Abstract
Online communities have emerged as vital platforms for communications across temporal and geographical boundaries, yet internet aggression has become a significant barrier to community development. Prior research has focused mainly on internet aggressive behaviors and their impact on individual victims, leaving community-level psychological and behavioral processes less understood. Drawing on ecosystem and social cognitive theories, this study examines how perceived aggressive culture influences belongingness-related behaviors through sense of virtual community, and how Big Five personality traits moderate these effects. Using a time-lagged field study of Reddit members, we find that aggressive culture negatively affects sense of virtual community, which in turn reduces belongingness-related behaviors such as information-seeking behavior and communication within the community. Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness buffer this negative effect, whereas neuroticism intensifies it.