Online groups can become communities, developing group identification and fostering deindividuation. But is this possible for very large, anonymous groups with low barriers to entry, highly ...constrained formats, and great diversity of content? Applying social identity theory and social identification and deindividuation effects theory, this study assesses influences on group identification and deindividuation in the case of Imgur.com. Respondents reported slightly positive levels of the three forms of group identification, but mixed levels of two forms of deindividuation. As argued by proponents of computer-mediated communication, demographics play only a minor role on these outcomes. More involved usage, such as direct access and commenting on images, is more associated with these outcomes, while more basic usage, such as total hours and reading comments, has little influence. Deindividuation is positively associated with group identification.
Many social media affordances can affect the quality of online discourse, but such an effect remains understudied for the visibility of geolocation, which is available on most social media platforms. ...We looked at the event in which Weibo started to display users’ IP locations on 28 April 2022, which was supposed to reduce incivility as the deindividuation hypothesis predicted. Leveraging a natural experiment, we examined the effect of IP location visibility, with special attention to COVID-19-related news posts and location-based, uncivil name-calling. We found that displaying the IP location in the comments section increased location-based incivility, as geolocation can function as an effective cue that signals ideological affiliation and fuels conflicts between users holding different political positions on the Chinese Internet. Meanwhile, we characterized a moderating effect of audience size on this decivilizing effect. Our study suggests that diverse social media affordances can fuel group identification and facilitate intergroup behaviors.
The dramatic increase in social media use has challenged traditional social structures and shifted a great deal of interpersonal communication from the physical world to cyberspace. Much of this ...social media communication has been positive: Anyone around the world who has access to the Internet has the potential to communicate with and attract a massive global audience. Unfortunately, such ubiquitous communication can be also used for negative purposes such as cyberbullying, which is the focus of this paper. Previous research on cyberbullying, consisting of 135 articles, has improved the understanding of why individuals—mostly adolescents—engage in cyberbullying. However, our study addresses two key gaps in this literature: (1) how the information technology (IT) artifact fosters/inhibits cyberbullying and (2) why people are socialized to engage in cyberbullying. To address these gaps, we propose the social media cyberbullying model (SMCBM), which modifies Akers’ Akers RL (2011)
Social Learning and Social Structure: A General Theory of Crime and Deviance
, 2nd ed. (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ) social structure and social learning model. Because Akers developed his model for crimes in the physical world, we add a rich conceptualization of anonymity composed of five subconstructs as a key social media structural variable in the SMCBM to account for the IT artifact. We tested the SMCBM with 1,003 adults who have engaged in cyberbullying. The empirical findings support the SMCBM. Heavy social media use combined with anonymity facilitates the social learning process of cyberbullying in social media in a way that fosters cyberbullying. Our results indicate new directions for cyberbullying research and implications for anticyberbullying practices.
•The Video Game Sexism Scale was created to assess attitudes toward female gamers.•Conformity to some masculine norms predicted video game sexism.•Social dominance orientation predicted video game ...sexism.
Sexism toward women in online video game environments has become a pervasive and divisive issue in the gaming community. In this study, we sought to determine what personality traits, demographic variables, and levels of game play predicted sexist attitudes towards women who play video games. Male and female participants (N=301) who were players of networked video games were invited to participate in an anonymous online survey. Social dominance orientation and conformity to some types of masculine norms (desire for power over women and the need for heterosexual self-presentation) predicted higher scores on the Video Game Sexism Scale (i.e., greater sexist beliefs about women and gaming). Implications for the social gaming environment and female gamers are discussed.
Humans' inherent fascination for stories can be observed throughout most of our documented history. If, for a long time, narratives were told through paintings, songs, or literature, recent ...technological advances such as immersive virtual reality have made it possible for us to interact with storylines and characters in a completely new manner. With these new technologies came the need to study how people interact with them and how they affect their users. Notably, research in this area has revealed that users of virtual environments tend to display behaviors/attitudes that are congruent with the appearance of the avatars they embody; a phenomenon termed the Proteus effect. Since its introduction in the literature, many studies have demonstrated the Proteus effect in various contexts, attesting to the robustness of the effect. However, beyond the first articles on the subject, very few studies have sought to investigate the social, affective, and cognitive mechanisms underlying the effect. Furthermore, the current literature appears somewhat disjointed with different schools of thought, using different methodologies, contributing to this research topic. Therefore, this work aims to give an overview of the current state of the literature and its shortcomings. It also presents a critical analysis of multiple theoretical frameworks that may help explain the Proteus effect. Notably, this work challenges the use of self-perception theory to explain the Proteus effect and considers other approaches from social psychology. Finally, we present new perspectives for upcoming research that seeks to investigate the effect of avatars on user behavior. All in all, this work aims to bring more clarity to an increasingly popular research subject and, more generally, to contribute to a better understanding of the interactions between humans and virtual environments.
A fast-growing literature is establishing how moving in time together has pro-social consequences, though no work to date has explored the persistence of these effects over time. Across two studies, ...people who had previously performed coordinated movements were over three times more likely to give their time to help their co-actor when asked 24 hours later than those who had performed a similar but uncoordinated task. Findings showed that group-level categorisation, but not social affiliation, partially mediated helping behaviour. This provides preliminary evidence that the pro-social effects of coordination are sustainable over a longer period than previously reported, and that the effects of coordination upon pro-social motivation may be more related to changes in group level categorisations than increased social affiliations.
•The relationship between cooridnation and pro-scoality is now well established. However what mediates this relationship, and how long lasting its prosocial effects are, is less establsihed.•This work explores wether the prosocial consequenecs of cordination persist outisde of the lab after a 24hour delay, wnad what ight mediate these.•Across two studies greater helping is found following a lab based entrainment task one day after the entrainment period took place.•This work also tests for the role of two potential mediators of this effect, increases in social affiliation, and changes ingroup level categorisation. Across both studies changes in group level categorisations are shown to be a more likely mediator of these effects than increases in social affiliation.
•Prejudice among Israeli Jews and Arabs’ declined in yearlong virtual teams.•A longitudinal design and post-test control groups enhance causal conclusions.•The study integrates CMC theory with the ...intergroup contact hypothesis.•Interpersonal factors correlate with better attitudes toward outgroups as a whole.
The promise of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to reduce intergroup prejudice has generated mixed results. Theories of CMC yield alternative and mutually exclusive explanations about mechanisms by which CMC fosters relationships online with potential to ameliorate prejudice. This research tests contact-hypothesis predictions and two CMC theories on multicultural, virtual groups who communicated during a yearlong online course focusing on educational technology. Groups included students from the three major Israeli education sectors—religious Jews, secular Jews, and Muslims—who completed pretest and posttest prejudice measures. Two sets of control subjects who did not participate in virtual groups provided comparative data. An interaction of the virtual groups experience×religious/cultural membership affected prejudice toward different religious/cultural target groups, by reducing prejudice toward the respective outgroups for whom the greatest initial enmity existed. Comparisons of virtual group participants to control subjects further support the influence of the online experience. Correlations between prejudice with group identification and with interpersonal measures differentiate which theoretical processes pertained.
Mainstream Public Relations literature concerns primarily with individuating, positive evaluation of organizations, such as relationship or reputation management. Comparatively, limited attention has ...been paid to the case when publics do not evaluate organizations as individual entities but based on the categories they belong or associate with, such as industry, country of origin, political orientation. In this regard, the organizational stigma perspective facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of publics’ evaluation of organizations. The case of Hong Kong real estate developers was examined from this theoretical lens. Basic and interpretative content analysis of related discussion forum and media content illustrates the coexistence of individuating and deindividuating evaluation in the light of various normative expectations. Analysis of stigma labels in circulation uncovers conditions accelerating transmission of deindividuating, negative stereotypes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Research on social influence shows that different patterns take place when this phenomenon happens within computer-mediated-communication (CMC), if compared to face-to-face interaction. Informational ...social influence can still easily take place also by means of CMC, however normative influence seems to be more affected by the environmental characteristics. Different authors have theorized that deindividuation nullifies the effects of normative influence, but the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects theorizes that users will conform even when deindividuated, but only if social identity is made salient.
The two typologies of social influence have never been studied in comparison, therefore in our work, we decided to create an online experiment to observe how the same variables affect them, and in particular how deindividuation works in both cases. The 181 experimental subjects that took part, performed 3 tasks: one aiming to elicit normative influence, and two semantic tasks created to test informational influence. Entropy has been used as a mathematical assessment of information availability.
Our results show that normative influence becomes almost ineffective within CMC (1.4% of conformity) when subjects are deindividuated.
Informational influence is generally more effective than normative influence within CMC (15–29% of conformity), but similarly to normative influence, it is inhibited by deindividuation.
•Normative influence, if exerted via CMC, disappears without group saliency.•Informational influence is effective via CMC even when subjects interact anonymously.•Deindividuation inhibits both normative and informational influence.•Subjects conform more under informational influence with more entropic items.•Personality traits are not relatable to the tendency to comply to social influence.
This study introduced deindividuation (DI) variables and constructed a mechanism model of football fans’ violent behavioral intentions (FVBI) in China based on theory of planned behavior (TPB). ...Specifically, taking Chinese football fans as the research subjects, we used a structural equation model (SEM) to explore the specific effects of subjective norms (SNs), perceived behavioral control, DI, and attitude (AT) on violent behavior intentions. Our results showed that SNs (β = -0.132,
P
< 0.01) had a significant negative predictive effect on FVBI, while perceived behavioral control (β = 0.297,
P
< 0.01), DI (β = 0.239,
P
< 0.01), and AT (β = 0.416,
P
< 0.01) had a significant positive predictive effect. However, we found that AT was the most important factor that predicted the FVBI and played a mediating role between SNs and FVBI, between perceived behavior control (PBC) and FVBI, and between DI and FVBI as well.
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