How vicarious learning increases users’ knowledge adoption in live streaming: The roles of parasocial interaction, social media affordances, and knowledge consensus

The surge in the popularity of live streaming, a recent addition to social media, has expanded informal learning and the possibilities for knowledge acquisition in online spaces for diverse user groups. However, current research mainly centers on live streaming in commerce and entertainment, overlooking its affordances for episodic learning. Drawing from classic vicarious learning (VL) paradigms, and considering the perspectives of social media affordances and parasocial interaction, we propose a theoretical model for examining VL in live streaming and address research gaps. The proposed theoretical model was tested and validated through a three-wave data collection survey (t1, N = 504; t2, N = 438; t3, N = 256) from four popular Chinese live-streaming platforms. The results reveal two main forms of VL (i.e., independent and coactive), which users engage in to enhance their knowledge adoption in live streaming. Parasocial interaction, on one hand, directly affects knowledge adoption in live streaming, while VL plays a partial mediating role in the effect. Moreover, both VL and parasocial interaction benefit from social media affordances (i.e., browsing others' content, communication, metavoicing, and relationship formation). More important, although knowledge consensus can strengthen the impact of VL on knowledge adoption, it negatively moderates the influence of parasocial interaction on knowledge adoption. Our study extends the applicability of VL to knowledge adoption in computer-mediated communication contexts (CMC) and provides practical suggestions for how social media practitioners and designers facilitate viewer learning behavior.