Social Media: Risks & Opportunities - notes from all lectures

Social Media: Risks & Opportunities – lecture 1 – 21-10-2024

Why is it relevant to study what people love/hate about social media?
 There are opportunities that you can use in businesses
 The fact that we are spending much time on social media is important
 People have access to different types of devices

Key terms
 Social media = websites/applications that enable users to create and share content
and/or to participate in social networking
 Risk = a situation involving exposure to danger
 Opportunity = a chance for something/someone to happen

Social Media: Risks & Opportunities – lecture 2 – 24-10-2024

Defining online aggression
 Online aggression = intentional harm delivered by the use of electronic means to a
person or a group of people irrespective of their age, who perceive(s) such acts as
offensive, derogatory, harmful or unwanted (Grigg, 2010)

Defining cyberbullying
 Bullying = aggressive, intentional act or behavior that is carried out by a group or an
individual repeatedly and overtime against a victim who cannot easily defend him- or
herself
 This is called power imbalance (= depends on context; can be someone who is very
popular or not)
- Social intelligence (= perpetrator knows very well what social consequences
some behavior has)

Who is perpetrator?
 Dark personalities = those characterized by socially offensive traits
 Dark Triad:
 Narcissism = having an extreme involvement in yourself; you want people to see you
- E.g., thinking about how you should present yourself (online)
 Machiavellianism = being very manipulative in order to reach your goals
- It’s part of who you are (what drives you) and do everything what is necessary in
order to reach your goal
 Psychopathy = arrogant style when they have to deal with others
- Deceitful, incentive, cold (don’t care about others) and they do whatever it takes
 Some overlap between these sorts of personalities

Dark Triad Study by Pabian et al.
 First to study the association between Dark Triad traits (as a combined Dark Triad
cluster) and cyber-aggression among an adolescent population
 Cyber-aggression = online aggression (it’s the same!)
 Method: Cross-sectional survey among adolescents aged 14-18

, Results: 1 out of 3 engaged at least once in the past three months in one or more than
one of the eight cyber-aggression activities
 Saying things about someone to make the person a laughing stock was the most
used activity
 Followed by sending insulting messages




 What can we learn from this model?
 Only psychopathy was significantly associated with cyber-aggression
- If you score a bit higher of psychopathy, it is more likely that you perform cyber-
aggression on a higher frequency
o People who are more narcistic are more likely to perform cyber-aggression
 Facebook intensity was connected to cyber-aggression
- If you use Facebook more often, it is more likely that you perform cyber-
aggression on a higher frequency
 It is not about extreme beliefs!

Implications of study
 As personality traits are fairly stabilized in this age group, cyber-aggression may be used
as an indicator of psychopathy in adolescent individuals
 Prevention?
 Social perspective-taking skills have been proven successful in overcoming
egocentrism and antisocial behavior
 Include training of these skills in prevention programs

Limitations of study
 Short Dark Triad instrument did not allow to investigate sub-constructs of
Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy
 More recently: Dark Tetrad ---> sadism as fourth trait
- Sadism = take pleasure out of hurting others
 Self-reports: Are children ot admit that they enjoy manipulating etc. others in the
school/leisure context?

,To consider because of this study:
 How to translate these findings into concrete implications remains difficult, hard to
change personality traits (black box)
 Might be more informative to focus on determinants of behavior that can be changed

Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) study by Pabian & Vandebosch (2014)
 Focus on proximal determinants of cyberbullying
 Proximal determinants: more immediate determinants of behavior
 Can influence your behavior, but do it through immediate determinants
 Received few attentions in previous research
 Previously studied in isolation from other proximal determinants
 Importance of studying proximal determinants:
 Modifiable by interventions




Model of TPB
 Intention is formed out of three concepts:
1. Behavioral beliefs: attitude towards the behavior
2. Normative beliefs: subjective norm; beliefs about different reference groups
3. Control beliefs: perceived behavioral control; beliefs about specific aspects who
make it hard/easy to perform a particular behavior
 If you know these, then you can change something
 People might think that cyber-bullying is okay, because everybody does it
 If you change this, you can change the cyber-bullying

, Use of the TPB
 Adding underlying beliefs
 Attitudes
- Why are attitudes positive/negative?
- Which are the expected positive/negative outcomes of cyberbullying?
 Subjective norm
- Which reference groups ultimately generate a positive/negative influence?
 Perceived behavioral control
- What makes cyberbullying easy/difficult to perform?
 This gives us very concrete information on what exactly should be targeted in an
intervention that wants to reduce cyberbullying!

Cyberbullying beliefs
 Behaviors beliefs (A): belief that forms the attitude
 Normative beliefs (SN)
 Control beliefs (PBC)
 First one is about accepting (injunctive norms), second one is about doing it
(descriptive norms; what you think that others do)
 Example behavioral beliefs (A):




 Example normative beliefs (SN):




 Example control beliefs (PBC):




 Method: Two-wave panel study among adolescents aged 11-17 years old
 Results: Perpetration CB (at least once in the past 6 months)