The impact of self-regulatory states and traits on Facebook use: Priming materialism and social comparisons

Highlights

• Materialism and SCO increase Facebook use causally.

• When primed high in materialism people with low SCO are more likely to use Facebook.

• When primed high in SCO high materialistic people are more likely to use Facebook.

Abstract

Social Networking Sites like Facebook are an upcoming phenomenon of the modern age. The Social Online Self-regulation Theory (SOS-T) proposes that people use Facebook in order to self-regulate. Using Facebook they regulate their emotions and satisfy a variety of needs and motives. The study's aim was to provide first evidence for the theory by examining the influence of two self-regulatory variables (i.e. materialism and social comparison orientation). Using priming paradigms in two experiments (N₁ = 228; N₂ = 239), we could show that both variables increase Facebook consumption jointly and independently. Implications for theory building and applied settings are discussed and a forecast of future studies is given.

Introduction

Social networking sites (SNSs) like Facebook or Instagram show a remarkable increase regarding their popularity over the last two decades, so that the social online platform Facebook has registered over 1.71 billion monthly active users in June 2016 (Facebook, 2016). The platform offers numerous possibilities of social interaction like sharing photographs, interacting through Facebook groups or chatting with friends. Thus, people's behavior on social networking sites becomes a new form of social interaction and in that way, it offers the opportunity to compare social online to offline behavior (Wilson, Gosling, & Graham, 2012).

Although social online behavior is a relatively new phenomenon, there are many studies that try to answer the question, why so many people are attracted to Facebook. By now, research identified quite a few social psychological variables to be associated with Facebook use. For example, studies demonstrated that people high in narcissism (Brailovskaia and Bierhoff, 2016, Mehdizadeh, 2010), high in extraversion (Ryan & Xenos, 2011) or high in trait materialism (Ozimek, Baer, & Förster, submitted) used Facebook more frequently than people low in these personality traits. Furthermore, high frequent Facebook use is associated with higher social comparison orientation (Lee, 2014, Ozimek and Bierhoff, 2016), lower self-esteem (Mehdizadeh, 2010, Steinfield et al., 2008) and increased feelings of loneliness (Ryan & Xenos, 2011). While such studies suggest specific strategies (i.e., people use Facebook for becoming socially connected; cf. Ryan & Xenos, 2011), the Social Online-Self-Regulation Theory (SOS-T, Ozimek et al., submitted), as an integrative model, approaches answering the “why-question” with one single superordinate, latent variable:

Regarding the SOS-T, people use Facebook to regulate themselves. Self-regulation involves the pursuit of individual goals (Higgins, 1997, Kruglanski et al., 2002, Ozimek et al., submitted), and Facebook can serve a means to reach more general end-states. People's individual goals can be related to many different contents such as increasing social contact, presenting oneself, improving self-esteem or seeking help for specific problems, to give only some examples. Some relations are less immediate. For example, some people may think that via social networking, Facebook could help to improve their career, gain prestige, or gain status friends (Ozimek et al., submitted); in other words, they may want to satisfy materialistic needs. Note that for our model, it is irrelevant if such attempts are successful, rather people make use of it because they think they can attain their goals this way. A theoretical model is presented in Fig. 1 (see Appendix A). In contrast to other studies, using solely correlational designs, SOS-T predicts causal relations.

As a start to collect evidence for our more general model, we examine the impact of two prominent self-regulatory variables on people's Facebook use by using priming logic: Materialism and social comparison orientation. More specifically, in order to test the causal influence of the variables on Facebook consume, we activated materialistic goals and people's social comparison orientation situationally and compared them with control groups that were not primed. This is, to our knowledge, the first study using an experimental design for assessing the impact of social comparisons and materialistic concerns on Facebook use.

Thus, our study has two main purposes: First, we tested the SOS-T, predicting means-goals-relationships between Facebook use and self-regulatory strategies. Secondly, our experimental designs deviate from many studies on Facebook consumption that are merely correlational in nature, and is indeed one of the first approaches examining the causal influence of materialistic goals and social comparison on Facebook use.

Additionally, there is a lack of experimental studies examining Facebook use and personality. Therefore, with our study we hope to inspire researchers to conduct more experimental studies in the field of social media research.