Psychology of People who frequently update their Facebook
status.
Why some people update their status frequently?
What kind of mentality they had?
After a long research, Scientists have found what compels
people to constantly update their Facebook status. College students who posted
more status updates than they normally did felt less lonely over the course of
a week, even if no one "Liked" or commented on their posts,
researchers found.
"We got the idea to conduct this study during a
coffee-break sharing random stories about what friends had posted on
Facebook," psychology researcher Fenne große Deters, of the Universitat
Berlin, told Psychtronics in an email. "Wondering why posting status
updates is so popular, we thought that it would be thrilling to study this new
form of communication empirically."
Deters and her colleague recruited about 100 undergraduates
(all Facebook users) at the University of Arizona. All participants filled out
initial surveys to measure their levels of loneliness, happiness and
depression, and they gave the researchers access to their Facebook profiles by
friending a dummy user created for the experiment.
The students were sent an analysis of their average weekly
status updates (online wall-memos) and some of the participants were then told
to post more statuses than usual over the next seven days. During that week,
all completed a short online questionnaire at the end of each day about their
mood and level of social connection.
Compared with the group of students who didn't adjust their
social media habits, those who went on a status-writing blitz felt less lonely
over the week, the team found. Their happiness and depression levels went
unchanged, "suggesting that the effect is specific to experienced
loneliness," the researchers wrote. And a drop in loneliness was linked to
an increase in feeling more socially connected, which the researchers believe
is the cause behind the positive effects of status updating.
Interestingly, the team found that loneliness levels did not
depend on whether the students' status updates garnered any comments or
"Likes" from Facebook friends. One might assume that a lack of
response could be considered a form of rejection, but the act of writing a
status update itself might help people feel more connected, the researchers
said. When crafting a clever status, Facebook users have a target audience in
mind. Simply thinking about their friends (or at least their Facebook friends)
can have a "social snacking" effect.
"Similar to a snack temporarily reducing hunger until
the next meal, social snacking may help tolerate the lack of 'real' social
interaction for a certain amount of time," the researchers wrote in a paper
published last month in the journal Social Psychological and Personality
Science.
Now with over a billion users, Facebook has become the focus
of an increasing number of studies trying to uncover the real-life social side
effects that can accompany using the social media site.
For example, research presented last year at the meeting of
the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) showed how the site
offers a dangerous medium for social comparison. People in that study with lots
of Facebook friends had lower self-esteem, feeling worse about their place in
life and their achievements if they'd just viewed their friends' status
updates, compared with people who hadn't recently surfed the site. But for
people with just a few Facebook friends, viewing status updates wasn't a
problem.
Another study, detailed in the Sept. 13 issue of the journal
Nature, found such Facebook friends can influence real-life actions of one
another. In that study, one "get out the vote" message sent to 61
million Facebook users on Election Day 2010 led to 340,000 people casting
ballots when they otherwise would not have.
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