Snap back to reality: Examining the cognitive mechanisms underlying Snapchat

Highlights

• Social Presence in Snapchat associated with Snapchat Intensity and Snapchat Usage.

• Theory of Mind in Snapchat associated with Snapchat Intensity and Snapchat Usage.

• Social Presence in Snapchat associated with Theory of Mind in Snapchat.

• Social Presence in Snapchat mediates relationship between Theory of Mind in Snapchat and Snapchat Intensity.

Abstract

This paper identifies and examines the factors that make Snapchat a unique social medium. Snapchat departs from mainstream media forms in that they are fundamentally visual and occur real-time, thus demonstrating a stronger sense of “being present” in multiple spaces at the same time. Specifically, we argue that what adds to the appeal of Snapchat is a focus on Social Presence as well as on Theory of Mind, a construct that could potentially play a key role in the degree of Social Presence generated by a medium. A sample of 656 Snapchat users, aged from 18 to 29, showed significant links between measures of various precursors and components of Theory of Mind with dimensions of Social Presence, Snapchat Intensity, and frequency of Snapchat usage patterns. Further, the results of a mediation analysis suggest that increasing elements of Social Presence underlie the relationship between mechanisms of Theory of Mind and the intensity of a social media (Snapchat) in users’ daily life. Taken in context of different social media platform uses, the results highlight how a platform that emphasizes such visual and real-time features over other features can fulfill a desired gap in established social media platforms and their practices.

Introduction

After its release in 2012, Snapchat experienced a meteoric rise in usage that placed it among the global leaders in the social media industry. Though competitors like Instagram have now integrated some of Snapchat's main features onto its platform, Snapchat is widely recognized as the innovator of the “Snap” – short video clips (and photos) that users can choose to send to any number of fellow users. What precipitated Snapchat's meteoric rise? Is there a fundamental basis for its appeal? The purpose of the present study was to explore these questions, with particular attention to the cognitive appeal of using Snaps to communicate.

Two main issues emerge when considering these questions, the first related to the consequences of the growth of large social media platforms and the second related to a more fundamental challenge in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Traditional social media platforms, by attempting to be all-encompassing, restrict the possibility for nuance and spontaneity by expanding one's potential audience to include multiple domains. The boundaries between the public and private, as well as the professional and personal, become increasingly blurred as a social media platform reaches saturation. In the wake of increasing awareness of online context collapse and of privacy issues, however, there is increasing interest in digital ephemerality (Leavitt, 2015, pp. 317–327) and a desire for a more personal and limited CMC (Vaterlaus, Barnett, Roche, & Young, 2016). This leads to the second challenge inherent in CMC – the mediation process. The experience of face to face communication is multimodal, immediate, personal, and private, unlike conventionally established forms of CMC which by nature make the mediation process explicit. These two forms of communication, however, are not inherently unbridgeable and the design choices that have resulted in this vast difference are not immutable.

One way to make CMC more effective in an age of unrelenting connectivity and disembodiment is to design and emphasize mechanisms that foster a greater degree of presence (Biocca, 1997, Lee, 2004, Lombard and Ditton, 1997, Sheridan, 1992, Steuer, 1992), a quality that reduces the perception of mediation. Qualities inherent in face to face communication, specifically those that enable greater personal connection and control, will therefore become the focus. Snapchat, is one such example of a social media platform that attempts to address the challenges of a digital world of context collapse and fragmentation. It serves as a useful case study to understand how the design of pervasive digital communication technologies is always undergoing a process of challenge and reconciliation with more fundamental aspects of human communication and sociability.

One of the major challenges facing traditional CMC is that it lacks many of the cues in face to face communication that are essential in conveying a sense of reality. Lacking these cues ultimately leads to a more superficial experience that will not convey the full range of communicative acts in a face to face situation. Text, for example, cannot carry tone as effectively as audio does, which means something like sarcasm will easily get lost in a text-only medium. Audio does not give insights into visual cues, such as body language and facial expressions, which may serve to drastically change the meaning of anything spoken.

According to Sundar (2008), technologies that make use of audiovisual modalities cue a “realism heuristic”, and are thus seen as more trustworthy and authentic because of their closer resemblance to the real world. When considering shifts in newer social media platforms from older ones, it becomes apparent that newer ones capitalize on this principle. Indeed, newer social media such as Instagram and Snapchat move away from the traditional models of Twitter (text-based) and Facebook (text and visual) to capitalize entirely on the “realism heuristic” of visual modalities. This also has other positive effects beyond increasing perceived authenticity. For example, relative to the text-dominated Twitter, the visually-dominated Instagram has demonstrated a reduction in loneliness and a boost in happiness among its users (Pittman & Reich, 2016). Such effects demonstrate the need and motivation for exploring the applications of efficient multimodal design in social media.

This, however, raises the question of what more fundamentally constitutes realism. One may assume that realism implies a closer visual representation to reality, but when considering how to design more effective CMC this is not solely the case. What is more crucial to mirroring perceptual reality is movement. To elaborate on this, the basic tenets of presence theory, a theory that developed when technological cost was high and realism was low, are useful. Essentially, the originators of presence theory were able to make a case for presence even in the absent of the realism that we experience in technologies today (Reeves & Nass, 1996; Nass & Moon, 2000). Indeed, Nass and colleagues (1995) showed that people attribute human mental states to computers with a minimal set of cues. Social presence refers to the reduction of the perception of mediation between mediated communicators. In other words, greater presence implies a reduced salience of the mediating technology as the actual communicator in the interaction as is the case when you are on the phone, speaking to a collection of metals, glass, and plastic. As such, presence as a construct is one that is distinct from other related ones such as immersion.

The cognitive explanation for the phenomenon of presence has been tied to a cognitive hijacking of the modular human mind (Cosmides and Tooby, 1992, Lee and Jung, 2005, Sherry and Schacter, 1987). While highly complex, the human mind does not always filter out messages simply because they are not from an authentic human. It can, and often will, respond to nonhuman agents as if they are human. The paradoxical union of the human mind and media technologies, therefore, is one that must be analyzed delicately as they become increasingly intertwined in complex ways. The development of media technologies serves the primary purpose of making communication more efficient. That said, a tertiary purpose of the development of media technology is to reduce the salience of the technology itself. This is accomplished in one way by designing technology that replicates our biological sensory modalities and their representation of perceptual reality. Thus, the written tools of yesterday have now developed into the visual tools of today.

Thus far, we have made several references to a particular “mirroring of perceptual reality” without delving into much detail. The Heider and Simmel (1944) landmark study demonstrated that people can relate to two-dimensional geometric triangles in social and anthropomorphic terms, simply by virtue of a sequence of movements. According to Heider (1958), the reasoning people made mentalistic attributions to non-human geometric shapes was commonsense, or folk psychology of human minds, where action perception links to beliefs, desires, and goals. This capacity to make inferences and predictions about mental states, intentions, and goals was later referred to as “Theory of Mind” (Premack & Woodruff, 1978).¹

The implications of the Heider-Simmel experiment are that the mechanisms of Theory of Mind naturally even in the most barren communicative environment. Clearly, if we can attribute mental states to simple geometric states, it would follow that we can also do so in a perceptually rich social media platform such as Snapchat.

While Snapchat use has been linked to more personal and intimate relations (Piwek and Joinson, 2016, Vaterlaus et al., 2016), there is currently no literature that connects Snapchat's appeal to its potential closeness to natural face to face communication. It is through this mirroring of the perceptual reality of human interaction, we argue, that Snapchat is able to reduce the salience of the mediation (presence). The multimodal affordances of Snapchat can provide greater opportunities for expression through nonverbal cues as well as a more effective way to understand the tone and emotion of others through CMC (Waddell, 2016).

In the current study, we will argue that the appeal of visually-dominated social media is rooted in their mirroring of perceptual reality, a design that has not been as effectively mobilized on traditional social media platforms. We will focus our attention on what we call the “Snapchat model” of multimodal affordances, which mirrors perceptual reality not only through visual representations, but by capturing social information contained within action and movement. With its “snaps” of images and video clips that are low in both production and effort costs as well as its distinct “vanishing” feature, the interactions on Snapchat are arguably much closer to actuality in visual perceptual experience than other social media. Much like interactions on Snapchat, much of our daily perceptual experiences (conversational or not) involve fleeting, fluid moments continuously layered onto one another. Snapchat breaks all traditional social media rules in that it discourages the preservation of messages. Like in our natural human experiences there are no timelessly preserved photos or re-runs.

Snapchat as a platform affords the capacity to visually represent being “present” in multiple spaces—here, there—at the same time. Snapchat departs from mainstream media forms in that they are fundamentally visual, and that they literally attempt to represent real-time moments, thus demonstrating a true sense of “being present”. The primary implication of these two qualities is that individuals we interact on Snapchat would be perceived with a greater degree of authenticity and alignment with our ancestral modular modes of social perception. Essentially, we argue that the heightened social presence within Snapchat is a source of major user appeal.

As such, we propose:

H1a

Social Presence will be positively associated with ratings of Snapchat Intensity (emotional investment).

H1b

Social Presence will be positively associated with greater Snapchat usage (messages sent/received).

In the present study, we make the case that Snapchat appeals to users due to its mirroring of perceptual reality. Specifically, Snapchat's appeal centers on its technological affordances that evoke sensations and capacities of attribution of mental states, empathy, and perspective-taking that occur naturalistically in face to face interactions. As such, we propose the following:

H2a

Theory of Mind will be positively associated with ratings of Snapchat Intensity (emotional investment).

H2b

Theory of Mind will be positively associated with greater Snapchat usage (messages sent/received).

Notably, prior literature has not accounted for the manifestation of Theory of Mind mechanisms in CMC. Considering how CMC can become closer to face to face communication, we return to the Theory of Presence. According to Lee (2004), the Theory of Mind demonstrated by the Heider-Simmel study is a construct that underlies the phenomenon of social presence. For Lee (2004), the attribution of mental states to geometric shapes is an example of social presence at a fundamental level. This potential connection between Theory of Mind mechanisms and social presence, however, has never been empirically tested. In order to add to our raw, incomplete understanding of the manifestation Theory of Mind in CMC, the current paper also attempts to make this very connection between Theory of Mind and social presence in Snapchat as support of Snapchat's alignment with perceptual reality. As such we propose the following:

H3

Social Presence will be positively associated with Theory of Mind.