Open AccessShould I Share That? Prompting Social Norms That Influence Privacy Behaviors on a Social Networking Site
Author(s) -
Spottswood Erin L.,
Hancock Jeffrey T.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of computer‐mediated communication
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.15
H-Index - 119
ISSN - 1083-6101
DOI - 10.1111/jcc4.12182
Subject(s) - bandwagon effect , affect (linguistics) , psychology , social cue , set (abstract data type) , social psychology , context (archaeology) , self disclosure , norm (philosophy) , internet privacy , computer science , communication , political science , paleontology , law , biology , programming language
This study examines how explicit and implicit cues to social norms affect disclosure and privacy decisions in a Social Network Site ( SNS ) context. Study 1 revealed that participants' disclosure behavior adhered to explicit cues indicating disclosure frequency norms, while implicit social norm cues (i.e., surveillance primes) acted to increase overall disclosure frequency and affect disclosure accuracy when explicit cues discourage disclosure. Study 2 explored how these cues affected privacy‐setting decisions and found that explicit cues indicating others' privacy settings could increase how strictly participants set their privacy settings, but the implicit cues had no effect. These results suggest that explicit cues about SNS norms can trigger bandwagon heuristic processing, and that, under limited circumstances, surveillance primes can affect self‐disclosure.