restrained by increasing the benefits that users with different views from the group bring to the virtual community and the fines paid by the community for not controlling negative conformity effect in a timely manner,reducing the benefits that users with group views bring to the virtual community and the cost of community to control negative conformity effect.Finally,the governance strategy of negative conformity effect in virtual community is proposed from three levels:users,virtual community and government.The research of this paper is of great significance for curbing the crisis of network public opinion in advance,reducing the pressure of network public opinion governance,and maintaining social stability.