Effects Of The Posts' Presentation Cues And Social Motivation On The Impression Formation Of Social Networking Site Users

At present,social networking has become an indispensable tool in interpersonal interaction.Forming a good online impression helps individuals to expand online and offline social networks.This study focuses on the information processing of individuals when browsing others' posts on social networking sites,and examines the internal and external factors that affect their impression of Post Publishers,in order to further explore the online social information processing process of individuals.Using cognitive behavior research paradigm and eye tracking technology,80 adult subjects were randomly selected for two experiments.In Experiment 1,we used 2(content contexts: high social context,low social context)× 4(presentation cues of posts: outward text and outward picture,outward text and inward picture,inward text and outward picture,inward text and inward picture)to design the internal experiment,mainly to explore the external clues that affect the impression formation and information processing on individual social websites.The results show that the presentation form and content situation of the post have significant influence on the internal and external evaluation and related eye movement indicators,and have interaction effect on social attraction evaluation,but there is no interaction effect on whether to praise or add as a friend.In Experiment 2,the subjects were divided into high and low social groups by speech priming paradigm,and a mixed experimental design of 2(social motivation: high and low)×2(content contexts)× 4(presentation cues of posts)was adopted.The results showed that the main effect of content context and presentation form,as well as the interaction between them were consistent with experiment 1.Social motivation had a significant impact on social attraction evaluation,whether to add friends,pupil diameter and scanning time,but there was no significant interaction between social motivation and two post presentation clues.In a word,the results of the two experiments show that thread presentation and internal social motivation present the bottom-up information processing process and the top-down information processing process respectively,which supports the parallel processing theory.The internal and external evaluation of the post publisher is more affected by the thread presented by the post,and the evaluation of the social attraction of the post publisher and whether to add friends is more affected by the internal social motivation factors.Socialmotivation increases cognitive load.The behavior intention of "like" or not is not affected by these factors.Praise may be a kind of habitual behavior in line with social expectations.These results are helpful for individuals,organizations and products to use social networking sites to manage or maintain their own image,to influence others' impression formation strategically,and to explain the group psychological phenomena on many social networking sites.