Palling around
Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults
Ethan Kross et al.
PLoS ONE, August 2013
Abstract:
Over 500 million people interact daily with Facebook. Yet, whether Facebook use influences subjective well-being over time is unknown. We addressed this issue using experience-sampling, the most reliable method for measuring in-vivo behavior and psychological experience. We text-messaged people five times per day for two-weeks to examine how Facebook use influences the two components of subjective well-being: how people feel moment-to-moment and how satisfied they are with their lives. Our results indicate that Facebook use predicts negative shifts on both of these variables over time. The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time we text-messaged them; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. Interacting with other people "directly" did not predict these negative outcomes. They were also not moderated by the size of people's Facebook networks, their perceived supportiveness, motivation for using Facebook, gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression. On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.
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Friends or Family? Revisiting the Effects of High School Popularity on Adult Earnings
Jason Fletcher
NBER Working Paper, July 2013
Abstract:
Recent evidence has suggested that popularity during high school is linked with wages during mid-life using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. The results were shown to be robust to a large set of individual-level heterogeneity included completed schooling, cognitive ability, and personality measures. This paper revisits this question by first replicating the results using an alternative dataset that is very similar in structure. Like the previous results, the Add Health baseline effects suggest that an additional high school friendship nomination is linked to a 2% increase in earnings around age 30. However, leveraging the unique sibling structure of the Add Health shows that sibling comparisons eliminate any associations between popularity and earnings. The findings suggest that families, rather than friends, may be the cause of the association.
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Number of Siblings and Friendship Nominations Among Adolescents
Donna Bobbitt-Zeher & Douglas Downey
Journal of Family Issues, September 2013, Pages 1175-1193
Abstract:
Considerable social science research questions the benefit of siblings. The most prominent example is the consistent negative association between sibship size and educational outcomes. But more recent work among kindergartners uncovered a potentially positive outcome - greater social skills - at least for those who have at least one sibling. We extend this line of inquiry to adolescence to see if there are long-term negative consequences of growing up without any siblings. Analyzing 13,466 youths from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find no evidence that only children receive fewer peer nominations of friendship than youths with one (or more than one) sibling(s). Our results suggest that the previously observed social skills deficit among only children in kindergarten appears to be overcome by adolescence.
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Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment
Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral & Sean Taylor
Science, 9 August 2013, Pages 647-651
Abstract:
Our society is increasingly relying on the digitized, aggregated opinions of others to make decisions. We therefore designed and analyzed a large-scale randomized experiment on a social news aggregation Web site to investigate whether knowledge of such aggregates distorts decision-making. Prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects. Whereas negative social influence inspired users to correct manipulated ratings, positive social influence increased the likelihood of positive ratings by 32% and created accumulating positive herding that increased final ratings by 25% on average. This positive herding was topic-dependent and affected by whether individuals were viewing the opinions of friends or enemies. A mixture of changing opinion and greater turnout under both manipulations together with a natural tendency to up-vote on the site combined to create the herding effects. Such findings will help interpret collective judgment accurately and avoid social influence bias in collective intelligence in the future.
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Benjamin Winegard, Bo Winegard & David Geary
PLoS ONE, August 2013
Abstract:
Mating decisions are influenced by conspecifics' mate choices in many species including humans. Recent research has shown that women are more attracted to men with attractive putative partners than those with less attractive partners. We integrate these findings with traditional accounts of social signaling and test five hypotheses derived from it. In our study, 64 men and 75 women were paired with attractive and unattractive opposite-sex putative partners and asked whether they would prefer to give surveys to peers or to older adults. Consistent with predictions, both men and women wanted to show off (flaunt) attractive partners by administering surveys to peers and both men and women wanted to hide (conceal) unattractive partners from peers by administering surveys to older adults. These decisions were mediated by how participants expected others to evaluate their status and desirability when they administered the surveys, consistent with partners serving a social signaling function in humans.
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Automatic Imitation Is Reduced in Narcissists
Sukhvinder Obhi et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Narcissism is a personality trait that has been extensively studied in normal populations. Individuals high on subclinical narcissism tend to display an excessive self-focus and reduced concern for others. Does their disregard of others have roots in low-level processes of social perception? We investigated whether narcissism is related to the automatic imitation of observed actions. In the automatic imitation task, participants make cued actions in the presence of action videos displaying congruent or incongruent actions. The difference in response times and accuracy between congruent and incongruent trials (i.e., the interference effect) is a behavioral index of motor resonance in the brain - a process whereby observed actions activate matching motor representations in the observer. We found narcissism to be negatively related to interference in the automatic imitation task, such that high narcissism is associated with reduced imitation. Thus, levels of narcissism predict differences in the tendency to automatically resonate with others, and the pattern of data we observe suggests that a key difference is that high narcissists possess an improved ability to suppress automatic imitation when such imitation would be detrimental to task performance. To the extent that motor resonance is a product of a human mirror system, our data constitute evidence for a link between narcissistic tendencies and mirror system functioning.
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James Laurence
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, Summer 2013, Pages 255-278
Abstract:
We identify two issues with the current literature suggesting that community ethnic diversity undermines social capital: (1) studies predominantly use attitudinal indicators of social capital; and (2) these attitudinal indicators are neighbourhood specific. We suggest the "size" of, and "frequency of interaction" within, individuals' social networks form more valid indicators of social capital. Thus it remains unknown: (1) whether diversity undermines individuals' social connectivity or only attitudes towards neighbours; or (2) whether diversity undermines individuals' total levels of social connectivity or only neighbourhood connectivity. We demonstrate that diversity negatively predicts both local trust and local social connectivity. However, diversity does not negatively predict individuals' total levels of connectivity. From a social connectivity perspective, diversity may undermine local social capital yet exert little effect on individuals' total levels of social capital. Instead, individuals in diverse communities possess equally sized (and active) but less neighbourhood-centric networks. However, this appears dependent on the ability to maintain dispersed social networks: less mobile individuals (e.g. the elderly) report both lower local and lower total social capital in diverse communities.
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Sara Thompson, Sandra Bucerius & Mark Luguya
British Journal of Criminology, September 2013, Pages 924-941
Abstract:
Concerns about high concentrations of poverty, social isolation and neighbourhood safety have made social housing developments the target of various interventions in recent decades. A current housing policy trend in many Western nations aims to de-concentrate poverty and other forms of disadvantage by engineering more socio-economically mixed residential environments. Based on 40 in-depth interviews, this paper examines the impact of neighbourhood ‘revitalization' on young adult residents of Regent Park, Canada's largest and oldest social housing project. We find that the large-scale displacement that attends this process has destabilizing effects on the neighbourhood, both in terms of social networks and supports, but also with respect to young people's perceptions of their risk of violent victimization.
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The Determinants and Consequences of Friendship Composition
Jason Fletcher, Stephen Ross & Yuxiu Zhang
NBER Working Paper, July 2013
Abstract:
This paper examines the demographic pattern of friendship links among youth and the impact of those patterns on own educational outcomes using the friendship network data in the Add Health. We develop and estimate a reduced form matching model to predict friendship link formation and identify the parameters based on across-cohort, within school variation in the "supply" of potential friends. Our model provides novel evidence on the impact of small changes in peer demographic composition on the pattern of friendship links. The evidence suggests, for example, that increases in the share of African-American or Hispanic students leads to reductions in the incidence of cross race friendships. We then use the predicted friendship links from the model in an instrumental variable analysis of the effects of friends' socioeconomic status, as measured by parental education, on own grade point average outcomes. Although the conditional correlation between friendship composition and grade point average suggests large associations between friends' characteristics and own grades, this effect is robust only for females in the instrumental variable analysis. We then present evidence that the GPA effects are driven by science and English grades and a mechanism is likely through non-cognitive factors.
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The Illusion of Saving Face: How People Symbolically Cope With Embarrassment
Ping Dong, Xun (Irene) Huang & Robert Wyer
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People who feel embarrassed are often motivated to avoid social contact - that is, to hide their face. At the same time, they may be motivated to restore the positive image that has been tarnished by the embarrassing event (or, in other words, to restore the face lost in the event). Individuals can symbolically employ these coping strategies by choosing commercial products that literally either hide their face (e.g., sunglasses) or repair it (e.g., restorative cosmetics). However, the two coping strategies have different consequences. Although symbolically repairing one's face eliminates aversive feelings of embarrassment and restores one's willingness to engage in social activities, symbolically hiding one's face has little impact.
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Tessa Lansu, Antonius Cillessen & Johan Karremans
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that adolescents' attention for a peer is determined by the peer's status. This study examined how it is also determined by the status of the perceiving adolescent, and the gender of both parties involved (perceiver and perceived). Participants were 122 early adolescents (M age = 11.0 years) who completed sociometric measures and eye-tracking recordings of visual fixations at pictures of high-status (popular) and low-status (unpopular) classmates. Automatic attention (first-gaze preference) and controlled attention (total gaze time) were measured. Target popularity was associated with both measures of attention. These associations were further moderated by perceiver popularity and perceiver and target gender. Popular adolescents attracted attention especially from other popular adolescents. Popular boys attracted attention especially from girls.
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Does the Internet make people happier?
Thierry Pénard, Nicolas Poussing & Raphaël Suire
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Given the increasingly prominent role the Internet plays in people's daily life, understanding its influence on individual well-being is crucial. Internet use yields direct utility and economic returns that may increase life satisfaction. But the Internet might also have detrimental effects (e.g. addiction, social isolation). This paper aims to examine the impact of Internet use on individual well-being. Using Luxemburgish data extracted from the European Value survey, we find evidence that non users are less satisfied in their life than Internet users. Moreover, the positive influence of Internet use is stronger for individuals who are young or not satisfied with their income. These findings suggest that public policies aiming to reduce the digital divide by reaching out to non-Internet users are socially desirable.
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A comparison study of user behavior on Facebook and Gmail
Jianqiang Shen, Oliver Brdiczka & Yiye Ruan
Computers in Human Behavior, November 2013, Pages 2650-2655
Abstract:
Email is one of the most important communication media to date, and millions of Internet users around the world spend the bulk of their time writing and reading electronic messages. The growing popularity of Social Network Sites (SNS) as a communication medium motivated us to explore the relationship between user behavior on SNS and email. In this paper, we collected objective, privacy-preserved behavior data from participants that were both active Facebook and Gmail users. We show that a large proportion of social interactions still occur through email messages, while participants tend to be more emotional on Facebook. We found that producing more content on Facebook does not necessarily decrease or increase the production of emails. By utilizing the quantitative analysis of usage data instead of surveys, we show that user behavior is likely consistent across SNS and email in some aspects, for example, users with more Facebook friends seem to email to more people, Facebook and Gmail share similar trend of "happiness".
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Christopher Cardoso et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, forthcoming
Introduction: Recent evidence suggests that oxytocin, a nonapeptide posited to underlie the affiliation-related "tend-and-befriend" behavioral response to stress (Taylor et al., 2000), may improve interpersonal functioning by facilitating the acquisition of social support during times of distress. The assertion, however, has not been explicitly tested in humans. Thus, we examined whether the effect of oxytocin on self-perceived trust is magnified in individuals who experienced higher ratings of negative mood following social rejection.
Method: In a double-blind experiment, 100 students (50♀) were subject to a live social rejection paradigm following random assignment to either a 24 IU intranasal oxytocin or placebo administration. Mood and self-perceived trust were measured following social rejection.
Results: Multiple regression and simple slope analysis revealed that oxytocin administration increased self-perceived trust relative to placebo in participants reporting a negative mood response following social rejection [b = 4.245, t(96) = 3.10, p = .003], but not in those whose mood state was euthymic.
Conclusion: These results demonstrate that oxytocin may promote the acquisition of social support in times of distress by increasing self-perceived trust. The findings provide empirical support that oxytocin promotes an affiliation-related behavioral response to stress, consistent with the tend-and-befriend theory.