• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.61-79
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• 2022

This study investigated the effect of cognitive dissonance that people experience during online communication on face-to-face communication. When people communicate with others on Interne using the comment system, they know that all the people including themselves equally participate in the discussion as one of the many commenters. At the same time, they somewhat distrust other commenters' attitudes because of the Internet anonymity. We name this seemingly contradicting beliefs as cognitive dissonance and examine how these beliefs affect the intention to communicate in face-to-face. Also, the proposed research model includes other factors such as curiosity and the differences in attitudes between online and offline. To verify the hypotheses, a total of 323 comment system users were recruited and show that most of the hypotheses were supported. This study emphasized its implications by examining the reasons when and why people prefer direct communication rather than comment based communication.