Laboratory approach to the relationships between people's beliefs and their reactions to messages on social media

In the age of social media, predicting people's reactions to messages has been the subject of many studies. Previous studies have attempted to achieve this goal by using users' personality or demographic characteristics. We attempted to find significant relationships between people's beliefs and their behaviors toward messages on social media using a creative quasi-experimental approach. The study was conducted in two steps. In the first step, we performed thematic analysis on Instagram posts to extract various ideas. Subsequently, we deliberately selected two specific beliefs from the pool of extracted ideas: ‘Iran is a significant military power' and 'Prayers help countries progress'. Through a researcher-designed questionnaire, we attempted to measure the participants’ adherence to each belief, and their reaction to messages that contain one or both of the beliefs. We found significant relationships between the respondents' beliefs and their reactions to the messages, indicating that surveying people's beliefs and predicting their responses to certain social media messages could be practical.