How Online Cross-Cutting and Like-Minded Interactions Relate with Emerging Adults' Prosocial Tendencies: Cognitive...

In the digital era, online social interactions (OSIs) have become increasingly prevalent, making it essential to explore their impacts on human behavior. The study intended to examine the associations between two types of OSIs, namely online cross-cutting and like-minded interactions, with individuals' prosocial tendencies, as well as the underlying mechanisms of these associations by introducing cognitive and affective empathy as potential mediators and gender as a moderator.

An online questionnaire was administered through Wenjuanxing, a widely used Chinese survey platform, and a total of 1142 valid responses were collected from emerging adults (gender: 54.0% females, 46.0% males; age: 18-25 years old, M = 21.15, SD = 1.89). We employed the structural model analysis to investigate the relationships among the variables in the conceptual model, as well as the bootstrap method to test for the mediating effects of cognitive and affective empathy. Also, multigroup analyses were conducted to explore gender differences in the relationships among the study variables.

Our results indicated that online cross-cutting interactions were negatively related with prosocial tendencies, despite the positive mediating effect of cognitive empathy (B = 0.007, SE = 0.005, 95% CI = [0.001, 0.021], κ² = 0.014). Conversely, online like-minded interactions were positively associated with prosocial tendencies through the mediating roles of both cognitive and affective empathy (B = 0.013, SE = 0.008, 95% CI = [0.001, 0.032], κ² = 0.027; B = 0.126, SE = 0.035, 95% CI = [0.060, 0.194], κ² = 0.357). Additionally, the results highlighted the moderating effects of gender. In particular, online cross-cutting interactions were positively associated with cognitive empathy among males, whereas this association was not significant among females.

Based on our findings, we identified cognitive and affective empathy as mediators for the relationships between online cross-cutting/like-minded interactions and prosocial tendencies, along with the moderating effects of gender. Our findings, from a theoretical perspective, provide a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of whether and how OSIs relate to prosocial tendencies, while offering valuable insights, on a practical front, for designing online platforms aimed at fostering prosocial tendencies among emerging adults.