Understanding user participation from the perspective of psychological ownership: The moderating role of social distance

Highlights

• Creating PO toward social media is the key to promoting user participation.

• Self-investment and perceived control are key paths toward achieving PO.

• Intimate knowledge is negatively associated with PO toward social media.

• Paths toward PO varies with users' social distance with other users.

Abstract

This research provides a new perspective to understand user participation in social media by focusing on the user-platform relationship. By drawing on the theory of psychological ownership, this study argues that the key to promoting user participation is to create feelings of ownership toward social media, as this signifies a strong psychological bond between users and the platform. The model was tested using a web-based survey with respondents that were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Structural equation modeling analyses demonstrated that self-investment and perceived control positively influenced users' psychological ownership toward social media, which in turn increased user participation. However, unlike previous literature on psychological ownership, this study found a negative association between intimate knowledge, that is, the degree of acquaintance as well as the number of experiences with social media, and users' psychological ownership. The results further showed that the paths toward achieving a sense of psychological ownership varied according to the extent to which users interact with others whom they perceive to be psychologically close to themselves, which is referred to as social distance. The theoretical and managerial implications for social media practitioners are also discussed.

Introduction

The last decade has witnessed the rapid proliferation of social media, which now connects more than one-third of the world's population (Statista, 2019). As one of the most popular tools for interpersonal communication and information exchange, social media has deeply penetrated our everyday life (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). As of 2018, about two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are Facebook users, for example, and a sizeable majority of these users (75%) visit the platform daily. In particular, young adults in the U.S. stand out because they not only embrace multiple platforms, but a majority of them (71%) visit the platforms multiple times per day (Smith & Anderson, 2018). The increasing popularity of social media is partly driven by its interactive and participatory features which make it easier to create and exchange content. These features serve to transform consumers from passive observers to active participants (Hoffman and Fodor, 2010, Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Various forms of user participation have been observed in previous research, such as sharing viral content (Taylor, Strutton, & Thompson, 2012), writing product reviews (de Vries, Peluso, Romani, Leeflang, & Marcati, 2017), posting selfies (Sung, Lee, Kim, & Choi, 2016), and engaging in brand-related conversations (Kabadayi & Price, 2014).

Even though the rapid growth of social media affects users’ active participation, this participation is not uniformly distributed. Most user-generated content from active, successful social media communities is only contributed by a small proportion of users (Preece et al., 2004, Sun et al., 2014). This pattern is captured in the 90-9-1 rule, which states that in most online communities only 1% of users create content, 9% of users contribute by synthesizing or curating content, and 90% are passive users, or lurkers, who consume content without contributing (Nielsen, 2006).

Since the active participation of users is critical to the success of social media, there is a growing stream of research that is devoted to understanding it by approaching the issue from different perspectives, such as a motivational approach (Khan, 2017, Leiner et al., 2018, Shao, 2009, Smock et al., 2011), individual differences (Preece et al., 2004, Sun et al., 2014), social influence perspective (Fu et al., 2017, Zhou, 2011), and other situational factors (Fu et al., 2017, Rudat and Buder, 2015, Sheldon and Bryant, 2016). However, there has been little attempt to explore user participation from a user-platform relationship perspective. This research is designed to fill the gap and expand the understanding of user participation by examining the psychological connection that users may be forming with social media platforms. Do users form strong psychological bonds with social media itself? If so, does that bond manifest in behavioral outcomes such as user participation? How and under what conditions do users develop psychological bonds with social media?

The notion of psychological ownership, which signifies a strong psychological bond between a person and an object that is closely connected with one's self-concept (Pierce et al., 2001, Pierce et al., 2003), provides a theoretical basis to answer the questions posed above. Social media offers an environment where people develop feelings of ownership for various targets, such as their self-created content that represents their identities (Belk, 2013, Schau and Gilly, 2003). As social media facilitates creation and interaction with these targets that reflect one's self-concept and act as an extended self (Belk, 1988, Belk, 2013), it seems plausible that users may develop feelings of ownership toward the medium itself. As demonstrated in the psychological ownership literature (e.g., Van Dyne & Pierce, 2004), this psychological bond will manifest in behavioral outcomes that benefit social media, like user participation. This study further aims to examine how the feelings of ownership toward social media develop. Drawing on the theory of psychological ownership (Pierce et al., 2001, Pierce et al., 2003), this research examines three ways that users may develop psychological ownership toward social media: self-investment, perceived control, and intimate knowledge. Lastly, this study investigates whether the process of ownership development will be moderated by users' perception of other users – social distance. Since user experience in social media involves interactions with other users (Karahanna, Xu, & Zhang, 2015), the paths to develop psychological ownership are contingent on social distance which concerns users' perception of other users as being similar in certain attributes, and thus, psychologically close to themselves (Liviatan, Trope, & Liberman, 2008).

In sum, this study aims to develop and test a model which investigates: (1) how users' psychological ownership toward social media influences user participation (2) how three factors of social media experience (i.e., self-investment, perceived control, and intimate knowledge), influence feelings of ownership toward social media, and (3) how one's social distance from other users moderates the process of ownership development.