Unpacking the emotional drive: a grounded theory model of online collective action in social media

What are the underlying psychological motivations that drive online collective action? This study addresses this question by employing a constructivist grounded theory methodology to analyze over 300,000 words of textual data from 16 influential cases on Chinese social media. This study operationalizes "emotional drive" as the core dynamic process in online collective action wherein group emotions, triggered by an initial event and rapidly contagious and amplified via social media, interact with group social identity and external action constraints to nonlinearly propel collective action from emergence and diffusion to transformation. We developed a comprehensive theoretical model that identifies "emotional drive" as the core phenomenon, around which five primary categories revolve: emotional contagion, trust dynamics, relative deprivation, social identity, and action constraints. Our findings reveal that emotional contagion acts as the central catalyst, often sparked by a pervasive sense of relative deprivation among participants. This research provides a nuanced social-psychological framework for understanding how large-scale collective behaviors emerge from the interplay of individual cognition and group dynamics in digital environments. The model not only offers theoretical insights but also yields practical implications for the governance of online communities and the management of social dynamics in the digital age.