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Dancing with Ambiguity Online: When Our Online Actions Cause Confusion
Abstract
Online social actions are often ambiguous, leading us to wonder: Why did this person unfollow me? Why did my friend like this negative content? Such ambiguity is common and perceived as a natural part of our ubiquitous online interactions. However, as online actions are curated and designed by platforms, this ambiguity is, at least in part, something platforms can control—for example, some platforms provide explicit dislike functionality, while others do not provide features to clearly signal such sentiment. Our understanding of this ambiguity around online actions is limited. We are unaware of the wide spectrum of situations in which people are confused by others’ online actions and how widespread such confusion might be. We conducted a survey study to identify when such ambiguity occurs—when people wonder why online actions are taken. We found that ambiguity of online actions occurs in non-nuanced situations. Specifically, some people wondered why online actions were taken when simply certain actions, content, or stakeholders were involved. For example, malicious content caused ambiguity, regardless of whether others posted or interacted with such content. Our findings suggest that more platform features may help to improve the clarity of people’s actions as well as the extent of the impact of these actions, which may help to avoid such uncertainty.
After 14 years of strong collaboration and exchange, it is with fond memories and a long list of community successes that we prepare this volume for the series Design Thinking Research. The Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program, which was led by Larry Leifer, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, and Christoph Meinel, professor of Internet and Web technologies and former director and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), began with 13 projects in its inaugural year of 2008. Through the generous funding of the Hasso Plattner Foundation, approximately 12 projects were funded annually between 2008 and 2022—each year six at Stanford University and another six at Hasso Plattner Institute. This is the 14th comprehensive volume that we have released together covering the research studies carried out by our affiliated researchers at Stanford University and Hasso Plattner Institute. Over this period, approximately 200 projects received funding and contributed to the shared knowledge that developed in our network.
Two studies of relatively aggressive and relatively unaggressive emotionally disturbed boys (aged 10–16 yrs) in residential treatment examined whether the more aggressive children exhibit either an attributional bias to infer hostility regardless of the nature of the social stimuli that they appraised or an actual ability to detect true instances of hostility. In both studies, the social stimuli consisted of photographs that each depicted 1 of 4 classes of affectively charged interpersonal situations (created by crossing the bipolar dimensions of positivity–negativity and dominance–submission). Study 1, with 32 Ss, varied both the nature of the social stimulus materials and the possible appraisals (response alternatives) available to the S in a way that distinguished the effects of attributional bias from those of actual ability to identify a particular class of social stimuli. Study 2, with 40 Ss, relaxed the response constraints imposed on Ss in the 1st study in order to assess the appraisals of the 4 classes of social stimuli that relatively aggressive and relatively unaggressive Ss formulated spontaneously. Findings from both studies indicate that an attributional bias to infer hostility from various classes of social stimuli became more marked as aggressiveness increased. (32 ref)
A meaningful portion of online misinformation sharing is likely attributable to Internet users failing to consider accuracy when deciding what to share. As a result, simply redirecting attention to the concept of accuracy can increase sharing discernment. Here we discuss the importance of accuracy and describe a limited-attention utility model that is based on a theory about inattention to accuracy on social media. We review research that shows how a simple nudge or prompt that shifts attention to accuracy increases the quality of news that people share (typically by decreasing the sharing of false content), and then discuss outstanding questions relating to accuracy nudges, including the need for more work relating to persistence and habituation as well as the dearth of cross-cultural research on these topics. We also make several recommendations for policy-makers and social media companies for how to implement accuracy nudges.
This paper analyses the communicative and epistemic value of retweeting (and more generally of reposting content on social media). Against a naïve view, it argues that retweets are not acts of endorsement, motivating this diagnosis with linguistic data. Retweeting is instead modelled as a peculiar form of quotation, in which the reported content is indicated rather than reproduced. A relevance-theoretic account of the communicative import of retweeting is then developed, to spell out the complex mechanisms by which retweets achieve their communicative goals. The last section outlines the epistemic threats posed by the increasing prevalence of retweeting on social media, linking them to the low reputational, cognitive and practical costs linked to this emerging form of communication.
A team's early interactions are influential: small behaviors cascade, driving the team either toward successful collaboration or toward fracture. Would a team be more viable if it could undo initial interactional missteps and try again? We introduce a technique that supports online and remote teams in creating multiple parallel worlds: the same team meets many times, led to believe that each convening is with a new team due to pseudonym masking while actual membership remains static. Afterward, the team moves forward with the parallel world with the highest viability by using the same pseudonyms and conversation history from that instance. In two experiments, we find that this technique improves team viability: teams that are reconvened from the highest-viability parallel world are significantly more viable than the same group meeting in a new parallel world. Our work suggests parallel worlds can help teams start off on the right foot - and stay there.
This study extends the nudge principle with media effects and credibility evaluation perspectives to examine whether the effectiveness of fact-check alerts to deter news sharing on social media is moderated by news source and whether this moderation is conditional upon users’ skepticism of mainstream media. Results from a 2 (nudge: fact-check alert vs. no alert) × 2 (news source: legacy mainstream vs. unfamiliar non-mainstream) ( N = 929) experiment controlling for individual issue involvement, online news involvement, and news sharing experience revealed significant main and interaction effects from both factors. News sharing likelihood was overall lower for non-mainstream news than mainstream news, but showed a greater decrease for mainstream news when nudged. No conditional moderation from media skepticism was found; instead, users’ skepticism of mainstream media amplified the nudge effect only for news from legacy mainstream media and not unfamiliar non-mainstream source. Theoretical and practical implications on the use of fact-checking and mainstream news sources in social media are discussed.
This study employed a functional approach to conceptualize the Facebook Like button as a social cue that allows users to convey various meanings while enacting multiple interpersonal functions. Participants reported on their general reasons for using the Facebook Like button, as well as their most recent actual uses. Results discussed the following: the general predictors of Liking frequency, the specific meanings that participants sought to express by clicking Like (i.e. relational-based and content-based), the larger interpersonal functions that participants hoped to accomplish (i.e. relational facilitation, self-presentation, and metacommunication), the associations between intended meaning and interpersonal functionality, and finally, the additional response buttons that participants wish Facebook offered (e.g. Dislike, Sympathy, Congratulations, Agree, Disagree, Interesting, Funny, Love, and Got It).
Moral grandstanding is a pervasive feature of public discourse. Many of us can likely recognize that we have engaged in grandstanding at one time or another. While there is nothing new about the phenomenon of grandstanding, we think that it has not received the philosophical attention it deserves. In this essay, we provide an account of moral grandstanding as the use of public discourse for moral self-promotion. We then show that our account, with support from some standard theses of social psychology, explains the characteristic ways that grandstanding is manifested in public moral discourse. We conclude by arguing that there are good reasons to think that moral grandstanding is typically morally bad and should be avoided.
Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook function as both venues for reconnecting with associates from a user's past and sources of social information about them. Yet, little is known about what factors influence the initial decision to reconnect with a past associate. This oversight is significant given that SNSs and other platforms provide an abundance of social information that may be utilized for reaching such decisions. The present study investigated the links among relational reconnection, information seeking (IS) behavior, and individual- and relationship-level factors in user decisions to reconnect on Facebook. A national survey of 244 Facebook users reported on their most recent experience of receiving a friend request from someone with whom they had been out of contact for an extended period. Results indicated that uncertainty about the potential reconnection partner and forecast about the reconnection's potential reward level significantly predicted IS behavior (passive on both target and mutual friends' SNS pages as well as active). However, the emergence of their two-way interaction revealed that the forecasts moderated the IS-uncertainty link on three of the strategies (extractive, both passive approaches). Moreover, social anxiety, sociability, uncertainty about the partner, the forecast about the reconnection's reward level, and extractive and passive (target SNS pages) strategies significantly predicted user decisions to reconnect. Future directions for research on relational reconnection on SNSs are offered.
Hardly anything has become a more popular expression of liking in contemporary online communication than the Facebook ‘thumbs up’ logo. And, just as the development of the first emoticons in the mid-1980s had, not coincidentally, been related to a smiling face, the same applies to the present-day Facebook illustration. Both of these popular visuals rely on non-verbal communicative cues — a facial expression and a hand gesture — to convey meaning in online interaction.
A three-condition (rejection, criticism, control) single-factor experiment (N = 78) reveals that even relatively minor face-threatening acts of rejection and criticism on a social-networking site similar to Facebook lead to increases in self-reported negative affect and retaliatory aggression, compared with a control. A mediation model demonstrates that face-threatening acts lead to a direct effect on negative affect and an indirect effect on retaliatory aggression through negative affect. Findings are discussed in relation to face theory and politeness theory.
The widespread prevalence and persistence of misinformation in contemporary societies, such as the false belief that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, is a matter of public concern. For example, the myths surrounding vaccinations, which prompted some parents to withhold immunization from their children, have led to a marked increase in vaccine-preventable disease, as well as unnecessary public expenditure on research and public-information campaigns aimed at rectifying the situation.
We first examine the mechanisms by which such misinformation is disseminated in society, both inadvertently and purposely. Misinformation can originate from rumors but also from works of fiction, governments and politicians, and vested interests. Moreover, changes in the media landscape, including the arrival of the Internet, have fundamentally influenced the ways in which information is communicated and misinformation is spread.
We next move to misinformation at the level of the individual, and review the cognitive factors that often render misinformation resistant to correction. We consider how people assess the truth of statements and what makes people believe certain things but not others. We look at people’s memory for misinformation and answer the questions of why retractions of misinformation are so ineffective in memory updating and why efforts to retract misinformation can even backfire and, ironically, increase misbelief. Though ideology and personal worldviews can be major obstacles for debiasing, there nonetheless are a number of effective techniques for reducing the impact of misinformation, and we pay special attention to these factors that aid in debiasing.
We conclude by providing specific recommendations for the debunking of misinformation. These recommendations pertain to the ways in which corrections should be designed, structured, and applied in order to maximize their impact. Grounded in cognitive psychological theory, these recommendations may help practitioners—including journalists, health professionals, educators, and science communicators—design effective misinformation retractions, educational tools, and public-information campaigns.
Thematic analysis is a poorly demarcated, rarely acknowledged, yet widely used qualitative analytic method within psychology. In this paper, we argue that it offers an accessible and theoretically flexible approach to analysing qualitative data. We outline what thematic analysis is, locating it in relation to other qualitative analytic methods that search for themes or patterns, and in relation to different epistemological and ontological positions. We then provide clear guidelines to those wanting to start thematic analysis, or conduct it in a more deliberate and rigorous way, and consider potential pitfalls in conducting thematic analysis. Finally, we outline the disadvantages and advantages of thematic analysis. We conclude by advocating thematic analysis as a useful and flexible method for qualitative research in and beyond psychology.
This article presents the results of a study concerning the use of online profile pages by adolescents to know more about "offline" friends and acquaintances. Previous research has indicated that social networking sites (SNSs) are used to gather information on new online contacts. However, several studies have demonstrated a substantial overlap between offline and online social networks. Hence, we question whether online connections are meaningful in gathering information on offline friends and acquaintances. First, the results indicate that a combination of passive uncertainty reduction (monitoring a target's profile) and interactive uncertainty reduction (communication through the target's profile) explains a considerable amount of variance in the level of uncertainty about both friends and acquaintances. More specifically, adolescents generally get to know much more about their acquaintances. Second, the results of online uncertainty reduction positively affect the degree of self-disclosure, which is imperative in building a solid friend relation. Further, we find that uncertainty reduction strategies positively mediate the effect of social anxiety on the level of certainty about friends. This implies that socially anxious teenagers benefit from SNSs by getting the conditions right to build a more solid relation with their friends. Hence, we conclude that SNSs play a substantial role in today's adolescents' everyday interpersonal communication.
Objectives: Determine the role of the friend request in unfriending decisions. Find factors in unfriending decisions and find differences in the perception of online and offline behaviors that vary depending on the unfriending decision. Method: Survey research conducted online. 690 surveys about unfriending were analyzed using exploratory statistical techniques. Results: The research results show that the initiator of the friend request has more than their expected share of unfriends compared to those who receive the friend request. There are online and offline factors for unfriending decisions; the research identified six constructs to evaluate unfriending decisions. There are 4 components for online behaviors (unimportant/frequent posts, polarizing posts, inappropriate posts and everyday life posts) and 2 offline components (disliked behavior and changes in the relationship). Survey respondents who said they unfriend for online reasons were more likely to agree that the person posted too frequently about unimportant topics, polarizing topics, and inappropriate topics compared to those who unfriended for offline reasons.
Twitter - a microblogging service that enables users to post messages ("tweets") of up to 140 characters - supports a variety of communicative practices; participants use Twitter to converse with individuals, groups, and the public at large, so when conversations emerge, they are often experienced by broader audiences than just the interlocutors. This paper examines the practice of retweeting as a way by which participants can be "in a conversation." While retweeting has become a convention inside Twitter, participants retweet using different styles and for diverse reasons. We highlight how authorship, attribution, and communicative fidelity are negotiated in diverse ways. Using a series of case studies and empirical data, this paper maps out retweeting as a conversational practice.
The face communicates an impressive amount of visual information. We use it to identify its owner, how they are feeling and to help us understand what they are saying. Models of face processing have considered how we extract such meaning from the face but have ignored another important signal – eye gaze. In this article we begin by reviewing evidence from recent neurophysiological studies that suggests that the eyes constitute a special stimulus in at least two senses. First, the structure of the eyes is such that it provides us with a particularly powerful signal to the direction of another person’s gaze, and second, we may have evolved neural mechanisms devoted to gaze processing. As a result, gaze direction is analysed rapidly and automatically, and is able to trigger reflexive shifts of an observer’s visual attention. However, understanding where another individual is directing their attention involves more than simply analysing their gaze direction. We go on to describe research with adult participants, children and non-human primates that suggests that other cues such as head orientation and pointing gestures make significant contributions to the computation of another’s direction of attention.
People tend to grossly underestimate the trustworthiness of other people. We tested whether this cynicism grows out of an asymmetry in the feedback people receive when they decide to trust others. When people trust others, they painfully learn when other people prove to be untrustworthy; however, when people refrain from trusting others, they fail to learn of instances when the other person would have honored their trust. Participants saw short videos of other people and had to decide whether to trust each person in an economic game. Participants overall underestimated the trustworthiness of the people they viewed, regardless of whether they were given financial incentives to provide accurate estimates. However, people who received symmetric feedback about the trustworthiness of others (i.e., who received feedback regardless of their own decision to trust) exhibited reduced cynicism relative to those who received no feedback or asymmetric feedback (i.e., who received feedback only after they trusted the other person).
While online, some people self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely than they would in person. This article explores six factors that interact with each other in creating this online disinhibition effect: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority. Personality variables also will influence the extent of this disinhibition. Rather than thinking of disinhibition as the revealing of an underlying "true self," we can conceptualize it as a shift to a constellation within self-structure, involving clusters of affect and cognition that differ from the in-person constellation.
The term mentalizing was coined to refer to the process by which we make inferences about mental states. Much of the time these inferences are made automatically, without any thought or deliberation. It is important for us to be able to read the minds of others because it is their mental states that determine their actions. This assumption that behavior is caused by mental states has been called “the intentional stance” (Dennett, 1987) or “having a theory of mind” (Premack and Woodruff, 1978). There are many different types of mental states that can affect the way we interact with others. There are long-term dispositions: one person may be trustworthy and reliable while another is hopelessly volatile. There are short-term emotional states like happiness and anger. There are desires like thirst and their associated goal-directed intentions (e.g., fetching a bottle of wine from the fridge). There are the beliefs that we have about the world. These beliefs determine our behavior even when they are false (someone has secretly removed the wine from the fridge) or not shared by others (English wine can be very pleasant). Finally, we shall consider the role of communicative intent.
Accurate task pricing in microtask marketplaces requires substantial effort via trial and error, contributing to a pattern of worker underpayment. In response, we introduce Fair Work, enabling requesters to automatically pay their workers minimum wage by adding a one-line script tag to their task HTML on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Fair Work automatically surveys workers to find out how long the task takes, then aggregates those self-reports and auto-bonuses workers up to a minimum wage if needed. Evaluations demonstrate that the system estimates payments more accurately than requesters and that worker time surveys are close to behaviorally observed time measurements. With this work, we aim to lower the threshold for pro-social work practices in microtask marketplaces.
Recent work indicates that a meaningful portion of online misinformation sharing can be attributed to users merely failing to consider accuracy when deciding what to share. As a result, simply redirecting attention to the concept of accuracy can increase sharing discernment. Here we discuss the relevance of accuracy, and outline a limited-attention utility model that formalizes a theory about inattention to accuracy on social media. Research showing how a simple nudge or prompt that shifts attention to accuracy increases the quality of news that people share (typically by decreasing the sharing of false content) is reviewed. We then discuss outstanding questions relating to accuracy nudges, including the need for more work relating to persistence and habituation, as well as a dearth of cross-cultural research. We also make several recommendations for policy makers and social media companies on how to implement accuracy nudges.
Nonverbal actions form an integral part of the interactive experience between users on online platforms. While convenient, these nonverbal online actions, which often take the form of clicking a button to like or share content with others, sacrifice contextual information compared with their in-person and verbal counterparts as they are simplified into an icon or content featured in one’s feed. We show that the simplicity of online nonverbal actions and their indicators may come at a cost to users. Through two surveys, we found that there was no single dominant reason for each nonverbal action; rather, users were varied in what they felt were the reasons for taking particular online actions. Users also felt more positive about some reasons than others, and how one felt about a nonverbal action was found to correlate with their affect for the reason thought to be behind that action. Finally, we found that not being aware of why an action was taken could lead to negative effect for an action. Unexplained nonverbal actions in online platforms evoke more negative affect than those same actions when their reason is known. Our findings suggest that surfacing rationales behind nonverbal actions could be one way to mitigate the unintended uncertainty and misunderstandings inherent in how indicators of nonverbal online actions are currently designed. We present this implication amongst others to consider in designing social platforms for user-user interactions online.
The emergence of Facebook Reactions provides new opportunities to explore the nature of paralinguistic digital affordances (PDAs; lightweight one-click social media response cues). Guided by adaptive structuration theory and the concept of cognitive automaticity, a survey of 255 individuals aged 18–24 assessed the cognitive processes and communicative meanings associated with the provision of Facebook Reactions and Likes. Although Like and Reaction cues (excluding Angry) were all identified as more literal in meaning than not, specific results indicated: (a) Likes were perceived more faithfully than Reactions; (b) the Like and Love cues were labeled as the most faithful; and (c) Reactions were perceived as more deliberate and less automatic communicative behaviors than Likes. Collective results suggest social media platforms that offer multiple one-click response cues (e.g., Facebook) can afford different communicative opportunities than platforms with a single PDA response option, presenting challenges for future cross-platform research addressing lightweight response cues.
Was a problematic team always doomed to frustration, or could it have ended another way? In this paper, we study the consistency of team fracture: a loss of team viability so severe that the team no longer wants to work together. Understanding whether team fracture is driven by the membership of the team, or by how their collaboration unfolded, motivates the design of interventions that either identify compatible teammates or ensure effective early interactions. We introduce an online experiment that reconvenes the same team without members realizing that they have worked together before, enabling us to temporarily erase previous team dynamics. Participants in our study completed a series of tasks across multiple teams, including one reconvened team, and privately blacklisted any teams that they would not want to work with again. We identify fractured teams as those blacklisted by half the members. We find that reconvened teams are strikingly polarized by task in the consistency of their fracture outcomes. On a creative task, teams might as well have been a completely different set of people: the same teams changed their fracture outcomes at a random chance rate. On a cognitive conflict and on an intellective task, the team instead replayed the same dynamics without realizing it, rarely changing their fracture outcomes. These results indicate that, for some tasks, team fracture can be strongly influenced by interactions in the first moments of a team's collaboration, and that interventions targeting these initial moments may be critical to scaffolding long-lasting teams.
Amid growing concerns about misinformation on social media, scholars, educators, and commentators see news literacy as a means to improve critical media consumption. We use a nationally-representative sample to investigate the relationship between news literacy (NL), seeing and posting news and political content on social media, and skepticism toward information shared on social media. This study finds NL and related orientations contribute to who is seeing and sharing information on social media, with those who are more knowledgeable about media structures seeing and sharing less content. Moreover, those who are more news literate and value NL are more skeptical of information quality on social media. Seeing and posting news and political content on social media are not associated with skepticism. This study suggests that NL plays an important role in shaping perceptions of information shared online.
Social media platforms are becoming increasingly popular news sources. They differ from traditional media as people are exposed to stories from a variety of people and outlets, including potential fake news stories. This raises a key question: What leads people to trust news on social media? Research indicates two cues that could impact opinions of news on social media: (1) the trustworthiness of the person who shares a story; (2) the credibility of the news outlet reporting the story. This study tests those factors simultaneously with a recent survey experiment of American adults that simulates social media posts by either a trusted or untrusted public figure and directs respondents to an article manipulated to come from either a reputable news source or a fake news source. The findings highlight the impact elites sharing a story has on views toward an article on social media compared with the effects of the news outlet reporting the story. The study has significant implications for researchers, citizens, and publishers trying to understand how people evaluate the trustworthiness of news on social media and the potential impact of fake news.
In this study, we explore the effect of diversity among people who share a story about a scientific discovery, on the recipient's credibility assessment regarding that story. The data used in this study were gathered in two phases. Initial data were collected through the Twitter application program interface. The data were then used in an experimental setting: We manipulated the level of diversity of real-life Twitter followings, supposedly retweeting a story to our participants ( n = 274). Each of our participants was then asked to complete a paper-based survey. Our findings show that social diversity can enhance the perceived credibility of a shared item. This effect is amplified among individuals with high digital literacy, as well as individuals with high need for cognition. The study offers a deeper understanding of credibility assessment mechanisms within Twitter and other social networking sites.
This study aimed to investigate the thoughts that social media users have prior to posting or ‘liking’ images on social media; particularly exploring the presence of egoistic, self-presentation considerations. Responses to
two open-ended questions regarding considerations prior to posting (n = 203) and ‘liking’ (n = 195) images on social media were analysed using thematic analysis. Egoistic motivations influenced both posting and ‘liking’ an
image on social media; suggesting an awareness that self-presentation can be affected (and therefore manipulated) through image posting and ‘liking’. Users also considered who would see their content or behaviour, and the effect this might have on others. Finally, ‘liking’ actually represents liking, with enjoyment and image value considered prior to providing public, online appreciation.
People engage in communication on Facebook via three behaviors—like, comment, and share. Facebook uses an algorithm that gives different weight to each behavior to determine what to show in user’s screen, suggesting that the strategic implication of each behavior may differ from the other. This study investigates when each behavior can be encouraged by organizational messages, thereby making clearer distinctions between three behaviors. A content analysis of organizational messages was conducted, where the researchers assessed message features and related them to each behavior separately. The findings indicated that different message features generated different behaviors: Sensory and visual features led to like, rational and interactive to comment, and sensory, visual, and rational to share. This suggests that like is an affectively driven, comment is a cognitively triggered behavior, and share is either affective or cognitive or a combination of both.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper from the series “Monitoring the Media: Spotlight on Social Media Research” is to look into different approaches to study uses of social media platforms – from user statistics to motivations for using specific features within a platform.
Design/methodology/approach
– Based on a literature review some general findings on social media usage are summarized alongside with examples of user activities that are rarely studied.
Findings
– The paper concludes that social media research has neglected to question the use of more recent features in social media platforms, such as Twitter favorites or Facebook hashtags, as well as the more “destructive” activities in social networking such as unfollowing.
Originality/value
– The paper draws attention to some features of popular social media platforms which are currently understudied. It raises awareness for these specific gaps in social media research and could inspire future studies to close the gap.
In this study we conceptualize cues in social media that require a single click (e.g., Likes, Favorites) as paralinguistic digital affordances (PDAs). Why do people use PDAs and how do they interpret them when they are the recipient? Through focus groups (N = 25) and interviews (N = 26) we address these research questions within a uses and gratifications framework. Using adaptive structuration theory as a lens for analysis, we examine both faithful and ironic uses of PDAs, finding they contribute more than phatic communication and may indicate just as much about the relationship between sender and receiver as they do content.
We propose unsociability as a novel perspective to approach and support online social interactions. With examples taken from focus group discussions, we highlight the need of users to save face in their online interactions within social network sites. We claim that people follow a "social-over-technical" pattern on Facebook, as they base their interactions on their social understanding of this site instead of on its technical capabilities. These social norms and patterns challenge social translucence which has for more than a decade been recognized as one of the cornerstones of social computing systems.
This study examines motives for virtually endorsing others on social media, focusing on the Facebook "like" function. Motives are studied in terms of uses and gratifications, Theory of Reasoned Action, and personality and technology factors. Data from an online survey of 213 respondents were examined using factor- and hierarchical-regression analyses. Findings showed enjoyment and interpersonal relationship as most salient motives. Two types of user profiles emerged. Those with higher self-esteem, more diligence, more emotional stability, and less subjective norm clicked "like" to express enjoyment. Those with lower self-esteem, less diligence, less emotional stability, and higher subjective norm clicked "like" for pleasing others.
Social translucence is a landmark theory in social computing. Modeled on physical life, it guides designers toward elegant social technologies. However, we argue that it breaks down over modern social network sites because social networks resist its physical metaphors. In this paper, we build theory relating social translucence to social network structure. To explore this idea, we built a tool called Link Different. Link Different addresses a structural awareness problem by letting users know how many of their Twitter followers already a saw link via someone else they follow. During two months on the web, nearly 150K people used the site a total of 1.3M times. Its widespread, viral use suggests that people want social translucence, but network structure gets in the way. We conclude the paper by illustrating new design problems that lie at the intersection of social translucence and other unexplored network structures.
Recent analyses of self-reported data (mainly survey data) seem to suggest that social rules for ending relationships are transformed on Facebook. There seem to be a radical difference between offline and online worlds: reasons for ending online relationships are different than those for ending offline ones. These preliminary findings are, however, not supported by any quantitative evidence, and that is why we put them to test. We consider a variety of factors (e.g., age, gender, personality traits) that studies in sociology have found to be associated with friendship dissolution in the real world and study whether these factors are still important in the context of Facebook. Upon analyzing 34,012 Facebook relationships, we found that, on average, a relationship is more likely to break if it is not embedded in the same social circle, if it is between two people whose ages differ, and if one of the two is neurotic or introvert. Interestingly, we also found that a relationship with a common female friend is more robust than that with a common male friend. These findings are in line with previous analyses of another popular social-networking platform, that of Twitter. All this goes to suggest that there is not much difference between offline and online worlds and, given this predictability, one could easily build tools for monitoring online relations.
When you share content in an online social network, who is listening? Users have scarce information about who actually sees their content, making their audience seem invisible and difficult to estimate. However, understanding this invisible audience can impact both science and design, since perceived audiences influence content production and self-presentation online. In this paper, we combine survey and large-scale log data to examine how well users' perceptions of their audience match their actual audience on Facebook. We find that social media users consistently underestimate their audience size for their posts, guessing that their audience is just 27% of its true size. Qualitative coding of survey responses reveals folk theories that attempt to reverse-engineer audience size using feedback and friend count, though none of these approaches are particularly accurate. We analyze audience logs for 222,000 Facebook users' posts over the course of one month and find that publicly visible signals --- friend count, likes, and comments --- vary widely and do not strongly indicate the audience of a single post. Despite the variation, users typically reach 61% of their friends each month. Together, our results begin to reveal the invisible undercurrents of audience attention and behavior in online social networks.
The article examines the use of social media by Internet users related to advertising and marketing, called "consumers' online brand-related activities (COBRA)." Interviews are conducted with such Internet users through instant messaging as to their motivations for engaging with brands and brand name products through social media. It was found that a desire for information, a desire for entertainment and the possibility of reward were the primary motivations for COBRA activity by Internet users, with entertainment being the primary motivation for the generation of brand-related social media content.
This paper provides a theoretical perspective for dealing with the initial entry stage of interpersonal interaction. The seven axioms and 21 theorems presented suggest a set of research priorities for studying the development of interpersonal relationships. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the problems to be considered if the theory is to be extended beyond the initial stages of interaction.
The tremendous amount of information available online has resulted in considerable research on information and source credibility. The vast majority of scholars, however, assume that individuals work in isolation to form credibility opinions and that people must assess information credibility in an effortful and time-consuming manner. Focus group data from 109 participants were used to examine these assumptions. Results show that most users rely on others to make credibility assessments, often through the use of group-based tools. Results also indicate that rather than systematically processing information, participants routinely invoked cognitive heuristics to evaluate the credibility of information and sources online. These findings are leveraged to suggest a number of avenues for further credibility theorizing, research, and practice.
We analyze the dynamics of the behavior known as 'unfollow' in Twitter. We collected daily snapshots of the online relationships of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days as well as all of their tweets. We found that Twitter users frequently unfollow. We then discover the major factors, including the reciprocity of the relationships, the duration of a relationship, the followees' informativeness, and the overlap of the relationships, which affect the decision to unfollow. We conduct interview with 22 Korean respondents to supplement the quantitative results.
They unfollowed those who left many tweets within a short time, created tweets about uninteresting topics, or tweeted about the mundane details of their lives. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first systematic study of the unfollow behavior in Twitter.
Systems for collaborative writing have long captured the attention of CSCW researchers, but have only recently come into widespread use. One issue in designing and understanding these systems is awareness of others' actions in a document. On the one hand, making edits and changes visible can improve collaborators' knowledge of who has made edits and what has changed in a document. On the other hand, studies of large scale editing systems such as Wikipedia have suggested that the visibility of certain edits can incite social conflict in groups. In this interview study, we aim to understand how people perceive and consider the potential impacts of their own and others' edits as they write together. Results suggest that edits embody not just changes to a document, but also social messages that have group maintenance implications. Many participants reported that they carefully consider how to make and explain edits so as to minimize social conflict.
Recognition of emotion draws on a distributed set of structures that include the occipitotemporal neocortex, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex and right frontoparietal cortices. Recognition of fear may draw especially on the amygdala and the detection of disgust may rely on the insula and basal ganglia. Two important mechanisms for recognition of emotions are the construction of a simulation of the observed emotion in the perceiver, and the modulation of sensory cortices via top-down influences.
Pervasive personal communication technologies offer the potential for important social benefits for individual users, but also the potential for significant social difficulties and costs. In research on face-to-face social interaction, ambiguity is often identified as an important resource for resolving social difficulties. In this paper, we discuss two design cases of personal communication systems, one based on fieldwork of a commercial system and another based on an unrealized design concept. The cases illustrate how user behavior concerning a particular social difficulty, unexplained unresponsiveness, can be influenced by technological issues that result in interactional ambiguity. The cases also highlight the need to balance the utility of ambiguity against the utility of usability and communicative clarity.
Beyond Zooming there: Understanding nonverbal interaction online
- S Y Park
- M E Whiting
Unpublished doctoral dissertation
- L Newton
Overconfidence in the communication of intent: Heard and unheard melodies. Unpublished doctoral dissertation
- L Newton
The future of free speech, trolls, anonymity and fake news online
- H Rainie
- J Q Anderson
- J Albright