Social Motivations have less impact on the behavior of Habitual Social Media Posters

What is it about?

Across our first two studies, we show that social media posting behavior is less impacted by reactions from other users as it becomes frequently repeated or habitual--on both Facebook and Instagram. Using user data from Facebook, we show that habitual posting is more impacted by changes in context, while non-habitual posting is impacted by rewards. In addition, we show that habitual posting behavior diverges from users self-reported intentions and goals related to posting.

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Photo by dole777 on Unsplash

Photo by dole777 on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This is important because it shows that the structure of social media facilitates highly repeated, reward-insensitive behavior among users. In particular, it shows that this applies to the sharing of information in the online context. This is important because there are many potential consequences to habitual information sharing, and because it shows that motivation or will-power based interventions are less likely to impact user behavior than interventions related to design structure.