Theorizing Social Media Usage Behaviour
Download 124.43 Kb. View original pdf
|
Chapt5-Single (1)
- Navigate this page:
- 2.4. Sociometer
- 2.5. Psychological Persuasion
- 3. Conclusion
| 2.3. Social brain hypothesis The upper limit of social networks is the result of both cognitive constraint and time constraint. The size of social groups systematically correlates with the size of the neocortex. Which implicate the cognitive limit on the size of natural face to face networks. In time constraint, individuals are bound to choose between exercising time or emotional capital richly among a small circle of close friends or thinly among a large number Dunbar et al., 2015). As suggested by the social brain hypothesis, offline social networks are limited. The width and magnitude of online social networks presented by social media are endless. Researchers have tried to investigate the size of offline social networks and online social networks. Interestingly, researchers found that sizes of online and offline social networks remained the same, typically about 150 altars. Individuals can have as many friends on social media, but the time, interactive pattern, and amount of time spent are typically similar to offline social networking behaviour. 2.4. Sociometer Sociometer describes the inner mental gauge that narrates how we are doing through the eyes of others (Leary, 2005). Evolutionary adaptation made us display virtue signalling to consider us as desirable partners for various kinds of relationships. Social media, with its different features such as likes, friends, followers and retweets, enable us to express sociometer of our thoughts and actions. The other users in social media in the form of the audience can interact, like, comment on individuals respective opinions. This kind of virtue signalling through sociometer boosts one's morale of status (Haidt & Stockwell, 2019). 2.5. Psychological Persuasion: Persuasion is an active attempt to change another person's attitudes, beliefs, or emotions associated with some issue, person, concept, or object. Persuading users through customizing social media features that cater to individuals unique psychological characteristics and motivations may influence their actual behaviour and choices is called psychological persuasion. The efficacy of psychological targeting or persuasion depends on harvesting and analysing psychological profiles based on people’s digital footprints (in the form of machine learning predictions from a user’s behavioural history or single target likes). Psychological persuasion can be helpful in making better decisions as well as can be used to exploit the weakness of individuals ( Matz et al., Though psychological science held a view that individuals can be easily pursued, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Individuals are endowed with epistemic vigilance, which is efficient in evaluating communicated and linguistic information. Individuals check the plausibility and trustworthiness of the message and its source, exercise the veracity of the arguments supporting the message. Most persuading messages are largely unsuccessful because the efficiency of epistemic vigilance makes individuals rely upon sensible cues and reject most misleading messages ( Mercier, 2017). 3. Conclusion This study tried to understand and adopted explanatory frameworks from varied theoretical approaches such as supernormal stimuli, social brain hypothesis, behavioural economics, sociometer and persuasion. Future research can undertake the task of validating these theories by designing and conducting empirical studies. Download 124.43 Kb. Share with your friends:
|