How the emotion's type and intensity affect rumor spreading

TL;DR

This paper models how the emotional type and intensity of individuals influence rumor spreading, revealing emotional thresholds and strategic behaviors that can inform government responses to rumors.

Contribution

It introduces an evolutionary game model incorporating emotions to analyze rumor spreading dynamics, highlighting the impact of emotional thresholds and strategic interactions.

Findings

Pessimism significantly affects rumor stability.

Emotional intensity influences the speed of rumor evolution.

Identified emotional thresholds for predicting netizens' behavior.

Abstract

The implication and contagion effect of emotion cannot be ignored in rumor spreading. This paper sheds light on how DMs'emotional type and intensity affect rumor spreading. Based on the theory of RDEU and evolutionary game, we construct an evolutionary game model of rumor spreading by considering emotions, which takes netizens and the government as the core subjects. Through MATLAB to simulate and reveal the influencing mechanism of DMs'emotional type and intensity on rumor spreading. The results indicate that the DMs'choice of strategy is not only affected by their own emotional preference and intensity but also affected by that of the other player in rumor spreading. Pessimism has a more significant influence on the stability of the evolutionary game than optimism, the government's emotion types are more sensitive to the game results than netizens, and the emotional intensity is proportional to the evolution speed. More importantly, some significant emotional thresholds are found, which can be used to predict the behavior of netizens, helping the government gain critical time to deal with rumors and avoid the Tacitus Trap crisis. Furthermore, the simulation results are summarized as five types: risk, opportunity, ideal, security, and opposition. We hope that this work is beneficial to the government's public governance.