Belief and Action in Information Dissemination: Meaningful Construction of Institutional Explanations
The transition "from rumor to reality" frequently occurs in information dissemination and such a "self-fulfilling prophecy" phenomenon is a challenge to the traditional path of causal analysis. From the perspective of methodology, it is found that when explaining the causal relationship be-tween belief and action in information dissemination, the institutional explanation has advantages as compared to regular and probabilistic causation, but it also faces the challenge of "weakly sta-ble structure" due to simplifying the source of actors' subjective intention. Therefore, based on the cultural context as a unit of analysis, the idea of meaningful construction of causal chain, con-sisting of the dependency and the iterative process among object, symbol and interpretation, just promotes the structural stability of causal institutional explanations.
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