An exploratory study of the impact of transparent and empathetic cues in emergency responses on the public's liking behavior from the elaboration likelihood model perspective

Releasing responses on social media is an essential approach for official agencies to communicate with the public during emergencies. Likes given by the public on the responses have potential value in gaining exposure of the message, demonstrating social and emotional support, and relieving negative impacts. This raises the question of what and how information in an emergency response on social media influences the public's liking behavior. Drawing upon the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this study examines the relationships between the public's liking behavior and the cues in emergency responses from the two important and useful response strategies of ensuring transparency and showing empathy. By conducting negative binomial regressions on the 225 emergency responses collected from social media Sina Weibo, we found that, on the central route, being transparent through providing cues including stakeholder information, causes and developments, and authenticated evidence using easy-to-comprehend expressions is positively related to the public's likes. However, the other two transparency cues, i.e., disclosing negative impacts and concrete data, are negatively associated with the public's preferences. For the empathic cues on the peripheral route, the public's liking behavior is positively related to affective words but negatively related to positive emotional descriptions in the responses. Additionally, the severity level of the emergency has a significant moderation effect on the relationships between the empathetic cues and the public's liking behavior. The findings of this study will contribute to our understanding of emergency communication on social media. In particular, this study provides theoretical implications and practical references for preparing emergency responses, especially their content and linguistic expressions.