Social Media Users’ Envy Toward Travel Bloggers: An Investigation of Dual-Mediating Paths and Boundary Conditions
通过实验和访谈，研究社交媒体用户对旅游博主的良性嫉妒与恶意嫉妒如何通过准社会互动和情感目的地形象影响旅游意愿，并发现博主帖子受欢迎程度和用户社会包容性调节了嫉妒效应。
Social media travel blogs have emerged as a pivotal tool in tourism marketing, yet users’ emotions in this context remain underexplored. To fill the research gap in social media-induced envy, this study employs scenario-based experiments and semi-structured interviews to investigate the impact of benign versus malicious envy toward bloggers on users’ travel intentions. The findings reveal that benign envy (vs. malicious envy) fosters parasocial interaction and enhances the affective destination image, thereby influencing travel intentions positively. The popularity of a travel blogger’s post as perceived by social media users eliminated the envy effect. Additionally, users’ social inclusion (vs. exclusion) on social media was found to reduce the negative effect of malicious envy on travel intentions. Destination marketers should closely monitor bloggers’ unfavorable social media behavior, and social media platforms may advise travel bloggers on how to design and implement content generation strategies to avoid instilling malicious envy among media users.