How Does Facebook Use for Politics Motivate Unfriending and Muting? The Role of Joy on Opinion Self-disclosure After Unfriending
Keywords:
unfriending, Facebook political motivation, motivating reasoning, opinion-disclosure, joyAbstract
Abstract
Motivated reasoning theory posits that individuals constantly engage in directional motivation which lets individuals use defensive strategies to defend their preexisting beliefs or identities. But how do people feel after they employ defensive strategies to manage political behaviors on Facebook? Results from a national representative sample from Qualtric survey panel (N = 505) showed that the political motivation of Facebook use for politics can impact the consequent management behaviors of exposing to posted political content by others and disclosure of personal opinions on Facebook. Interestingly, individuals who felt joy after unfriending or muting others for political reasons reported they would disclose more on Facebook. This study indicates the important role of political motivation and emotion of joy in the formation of echo chambers on social media.
References
References
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Bevan, J. L., Pfyl, J., & Barclay, B. (2012). Negative emotional and cognitive responses to being unfriended on Facebook: An exploratory study. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(4), 1458-1464. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.03.008
Bevan, J. L., Ang, P. C., & Fearns, J. B. (2014). Being unfriended on Facebook: An application of Expectancy Violation Theory. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 171-178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.029
Bode, L. (2016). Pruning the news feed: Unfriending and unfollowing political content on social media. Research & Politics, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168016661873
Boyd, D. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), Networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). New York: Routledge.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. New York: Cambridge Press.
Carson, C & Friedman, K (2019, January 22). Want to do a ‘Marie Kondon’ on your messy social media accounts? Here’s how. Retrieved from
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/326546.
Colleoni, E., Rozza, A., & Arvidsson, A. (2014). Echo chamber or public sphere? Predicting political orientation and measuring political homophily in Twitter using big data. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 317-332. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12084
Dunbar, R. (2016). Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks?. Royal Society Open Science, 3(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150292
Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook “friends:” Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), 1143-1168. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x
Ellsworth, P., & Smith, C. (1988). Shades of joy: Patterns of appraisal differentiating pleasant emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 2, 301-331.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Flynn, D. J., Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2017). The nature and origins of misperceptions: Understanding false and unsupported beliefs about politics. Political Psychology, 38, 127-150. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12394
Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions?. Review of general psychology, 2(3), 300-319.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition & emotion, 19(3), 313-332. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000238
Frey, D. (1986). Recent research on selective exposure to information. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 41-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60212-9
Garrett, R. K., & Stroud, N. J. (2014). Partisan paths to exposure diversity: Differences in pro-and counterattitudinal news consumption. Journal of Communication, 64, 680-701. doi: 10.1111/jcom.12105
Gramlich, J. (2019, May 16).10 facts about Americans and Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about-americans-and-facebook/
Hayes, A. F. (2017). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. New York: Guilford Publications.
Hayes, R. A., Smock, A., & Carr, C. T. (2015). Face [book] management: Self-presentation of political views on social media. Communication Studies, 66(5), 549-568. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2015.1018447
Heiss, R., Knoll, J., & Matthes, J. (2019). Pathways to political (dis-) engagement: motivations behind social media use and the role of incidental and intentional exposure modes in adolescents’ political engagement. Communications, 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2019-2054
Kunda, Z. (1987). Motivated inference: Self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories. Journal of personality and social psychology, 53(4), 636-47
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological bulletin, 108(3), 480-98.
Knoll, J., Matthes, J., & Heiss, R. (2020). The social media political participation model: A goal systems theory perspective. Convergence, 26(1), 135-156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517750366
Lang, C., & Barton, H. (2015). Just untag it: Exploring the management of undesirable Facebook photos. Computers in Human Behavior, 43, 147-155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.051
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Leeper, T.J. & Mullinix, K.J. (2018) Motivated reasoning, In L.S. Maise (ED.) Oxford bibliographies in political science (pp. 129-156). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Leeper, T. J., & Slothuus, R. (2014). Political parties, motivated reasoning, and public opinion formation. Political Psychology, 35, 129-156. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12164
John, N. A., & Dvir-Gvirsman, S. (2015). “I Don't Like You Any More”: Facebook unfriending by Israelis during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. Journal of Communication, 65(6), 953-974. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12188
Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313
Mckelvey, A. (2019, August 6). Deleting people off of social media made me a happier person, and I’m not sorry about it. Retrieved from https://www.popsugartech.com/Why-I-Detoxed-My-Social-Media-45652601.
Mutz, D. C. (2006). Hearing the other side: Deliberative versus participatory democracy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Mutz, D. C., & Martin, P. S. (2001). Facilitating communication across lines of political difference: The role of mass media. American Political Science Review, 95(1), 97-114. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3117631
O’Sullivan, P. B., & Carr, C. T. (2018). Masspersonal communication: A model bridging the mass-interpersonal divide. New Media & Society, 20(3), 1161-1180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686104
Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & John, O. P. (2006). Positive emotion dispositions differentially associated with Big Five personality and attachment style. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 61-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760500510833
Sibona, C. & Walczak, S. (2011). Unfriending on Facebook: Friend request and online/offline behavior analysis. in Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp.1-10). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved from https://www.computer.org/csdl/ proceedings/hicss/2011/4282/00/07-05-17.pdf
Smith, K. (2019). Facebook historical facts. Brandwatch.com. Retrieved from: https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/
Sobkowicz, P., & Sobkowicz, A. (2012). Two-year study of emotion and communication patterns in a highly polarized political discussion forum. Social Science Computer Review, 30(4), 448-469. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439312436512
Stroud, N. J. (2010). Polarization and partisan selective exposure. Journal of Communication, 60, 536–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01497.x
Sunstein, C R (2009), Republic.com 2.0, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taber, C.S. & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science., 50(3). 755-769. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00214.x
Taber, C.S., Lodge, M., & Glather, J. (2001). The motivated construction of political judgments. In J. Kuklinski (Ed.). Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology (pp.198-226), New York: Cambridge University Press.
Verswijvel, K., Heirman, W., Walrave, M., & Hardies, K. (2019). Understanding adolescents’ unfriending on Facebook by applying an extended theory of planned behaviour. Behaviour & Information Technology, 38(8), 807-819. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2018.1557255
Vitak, J. (2012). The impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4), 451-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732140
Watkins, P. C. (2020). Appraising joy. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 15(1), 25-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1685570
Westen, D., Blagov, P. S., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (2006). Neural bases of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on partisan political judgment in the 2004 US presidential election. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18(11), 1947-1958. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2006.18.11.1947
Wheeless, L. R., & Grotz, J. (1976). Conceptualization and measurement of reported self disclosure. Human Communication Research, 2, 338-346. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1976.tb00494.x
Wohn, D. Y., & Spottswood, E. L. (2016). Reactions to other-generated face threats on Facebook and their relational consequences. Computers in Human Behavior, 57, 187-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.12.021
Yang, J., Barnidge, M., & Rojas, H. (2017). The politics of “Unfriending”: User filtration in response to political disagreement on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 70, 22-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.079
Beck, J. (2019, February 4). Facebook: Where friendships go to never quite die. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/15-years-facebook-friendships-wont-die/581824/.
Bevan, J. L., Pfyl, J., & Barclay, B. (2012). Negative emotional and cognitive responses to being unfriended on Facebook: An exploratory study. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(4), 1458-1464. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.03.008
Bevan, J. L., Ang, P. C., & Fearns, J. B. (2014). Being unfriended on Facebook: An application of Expectancy Violation Theory. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 171-178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.029
Bode, L. (2016). Pruning the news feed: Unfriending and unfollowing political content on social media. Research & Politics, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168016661873
Boyd, D. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), Networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). New York: Routledge.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. New York: Cambridge Press.
Carson, C & Friedman, K (2019, January 22). Want to do a ‘Marie Kondon’ on your messy social media accounts? Here’s how. Retrieved from
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/326546.
Colleoni, E., Rozza, A., & Arvidsson, A. (2014). Echo chamber or public sphere? Predicting political orientation and measuring political homophily in Twitter using big data. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 317-332. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12084
Dunbar, R. (2016). Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks?. Royal Society Open Science, 3(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150292
Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook “friends:” Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), 1143-1168. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x
Ellsworth, P., & Smith, C. (1988). Shades of joy: Patterns of appraisal differentiating pleasant emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 2, 301-331.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Flynn, D. J., Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2017). The nature and origins of misperceptions: Understanding false and unsupported beliefs about politics. Political Psychology, 38, 127-150. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12394
Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions?. Review of general psychology, 2(3), 300-319.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition & emotion, 19(3), 313-332. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000238
Frey, D. (1986). Recent research on selective exposure to information. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 41-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60212-9
Garrett, R. K., & Stroud, N. J. (2014). Partisan paths to exposure diversity: Differences in pro-and counterattitudinal news consumption. Journal of Communication, 64, 680-701. doi: 10.1111/jcom.12105
Gramlich, J. (2019, May 16).10 facts about Americans and Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about-americans-and-facebook/
Hayes, A. F. (2017). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. New York: Guilford Publications.
Hayes, R. A., Smock, A., & Carr, C. T. (2015). Face [book] management: Self-presentation of political views on social media. Communication Studies, 66(5), 549-568. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2015.1018447
Heiss, R., Knoll, J., & Matthes, J. (2019). Pathways to political (dis-) engagement: motivations behind social media use and the role of incidental and intentional exposure modes in adolescents’ political engagement. Communications, 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2019-2054
Kunda, Z. (1987). Motivated inference: Self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories. Journal of personality and social psychology, 53(4), 636-47
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological bulletin, 108(3), 480-98.
Knoll, J., Matthes, J., & Heiss, R. (2020). The social media political participation model: A goal systems theory perspective. Convergence, 26(1), 135-156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517750366
Lang, C., & Barton, H. (2015). Just untag it: Exploring the management of undesirable Facebook photos. Computers in Human Behavior, 43, 147-155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.051
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Leeper, T.J. & Mullinix, K.J. (2018) Motivated reasoning, In L.S. Maise (ED.) Oxford bibliographies in political science (pp. 129-156). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Leeper, T. J., & Slothuus, R. (2014). Political parties, motivated reasoning, and public opinion formation. Political Psychology, 35, 129-156. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12164
John, N. A., & Dvir-Gvirsman, S. (2015). “I Don't Like You Any More”: Facebook unfriending by Israelis during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. Journal of Communication, 65(6), 953-974. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12188
Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313
Mckelvey, A. (2019, August 6). Deleting people off of social media made me a happier person, and I’m not sorry about it. Retrieved from https://www.popsugartech.com/Why-I-Detoxed-My-Social-Media-45652601.
Mutz, D. C. (2006). Hearing the other side: Deliberative versus participatory democracy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Mutz, D. C., & Martin, P. S. (2001). Facilitating communication across lines of political difference: The role of mass media. American Political Science Review, 95(1), 97-114. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3117631
O’Sullivan, P. B., & Carr, C. T. (2018). Masspersonal communication: A model bridging the mass-interpersonal divide. New Media & Society, 20(3), 1161-1180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816686104
Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & John, O. P. (2006). Positive emotion dispositions differentially associated with Big Five personality and attachment style. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 61-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760500510833
Sibona, C. & Walczak, S. (2011). Unfriending on Facebook: Friend request and online/offline behavior analysis. in Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp.1-10). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved from https://www.computer.org/csdl/ proceedings/hicss/2011/4282/00/07-05-17.pdf
Smith, K. (2019). Facebook historical facts. Brandwatch.com. Retrieved from: https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/
Sobkowicz, P., & Sobkowicz, A. (2012). Two-year study of emotion and communication patterns in a highly polarized political discussion forum. Social Science Computer Review, 30(4), 448-469. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439312436512
Stroud, N. J. (2010). Polarization and partisan selective exposure. Journal of Communication, 60, 536–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01497.x
Sunstein, C R (2009), Republic.com 2.0, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taber, C.S. & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science., 50(3). 755-769. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00214.x
Taber, C.S., Lodge, M., & Glather, J. (2001). The motivated construction of political judgments. In J. Kuklinski (Ed.). Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology (pp.198-226), New York: Cambridge University Press.
Verswijvel, K., Heirman, W., Walrave, M., & Hardies, K. (2019). Understanding adolescents’ unfriending on Facebook by applying an extended theory of planned behaviour. Behaviour & Information Technology, 38(8), 807-819. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2018.1557255
Vitak, J. (2012). The impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4), 451-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732140
Watkins, P. C. (2020). Appraising joy. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 15(1), 25-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1685570
Westen, D., Blagov, P. S., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (2006). Neural bases of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on partisan political judgment in the 2004 US presidential election. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18(11), 1947-1958. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2006.18.11.1947
Wheeless, L. R., & Grotz, J. (1976). Conceptualization and measurement of reported self disclosure. Human Communication Research, 2, 338-346. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1976.tb00494.x
Wohn, D. Y., & Spottswood, E. L. (2016). Reactions to other-generated face threats on Facebook and their relational consequences. Computers in Human Behavior, 57, 187-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.12.021
Yang, J., Barnidge, M., & Rojas, H. (2017). The politics of “Unfriending”: User filtration in response to political disagreement on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 70, 22-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.079
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2021-05-28
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