ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1546168
How Youth Engage in Online Deliberation: An Empirical Study Based on Individual Psychological Motivations from China
Provisionally accepted
- Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
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Clarifying the youth expression patterns on the internet and guiding contemporary youth to participate in public deliberation in an orderly manner within the online society will contribute to their growth and development and further promote the democratic development of society. While many studies have explored the impact of structural factors in the online environment on public deliberation, they overlook the psychological processes of the participants themselves. This paper, based on the background of social conflict events, focuses on the online public deliberation behavior of young people and explores how the involvement and inter-group emotional contagion influence the level of online public deliberation from the perspective of individual psychological motivations, as well as the mediating role of selective exposure. Through a questionnaire survey (n=1092), this study found that involvement has a positive impact on the level of online public deliberation, but similar to inter-group emotional contagion, it can lead to a higher degree of conversational dominance. Inter-group emotional contagion is not conducive to deliberation. Selective exposure serves as an important mediator between individual cognition and emotion and online public deliberation. The research findings examine the influence pathways of individual cognition on online public deliberation, providing insights for understanding the mechanisms of youth online expression and enhancing the degree of online public deliberation.
Keywords: Youth, public deliberation, Involvement, inter-group emotional contagion, selective exposure Volitional action
Received: 16 Dec 2024; Accepted: 09 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lin, Tan, Wang and Liang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhenwei Liang, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
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