By facilitating user participatory features such as online comments, digital media expand the means through which individuals can get access to others’ behavior choices. This opens new research avenues in the pursuit of understanding how social influence operates in the virtual space. The current study examined whether anonymous others’ behavior choices within the online comment board may affect viewers’ descriptive norm perceptions in the real world. Results show that, given sufficient total exposure, viewers’ “quasi-statistical sense” allowed them to correctly identify the numerical majority through subtle individual behavior cues embedded in the online comments, which effectively influenced their estimation of the actual e-cigarette use prevalence among the U.S. population. Perceived behavior choice dominance and valence stance dominance toward e-cigarette use on the online comment board were found to mediate the relationship. Implications for the underlying mechanism of descriptive norm perception formation and future directions are discussed.

中文翻译：

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在线评论如何影响人们对电子烟使用的描述性规范？准统计感，价感和暴露剂量的作用

通过促进用户参与功能（例如在线评论），数字媒体扩展了个人可以访问他人行为选择的方式。这为追求了解社会影响力如何在虚拟空间中运作开辟了新的研究途径。本研究调查了在线评论委员会中匿名他人的行为选择是否会影响现实世界中观众的描述性规范感知。结果表明，在足够的总曝光量下，观看者的“准统计意义”使他们能够通过嵌入在线评论中的细微个体行为线索来正确识别数字多数，从而有效地影响了他们对实际电子烟使用率的估计美国人口。在在线评论板上发现了对电子烟使用的感知行为选择优势和效价态势优势，以调节这种关系。讨论了潜在的描述性规范感知形成机制和未来方向。