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Research on online support forums has largely overlooked the quality of support provision. The present experiment examined how others' responses and a support-seeker's reply can influence action-focused supportiveness, emotion-focused supportiveness, and politeness of readers' support messages. Results showed that the supportiveness of others' comments was associated with subsequent readers' perceptions of public opinion toward the support-seeker and readers' liking of the support-seeker, which in turn influenced the quality of readers' support messages.
Li et al. (Fri,) studied this question.