online behavior and psychology
This is my second post, and I’d like to discuss people’s online behaviors with you guys.
We have already known that this course is not only on social web but also on the relationship between people’s online behaviors and psychology from the beginning. After this class, I got a deeper understanding.
Dr. Rosanna mentioned that social psychologists identified the following 5 strategic motives in the way we attempt to present ourselves. Out of curiosity, I was eager to know whether individuals’ online behaviors are all related to these 5 motives. I checked social web like Renren, Weibo, Twitter, BBS and hunted for examples to try confirming this theory.
1. Self-promotion: trying to persuade others that you are competent.
In order to show his close relationship with citizens and achieve a good effect of propaganda, the U.S. president Obama registers a Twitter account and communicates with Twitter users.
2. Ingratiation: trying to get others like you.
Stars would do this to show his care, and of course the implicit purpose is to get his friends or fans like him. Similarly, we normal people would behave in this way.
3. Intimidation: trying to get others to think you are dangerous.
This always occurred in the election process. My dear friends, could you help me find an example to support this motive?
4. Exemplification: trying to get others to regard you as a morally respectable individual.
5. Supplication: trying to get others to take pity on you as helpless and needy.
I can see the most cases people present themselves with this motive. Just as Dr. Rosanna exampled us that the high school girl posted the picture of her drops of tear to gain comfort from her friends. I realize about 40 percent of new posts describing their condition on Renren are ‘complaints’ or something embarrassing happened to them.
With the increasing popularity of all sorts of social media, people, especially young people, are more willing to chat and recognize the whole world online rather than go outside and feel the real world. Just because it’s more convenient and perhaps they think it stands for fashion. But I am wondering if the ‘person’ presents on the Internet is real. Is there any discrepancy between the online you and the offline you?
The picture was found in a book called ‘Privacy Online: Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web’, which shows the comparison between self-presentation offline and online on social networking sites under consideration of the dimension ‘impression construction’.
From my point of view, the online behaviors cannot totally stand for a person’s characteristics and the difference-degree distinguishes from person to person. For instance, I have a friend who has several Weibo accounts, as she has different social communities, colleges, closest friends and fans group. As a result, the girl performs distinct behaves in each online social hub and feels different sense of consonance.
All in all, as separate elements in the huge social network, we are crowded by tons of information. We’d better learn to analysis the psychology basis of online behaviors, and then we can know what to achieve and what to abandon. Let the online resources help you grow rather than be blindly influenced by them.
