Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 24, Issue 5, September 2019, Pages 259–273, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz013

Although peer production has created valuable information goods like Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux operating system, and Reddit, the majority of attempts at peer production achieve very little. In work groups and teams, coordination and social integration—manifested via dense, integrative communication networks—predict success. We hypothesize that the conditions in which new peer production communities operate make communication problems common and make coordination and integration more difficult, and that variation in the structure of project communication networks will predict project success. In this article, we measure communication networks for 999 early-stage peer production wikis. We assess whether communities displaying network markers of coordination and social integration are more productive and long-lasting. Contrary to our expectations, we find a very weak relationship between communication structure and collaborative performance. We propose that technology may serve as a partial substitute for communication in coordinating work and integrating newcomers in peer production.

People benefit from high-quality supportive messages online, yet the production of these messages is a complex process that is shaped by multiple factors. As informed by the lens model, this study seeks to investigate the interplay of third party’s supportive messages as a form of behavioral residue and the support seeker’s seeking strategy as an identity claim on providers’ language use in supportive messages conveyed in public and private channels online. Data showed that providers’ use of words that differentiate supportive messages of varying quality (i.e., first-person singular pronouns, second-person pronouns, social process words, cognitive process words, and anxiety words) was influenced by the quality and quantity of others’ comments, the support-seeking strategy, and the publicness of the communication channel in an interactive way. Findings extend the literature by providing a more comprehensive account of online supportive communication and illuminating the actual language used to support others.

This study explores how gay male employees represent themselves on social media. Research shows that online self-representations vary according to imagined audiences and platforms’ affordances, but little is known about the possible roles of work in this process. In a qualitative study based on interviews and observations in the Brazilian subsidiary of a multinational automaker, I show how employees’ assessment of compatibility between professionalism and homosexuality leads them to adopt different strategies on Facebook and Instagram, platforms where work and other spheres of their lives overlap. These behaviors are dynamic, occurring in a process I label “testing the waters”: The gay men observe visible audiences’ reactions and change their online self-representations in response to these reactions. This study shows how worried, conscious, and strategic LGBTQIA+ employees are about their use of social media, in new spaces that reproduce old workplace pressures.

Given how strongly social media is permeating young people’s everyday lives, many of them have formed strong habits that, under specific circumstances, can spiral out of control and bring harmful experiences. Unlike in extant literature where habitual and compulsive behaviors are often conflated, we report findings from a two-wave panel study examining the individual predictive value of both habitual and compulsive social media use on connection overload (i.e., information and communication overload) and sleep quality. Longitudinal structural equation modeling reveals that only compulsive social media use is related to enhanced feelings of connection overload and to poorer sleep, whereas habitual social media use had no significant associations with either indicator over time. These differential findings highlight a conceptual imperative for future approaches to further clarify the nature of people’s media habits to prevent spurious (and potentially overpathologizing) conclusions.

We conducted a randomized-controlled experiment with 201 participants to investigate the effects of relationship closeness, emotions, and the receipt of Likes on reciprocal Liking behaviors. We found that individuals engaged in interchange-oriented social grooming by giving Likes to close friends regardless of whether they had received Likes from them before. However, when relationship closeness was low, participants mirrored their acquaintances’ behavior by reciprocating Likes for Likes. Additionally, high-arousal positive emotions mediated the effects of receiving Likes on the intention to Like other users’ content, but this result only held true when relational closeness was not accounted for in the model. Our study explains why people give Likes on social media and what factors shape their Liking intentions. The results of our study contribute to the existing knowledge of the social norm of reciprocity, social grooming, emotion regulation, relational closeness, and social media Liking.

Two large surveys with adult samples of Americans (N = 1,105; N = 1,035) investigated differences in perceived incivility between seven social media platforms. Perceptions of incivility were targeted, given both their inherent societal relevance and the personalized nature of each user’s platform experience. Utilizing a novel approach, observations per platform were nested within each user, facilitating disentangling user-level from platform-level factors. Study 1 demonstrated that even accounting for differences between users, perceptions vary by platform. Further, while individual users do admit to generating uncivil content themselves, self-perceptions were in contrast largely stable across platforms. Study 2 built upon Study 1 by investigating additional platform-level factors that could impact perceptions of incivility: Differences in perceived affordances between platforms were related to differences in perceptions of incivility’s prevalence. Specifically, platforms characterized by either perceived anonymity or perceived network association were in turn perceived to be more uncivil. It can seem like Americans are increasingly rude, insulting, and hateful toward one another, particularly online. Perceptions of incivility in turn can have a variety of impacts, including undermining Americans’ faith in each other, interpersonally and politically. Rather than focus on social media generally, in this article, two large surveys examined separate social media platforms. The first study found that American users do see certain platforms as more uncivil than others, even taking into account differences in their behavior. The same user behaving similarly on two different platforms may still see differences between these platforms. Interestingly, users did not just think that others were uncivil but also admitted to behaving uncivilly. The second study asked what it was about the platforms that might differ, leading to differences in impressions of incivility. Specifically, it found that platforms perceived to have more network association were perceived to have more incivility. Further, it found that platforms that were perceived to allow greater anonymity were perceived to have more incivility. In other words, users likely felt that incivility was more likely when platforms (a) had a sense of community as well as (b) where people could escape personal consequences for their uncivil behavior.

As the metaverse expands, understanding how people use virtual reality to learn and connect is increasingly important. We used the Transformed Social Interaction paradigm ( Bailenson et al., 2004) to examine different avatar identities and environments over time. In Study 1 (n = 81), entitativity, presence, enjoyment, and realism increased over 8 weeks. Avatars that resembled participants increased synchrony, similarities in moment-to-moment nonverbal behaviors between participants. Moreover, self-avatars increased self-presence and realism, but decreased enjoyment, compared to uniform avatars. In Study 2 (n = 137), participants cycled through 192 unique virtual environments. As visible space increased, so did nonverbal synchrony, perceived restorativeness, entitativity, pleasure, arousal, self- and spatial presence, enjoyment, and realism. Outdoor environments increased perceived restorativeness and enjoyment more than indoor environments. Self-presence and realism increased over time in both studies. We discuss implications of avatar appearance and environmental context on social behavior in classroom contexts over time. Understanding how people connect socially via avatars in immersive virtual reality has become increasingly important given the prolific rise of the metaverse. In two large-scale, longitudinal field experiments, we extended predictions of the Transformed Social Interaction paradigm to investigate how the appearance of avatars and the characteristics of the virtual environment influenced people’s behaviors and attitudes over time. In Study 1, we demonstrated the effects of time: group cohesion, presence, enjoyment, and realism measures increased over time, and the effects of appearance: When represented by avatars that looked like themselves, people displayed more synchronous nonverbal behaviors, or were more “in sync” with others, and reported the image quality of the environment and people as more realistic. On the other hand, when people wore the same uniform avatar, they experienced more enjoyment. In Study 2, we demonstrated the effects of the environment: When in more spacious virtual environments, there was more synchronous movement and people reported feeling greater restoration, group cohesion, pleasure, arousal, presence, enjoyment, and realism, than in constrained environments. When in outdoor environments with elements of nature, people reported feeling greater restoration and enjoyment than in indoor environments.

AI can make mistakes and cause unfavorable consequences. It is important to know how people react to such AI-driven negative consequences and subsequently evaluate the fairness of AI’s decisions. This study theorizes and empirically tests two psychological mechanisms that explain the process: (a) heuristic expectations of AI’s consistent performance (automation bias) and subsequent frustration of unfulfilled expectations (algorithmic aversion) and (b) heuristic perceptions of AI’s controllability over negative results. Our findings from two experimental studies reveal that these two mechanisms work in an opposite direction. First, participants tend to display more sensitive responses to AI’s inconsistent performance and thus make more punitive assessments of AI’s decision fairness, when compared to responses to human experts. Second, as participants perceive AI has less control over unfavorable outcomes than human experts, they are more tolerant in their assessments of AI.

Drawing from the social capital framework and socioemotional selectivity theory, this study examines how individuals’ future time perspective (FTP) alters their social capital processes, which further influences their well-being. A two-wave survey was conducted across WeChat users possessing different FTPs. The findings showed that bonding and bridging social capital accumulation were attributed to differential WeChat affordances, which in turn exerted disparate influences on individuals’ positive affect and psychological well-being. Importantly, multigroup analyses revealed that future-oriented users were more fulfilled from the broadcasting affordance, whereas present-oriented users derived more emotional gains from the association affordance. Notably, frequent engagement with the reviewability affordance was found to diminish WeChat bonding social capital only for those who possessed open-ended FTP. The findings contribute to theoretical knowledge of social media affordances and provide practical implications for social media developers in harnessing social media to improve users’ well-being across lifespans by considering their priority of social goals.