Social Media as Sources of Emotions
Each day, millions of people use social media. On these platforms, they are exposed to many positive updates from their network members, raising the question how this selective picture of other people’s lives affects recipients’ emotions: do people become
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Sonja Utz
Contents Introduction
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Social Media
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Emotions
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Capitalization
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Emotional Contagion The Field Approach The Survey Approach The Experimental Approach
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Social Comparison Theory
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Taking into Account the Affordances of Social Media
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Facebook and Envy: Application to Consumer Behavior
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Recommended Reading
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Guiding Answers to Questions in the Chapter
217
References
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S. Utz (*) Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction If you are one of the 2.2 billion active Facebook users, you might regularly check your Facebook newsfeed. Intermixed with news or posts from celebrities and brands, you then see what your friends are up to: having fun at a party, going on a weekend trip, and posting a picture with their partner or a gorgeous-looking selfie. How do these messages affect you? Are you happy for your Facebook friends or do you experience envy? Taking these questions as a starting point, this chapter will summarize the literature on the impact of social media use on emotions and discuss (studies) on its implications for marketing. Checking the latest updates on social media has become part of a daily routine for many people: Instagram reports 800 million monthly active users (Statista, 2018), and the Chinese platform Weibo reports 441 million users.1 Many of these users check the platforms daily, and the updates on social media are mostly positive, cool, and entertaining (Barash, Duchenaut, Isaacs, & Bellotti, 2010; Utz, 2015). Researchers therefore have wondered how reading these positive updates affects the emotions of users (Krasnova, Wenninger, Widjaja, & Buxmann, 2013; Lin & Utz, 2015). The potential negative effects have https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/weibo-userstatistics/ 1
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 K. Sassenberg, M. L. W. Vliek (eds.), Social Psychology in Action, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13788-5_14
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S. Utz
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received a great deal of attention; reading posts on social media is assumed to reduce well-being because the posts elicit envy (Krasnova et al., 2013; Verduyn, Ybarra, Résibois, Jonides, & Kross, 2017). But emotions also influence consumer behavior. Most platforms are free for the users, but make money from advertising. Facebook alone made roughly 40 billion dollars from advertising in 2017.2 Understanding how social media use influences emotions should thus also pay off for companies. This chapter will review several social- psychological theories that help to explain how social media use influences emotions. It will also demonstrate the applied relevance of this knowledge by summarizing research showing how social media-triggered envy influences consumer behavior. The chapter starts with a discussion of social media and their affordances, before emotions are briefly defined. The effects of social media use on emotions are then discussed from
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