Effects of participating in a virtual dieting support community on eating behaviours: the mediating role of susceptibility to social influence

Steffie Gallin (1)

1 MRM - Montpellier Research in Management

Wilcox and Stephen (2013) highlighted that when individuals browse on Facebook, they are more likely to have unhealthy eating behaviours. Our PhD work aims to deepen the understanding of the link between participating in a virtual community (“social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (Rheingold 2000, p. 20)) and some harmful eating behaviours (indulgent consumption, snacking, etc.). We do not exclude the positive effect of these communities with mutual social support and motivation between participants which is well referenced in the academic literature and throughout the interviews conducted with nutrition experts. Nonetheless, the counterintuitive effects of these online tools have not been addressed to our knowledge. Social influence theory results are inconsistent with different and opposite theories to explain the way people are influenced. The role of social comparison has also been largely under-experimented (Polivy and Pliner 2015).

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Steffie Gallin. Effects of participating in a virtual dieting support community on eating behaviours: the mediating role of susceptibility to social influence. Academy of Marketing Science 19th World Marketing Congress, Doctoral Colloquium, Jul 2016, Paris, France. ⟨hal-02108995⟩