Social trust reshaping in the mobile social era:A dual examination of social interaction and information dissemination
There is wide consensus that social trust is a fundamental asset for economic de-velopment.A large literature suggests that trust crucially depends on social interaction and information.The use and popularity of mobile social networks(MSN)have profoundly changed the way of social interaction and information dissemination.Yet,evidences on whether and how they affect social trust are rare.This paper uses the establishing of community WeChat group as a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the impact of MSN on social trust.Using data from China household financial survey(CHFS)and taking the difference-in-differences(DID)and difference-in-difference-in-differences(DDD)as empirical strategy,we find that WeChat group can increase the level of social trust by 0.109 standard deviations during the sample coverage period(2013-2017),which slows down the decline of social trust by about 27％.Further mechanism analyses show that the enhancing effect of MSN on social trust does not arise through the channel of facilitating social interactions,but rather through the superimposed effect positive and negative information dissemination.This paper emphasizes that the content of information dissemination in MSN is the key to reshape social trust.
mobile social networksocial trustsocial capitalsocial interactioninformation dissemination
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NSTL
万方数据
