The effect of visual, textual, and third-party evaluative cues on impression formation in Facebook.

摘要

The frequent everyday use of social networking by individuals is a growing factor in today's society. The importance of the specific mechanisms of action individuals take when forming impressions through social networking requires attention from a scientific standpoint. The present research attempted to isolate the specialized cues that social networking sites, such as Facebook, provide to users. Three cues of interest, visual (profile photograph), textual self-disclosure (status updates), and third-party evaluations (comments), as well as past research supporting their connection to impression formation were emphasized. The strength of impressions was measured by participants' perception of a viewed Facebook user's narcissism using an adaptation of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory-16 (NPI-16; Ames, Rose, & Anderson, 2006). I hypothesized that (a) presenting the combination of photographic, textual self-disclosure, and third-party evaluative cues together would yield the highest scores on the NPI-16, and (b) that comments on Facebook (third-party evaluations) presented alone would result in higher scores on the NPI-16 than visual or textual self-disclosure cues presented alone. Participants included 128 male and female Facebook users between the ages of 17 and 48. The effects of Facebook cues on the strength of narcissistic impressions formed by observers were tested using a 2 (visual cue: present vs. absent) x 2 (textual cue: wall post vs. no wall post) x 2 (third-party cue: comment vs. no comment) factorial ANOVA. The ANOVA results indicated that all main effects had significant impacts on participants' perceptions of the target's narcissism; however, third-party cues accounted for the largest percentage of explained variance in NPI-16 scores, supporting hypothesis 2. Third-party evaluations (comments) alone accounted for more variance in narcissistic impressions than either visual (profile photograph) or textual self-disclosure (status update) cues presented individually or in any interactions of the cues. Simple main effects tests indicated partial support for the first research hypothesis. Individuals who viewed a Facebook profile with visual (profile photograph), textual self-disclosure (status update), and third-party evaluative (comments) cues combined formed significantly stronger impressions of an individual than if none of the cues were present. Additional interpretations, limitations of the present study, and directions for future research are discussed.