Does sharing negative attitudes of others promote feelings of familiarity?
lding similar negative—versus positive—attitudes toward a third party has been shown to predict increased closeness to a stranger. Here, the authors examined whether this effect is mediated by the heightened feelings of familiarity engendered by shared negative attitudes. In Study 1, participants who shared with a (bogus) stranger a negative attitude of a professor subsequently reported knowing more about the stranger than those who shared a positive attitude, but only when they did not feel strongly about the attitude. In…
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How many of your Facebook friends actually influence your behavior?
e success of Internet social networking sites depends on the number and activity levels of their user members. Although users typically have numerous connections to other site members (i.e., “friends”), only a fraction of those so-called friends may actually influence a member's site usage. Because the influence of potentially hundreds of friends needs to be evaluated for each user, inferring precisely who is influential—and, therefore, of managerial interest for advertising targeting and retention efforts—is difficult. The authors develop an approach…
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What kinds of friendships does Facebook promote?
..Facebook promotes mainly weak, low-commitment ties." Facebook offers the possibility of increased social contact via a process known as ‘friending’, whereby users create personal profiles and accumulate ‘friends’ on a reciprocal basis. The making and maintaining of friendships has been shown to be particularly important to young adults, but there is a strong debate in the literature on computer-mediated communication about the value of the often weak ties that are created. Relatively little is known about the kind of contact…
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