Spiral of Silence or Social Loafing? A Parallel Mechanism to Explain Why People Defend Their Stances on Controversial Sociopolitical Issues

Using spiral of silence and social loafing theories, this study proposed a parallel mechanism to explain why people defend their stances on controversial sociopolitical issues through political consumption behaviors (i.e., boycott and buycott) when they read about corporate advocacy messages on social media. A 2 (personal stance: supporting vs. opposing gun control) × 3 (other Instagram commenters’ stances: majority supporting gun control vs. majority opposing gun control vs. balanced opinions) between-subjects quasi-experiment was conducted to test the mediating effects of feeling of being in the majority opinion group and feeling of others not contributing enough on boycott/buycott intentions. Results showed that people defend their stances through boycott/buycott actions, because of the feeling of being in the majority opinion group. commenters’ stances on gun control as the independent variables and boycott/buycott intention as the dependent variable. Results showed that support for gun control significantly and positively impacted intention to buycott Levi’s, F(1,262) = 97.3, p < . 001 and the interaction effect was also significant, F(2, 262) = 5.43, p = . 005. Furthermore, to test the mediation effect, the PROCESS macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2013) was employed. Specifically, PROCESS model 58 was adopted with 5,000 bias-corrected bootstrap samples and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Statistical significance ( p < .05) was achieved when the lower bound (LL) and the upper bound (UL) CI did not include zero. A person’s stance on gun control was the predictor (X), with 1 representing supporting gun control and 0 representing opposing gun control. Boycott/buycott intention was the dependent variable (Y). The feeling of being in the majority opinion group (M1) was the mediator in the first model based on the spiral of silence theory. The feeling of others not contributing enough (M2) was the mediator in the second model based on the social loafing theory. Instagram commenters’ stances on gun control served as the moderator in both models. This variable was converted into two dummy variables by PROCESS. The first dummy variable (W1) was based on the spiral of silence theory, with 1 being most commenters supporting gun control and 0 being all and Instagram commenters’ stances on gun control (majority support vs. majority oppose vs. balanced opinions) on boycott/buycott intention. Because of the expressive and instrumental nature of boycott/buycott behavior, the frameworks of the spiral of silence and social loafing were used to investigate the psychological mechanism of such an interaction effect. Although both theories predicted the same pattern of results, mediation analyses showed more support for the spiral of silence theory. Through these findings, this study advances the explanatory power of the spiral of silence and confirms the expressive nature of boycott/buycott behavior in the context of CMC and corporate advocacy advertising. decisions such as prior buycott or boycott experience. We future research to examine the effect of such our did not investigate on the gun Future examining this of their to companies’ advocacy and