Toward a Holistic Approach for Nuanced Public Segmentation: Social Vigilantism and the Situational Theory of Problem Solving (STOPS)

ABSTRACT This study investigated a dynamic interplay between social vigilantism (SV) – the extent to which one believes in his/her opinion superiority and the tendency to preach to others – and situational variables from the STOPS model. We explored how the two, separately and together, impacted publics’ active communicative action for problem-solving (active CAPS), as well as participation intent for an environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaign. Structural equation modeling results demonstrated that problem and involvement recognitions motivated people to communicate about the given issue, while constraint recognition decreased the motivation. SV was a strong driving force for people to actively communicate about a given issue; additionally, as a moderator, SV amplified the positive effect of involvement recognition on situational motivation and that of referent criterion on active communicative engagement. SV, however, was a negative predictor of participation intent in the environmental CSR campaign. This study extends our understanding of segmentation of publics by taking a synthetic approach and furthers our knowledge in delineating more-nuanced subgroups in active publics.