Building loyalty to online communities through bond and identity-based attachment to sub-groups.

ABSTRACTResearchers and theorists have proposed that feelings of attachment to subgroups within a larger online community or site can increase users' loyalty to the site. They have identified two types of attachment, with distinct causes and consequences. With bond-based attachment, people feel connections to other group members, while with identity-based attachment they feel connections to the group as a whole. In two experiments we show that these feelings of attachment to subgroups increase loyalty to the larger community. Communication with other people in a subgroup but not simple awareness of them increases attachment to the larger community. By varying how the communication is structured, between dyads or with all group members simultaneously, the experiments show that bond- and identity-based attachment have different causes. But the experiments show no evidence that bond and identity attachment have different consequences. We consider both theoretical and methodological reasons why the consequences of bond-based and identity-based attachment are so similar.