Social Distance of Affective Advice: The Role of Construal Level in Acceptance of Rational and Emotional Advice

Social network service provides an excellent platform for people seeking for advices. This research analyzed the effect of rational and emotional response and social distance on people's acceptance for advices online by the construal level theory. An experiment was completed to test the relationship between advisers and questioners and verify the content of online feedback would influence people's acceptance for advices on social network site. The online response included emotional advice and rational advice. Social distance between advisers and questioners was divided to close social distance condition and distant social distance condition. The study showed: (1) comparing with emotional advice, rational advice had a higher persuasive effect in both close and distant social distance conditions; (2) the impact of feedback from people with close social distance was stronger than the impact of the advices from people with distant social distance; (3) there existed an interaction effect between social distance and affective advice. The results revealed that the adviser's affective expression and relationship with the questioner would interactively impact the online persuasive effect.