summary: Social media usage evolves from a conscious choice to an automatic habit, especially among frequent users. The study revealed that likes and comments are becoming less and less important for habitual users who continue to post regardless of social engagement or results.
Structural changes on platforms such as Facebook may temporarily slow down the pace of these frequent posts, but they adapt quickly. These findings raise questions about the effectiveness of motivational interventions in regulating harmful or misleading content online.
Important facts:
- Frequent and habitual social media users continue to post at a constant rate, even as the number of likes and comments they receive fluctuates.
- The first structural changes in social media platforms may slow down their habitual posting behavior, but frequent users often return to their previous posting speeds quickly.
- Habitual users appear to be less effective at motivational interventions and more resistant to change influenced by positive or negative social feedback.
sauce: University of Southern California
People participate in social media to express themselves while enriching their social lives, making new friends, and building their online identities. But as they delve deeper into these digital realms, their behavior changes.
Participating in likes, shares, posts, and retweets becomes habitual, eroding the original motivation that drew users to the platform in the first place. What was once a conscious choice turns into an automatic, almost impulsive action.
These are the results of new research by researchers at the USC Dornlife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Even though public health experts have expressed concern about its negative impact on mental health and overall well-being, especially among younger users, the majority of Americans (70% according to Pew Research) still feel they are accessing the app daily, sometimes hourly.
USC Dornlife psychology researchers Wendy Wood and Ian Anderson compared the posting rates of frequent habitual users to those of infrequent, non-habitual users. They wanted to know if the proportions of those groups would change depending on the reactions and comments they received from other groups.
The study was published online earlier this year. motivational science.
Building on previous research, the researchers conducted three sequential studies focusing on Instagram and Facebook posting behavior. They found evidence that users developed different posting habits depending on how often they used her two apps.
Research highlights how latent your daily posting habits can become over time, from posting with a goal in mind to automatically posting with little thought. Ta. And this behavior can lead to a never-ending urge to share content on these platforms.
Researchers used Facebook metrics to compare regular users to infrequent or new users and explore whether social rewards motivate the two types of users in the same way.
Anderson said he and Wood also investigated whether automatic and habitual recurring postings to Facebook and Instagram occur when social incentives are limited or non-existent. “In other words, do these frequent users just post when they receive likes and comments on their posts, or are they just posting out of habit?” he asked.
Social rewards only work for some people
Researchers found that likes, comments, and shares had less of an impact on the motivation of frequent users to post than infrequent or new users.
In a preliminary study using Instagram user data collected from a study conducted by Emilio Ferrara of the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, Woods and Anderson predictably found that social rewards in the form of likes We found that it certainly motivates users to engage more often and quickly. . The more likes a user receives, the more often they post. Fewer likes will slow down your posting speed.
But digging a little deeper, the researchers made an interesting discovery. Social rewards such as likes increased engagement primarily among new or infrequent users. In contrast, frequent users continued to post at their normal pace regardless of how others reacted.
Woods and Anderson conducted a second study to further test this theory, examining over 1,900 Facebook posts.
They found that positive responses prompted increased and faster engagement only among infrequent new users, but not among frequent users. Duplicate Instagram results, Habitual Facebook users quickly continued to post regardless of whether they received positive or negative reviews.
Habitual users don’t care what you think
The findings confirmed what Woods and Anderson had suspected. With enough repetition, users form habits and mental associations tied to specific contextual cues. Contextual cues include elements such as where and when you use your app or receive notifications.
For example, users who frequently use an app while lying in bed, sitting on the couch, or during certain times of the day will begin to associate their use of the app with those specific situations. Once these habits are formed, users react quickly and automatically with minimal consideration when they encounter these contextual cues.
In this second study, the researchers also surveyed the participants and found that for those with really strong habits, even if they said they cared about social rewards or reactions from others, their behavior It turned out to be telling a different story. These users post at about the same rate regardless of how many likes they get. This could have negative consequences, Anderson said.
“Not only are they ignoring the likes, they are ignoring the impact of the posts.
This study shows that motivational interventions do not affect habitual and non-habitual users the same way. Simply telling people not to share certain types of potentially harmful, dangerous or deceptive content works for non-habitual users but not for regular users.
Structural site changes might work
To further test the hypothesis that frequent and habitual users are not motivated by positive feedback or warnings not to post harmful or misleading information, the researchers: We investigated whether structural changes in social media platforms change the posting rate of such users.
In 2007, Facebook redesigned its platform to increase engagement, launching a status update bar and putting content from users’ friends at the forefront of their news feed.
This change initially slowed down auto-responses for frequent posters. However, for infrequent users, this restructuring had the intended effect of increasing engagement with others and posting faster after receiving positive feedback.
This study demonstrated that the design of social platforms can positively affect the posting rate of habitual posters by temporarily slowing the posting rate.
However, over time, these users regained their posting speed, suggesting they retrained their habitual posting behaviors to match the platform’s new design.
Anderson said that if social media companies are to take issues like misinformation, hate speech and youth mental health seriously, they will also need to change the structure of their platforms to affect habitual users. concluded.
“Interventions that work for some types of users do not work for other types. Something will be needed,” he said.
He said if Facebook and Instagram wanted to move behavior in another direction, they would have had to change their structure to allow users to post accurate content. It hasn’t happened to the degree necessary to break the bad habits of frequent users.
About research
This study was funded by a grant from the USC Department of Psychology.
About this Psychology and Social Media Research News
author: Ileana Wachtel
sauce: University of Southern California
contact: Ileana Wachtel – USC
image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: open access.
“Limited Effects of Social Motivation on Habitual Behavior: A Test from Social Media EngagementAnderson, IA et al. motivational science
abstract
Limited Effects of Social Motivation on Habitual Behavior: A Test from Social Media Engagement
Queues are displayed automatically by context. We tested the role of this shifting motivation in social media engagement. Specifically, how the posting rates of habitual and non-habitual social media users change according to the social rewards of others’ reactions and comments, and the prominence of their own and others’ posts. We evaluated how it would change due to the 2007 platform design change that enhances performance.
in a preliminary investigation with Instagram In controlled observations of users and Study 1, Facebook When posting, nonhabitual posters experienced increased engagement after receiving social rewards for previous posts, whereas habitual posters were unaffected.
In study 2, occasional Facebook posters were motivated by platform designs that increased engagement, but frequent users were not. Instead, the post was interrupted by a new platform feature.
Finally, we suggested that these reward effects were not due to decreased motivation, and habitual contributors self-reported that they cared about how others responded, predicting increased engagement after the platform change. .
Thus, we found that frequent users reacted automatically out of habit and were insensitive to their own motivations.