Social Media Exposure and Helping Intentions Toward Stray Animals: A Moderated Mediation Model of Empathy and Responsibility Attribution

ABSTRACT

The global stray animal population presents a pressing challenge for animal welfare, public health, and social governance. Social media has become a primary context in which individuals encounter animal‐related content, yet the psychological mechanisms linking such exposure to helping intentions remain underexplored. Drawing on the Empathy‐Altruism Hypothesis and Attribution Theory, this study examined whether animal empathy mediates the association between social media exposure and helping intentions toward stray animals, and whether responsibility attribution moderates this indirect pathway. Two new scales—the Social Media Exposure Scale and the Stray Animal Helping Intentions Scale—were developed and validated in a pilot study ( N  = 280). The main study surveyed 744 young Chinese adults ( M _age  = 20.18 years, primarily college students) using measures of social media exposure, animal empathy, responsibility attribution, and helping intentions. Results indicated that social media exposure was positively associated with helping intentions, both directly and indirectly through animal empathy. Responsibility attribution moderated the social media exposure–empathy link, such that the positive association was stronger among individuals with lower levels of responsibility attribution. These findings suggest that emotionally evocative, anthropomorphized social media content may serve as a low‐cost tool to promote engagement in stray animal welfare among young adults, particularly among individuals who do not strongly attribute the plight of stray animals to human action.