Abstract: Negativity bias refers to the audience's tendency to focus on and pass on negative information while neglecting positive information, which brings great resistance to the guidance and management of corporate crisis network public opinion. Based on the combined framework of internal cognition and external stimulus, this paper explores the driving mechanism of negativity bias in enterprise crisis public opinion from the perspective of configuration. After an analysis of staged fsQCA, we find that there are three driving paths of high negativity bias in the public opinion of enterprise crisis in the exposure stage, which are "negative explanation driven", "cognition gap driven" and " negative heuristic processing driven". In the response stage, there are also three driving paths of high negativity bias, namely "questioning attitude driven", "expectation deviation driven" and "negative heuristic processing driven". At the same time, two non-high negativity bias formation paths are found in both exposure and response stages, all showing the characteristics of "crowd eating melon". In addition, through comparison analysis between configurations, it is found that threat perception has an important promoting effect on negativity bias of corporate crisis public opinion; good corporate image does not always bring positive benefits; attitude accumulated by public in crisis publicity stage is a key influencing factor for negativity bias in response stage.

Key words: enterprise crisis events, network public opinion, negativity bias, information perception, qualitative comparative analysis