Tutorial: Psychology of Social Media

This was a 2-hour long tutorial at ICWSM'09, delivered by Sam Gosling (UT Austin) and Kate Niederhoffer (Nielsen Online). It was refreshing to listen to people in different fields who look at the very same problems (audience span psychologists, sociologists, computer scientists, wall street analysts). Sharing my note below.

1. Social media (like Facebook, Twitter) is serving some psychological needs. What?

- Everybody spends their day by doing something. What do they do and what does that tell us about the person?

- Psychologist Maslow says everyone has his own "hierarchy of human needs". This means that we all have our own set of priority in the action set.

2. Fundamental social needs of people: People want to (1) get along and (2) get ahead.

- Get along meaning, socialize. Get ahead meaning, step up in the social hierarchy level. How could this be projected in social media?

- What do our friends tell us about us? In a lab test, people with low self-esteem wanted to hang out with those who gave negative feedback, against those who gave positive feedback. Homophily?

3. People want to be seen accurately, than being projected more positively than they actually are.

- Sam looked at webpages of people, contacted the webpage owners, interviewed them and asked what person they'd like to be, asked their friends what the person is like, and found the projection is rather accurate.

- Would this hold in Facebook too?

4. What are identity claims?

- This mean the things about you that is deliberately chosen for other people. Examples are t-shirts that you wear, bumper sticker, webpage, pictures you hang in your room, etc.

- Music is not an identity claim. It's a tone-setter. It is typically chosen to set our mood in a particular way. You listen to upbeat music when you head out for clubbing vs. when you are home, you may listen to a different music.

- Books are inadvertent identity claims. This is not so deliberate, but is a behavioral residue over a longer time period. Just by looking at the variety, topics, and organization of books at home, we can tell so much about the person. For example, does the person read a wide variety of books (openness), are the books actually read, are there notes, how are they ordered -- neatly or messy, are cheesy books hidden behind, etc.

5. Language is the backbone of our expression.

- There are a lot of approach to understand human behaviors based on their linguistic styles. The use of pronouns (which we think is garbage word) can already reveal sex and age of a person.

- 140 characters in Twitter can tell so much.

- Usage of word "I" : more common among females. more common among people with low social status. Usage of word "We": group action. but also reflects future trouble (meaning, followed by "but")

6. What do we need to know to know a person?

(a) big five traits (openness = creativity + interest + opinions, conscientiousness = daily life, extraversion = documenting life, agreeableness = polite topic covered, neuroticism = cathartic or auto-therapeutic purpose - standard way, look Goldberg 1992, Costa and McCrae 1992)

(b) personal concerns (visions and goals)

(c) identity (personal myth - very difficult to measure)