Jeffrey T Hancock
Biographic Data
| ID | 75301 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey T Hancock |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey T |
| FAMILY NAME | Hancock |
| SIGNATURE | HANCOCK J T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5367-2677 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 74 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 333 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 74 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Consumption of Pink Slime Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, and Why
Pink slime journalism refers to organizations masquerading as local news, often serving special interests. Past research and reporting have illuminated pink slime journalism production (e.g., identifying outlets and documenting practices) but have not systematically analyzed consumption. We combine web browsing behavior of a national sample of American adults during the 2020 election (N = 1,238; 21 M website visits) with a database of pink slime …
Multi-Platform Referrers of Misinformation: A Comparative Analysis of Misinformation Visits Referred by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok
Journalistic and scholarly accounts alike often depict social media platforms as key players in exposing people to misinformation. Unfortunately, existing research examining social media’s role in exposing people to misinformation online implicitly operates under what we call the direct referrer paradigm, focusing only on visits to misinformation that directly follow social media. We introduce the embedded referrer paradigm, which considers socia…
Building an LLM-Powered Content Moderation Bot in the Classroom
As online platforms seek to improve content-moderation strategies, large language models (LLMs) may be a potential tool. This study examines opportunities and limitations of LLM-powered moderation through a unique lens: student projects for a Stanford University course titled Trust and Safety. In this course, students developed Discord bots using LLMs to moderate specific types of harmful content. Interviews with 16 of the students suggest that t…
Of Loving and Losing: The Influence of Dating App Motivations and Perceived Success on Psychological Well-Being
We advance communication theory on the relationship between online dating and psychological well-being with a nationally representative, two-wave panel survey of dating app users ( N = 521) that investigates individuals' motives for dating and their perceived success. Results from an autoregressive structural equation model revealed people felt lonelier when they used dating apps for social approval, but not when they used them to pursue relation…
When Adolescents’ Self-Worth Depends on Their Social Media Feedback: A Longitudinal Investigation With Depressive Symptoms
While social media is assumed to exacerbate adolescents’ depressive symptoms, research findings are ambiguous. One way to move the field forward is by looking beyond time spent on social media and considering subjective experiences. The current three-wave longitudinal panel study examines the within- and between-person relations between adolescents’ self-worth dependency on social media feedback and depressive symptoms. About 1,607 adolescents pa…
Black representation in social media well-being research: A scoping review of social media experience and psychological well-being among Black users in the United States
There has been a wide array of scholarship that has investigated the effects of social media use on psychological well-being since 2006, with most focusing on general populations, specific populations of non-Black individuals, or specific use patterns such as passive use, active use, and addictive use. Comparatively, the extant literature focusing on Black populations is sparse. In this scoping review, we collected 38 articles that studied social…
Generative AI Are More Truth-Biased Than Humans: A Replication and Extension of Core Truth-Default Theory Principles
Humans often display a truth-bias—the perception that others are honest independent of message veracity—but does this phenomenon extend to generative artificial intelligence (AI)? We had humans and large language models make nearly 1,000 veracity judgments across different prompts. Human detection accuracies were near chance (50%–53%) with notable truth-biases (59%–64%); AI had a substantially greater truth-bias than humans (67%–99%). GPT-4 was a…
Building resilience to misinformation in communities of color: Results from two studies of tailored digital media literacy interventions
Interventions to build resilience to misinformation should consider the needs of communities of color, who experience (mis)information in unique ways. We evaluated digital media literacy interventions to improve misinformation resilience among four communities of color in the United States (Black, Latino, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Native American), which were designed by the nonprofit PEN America and community partner organizations. We ass…
But is it for us? Rural Chinese elders’ perceptions, concerns, and physical preferences regarding social robots
Social robots can benefit aging people, especially those with restricted social interactions and health care, but how do resource-poor older adults respond to them? In this study, 5 focus groups with 60 older participants in rural China revealed their perceptions of social robots, concerns about the technology, and the types of social robots they were likely to accept. The participants cited multiple technological, discomfort, privacy, safety, an…
Internal Fractures: The Competing Logics of Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are too often understood as monoliths with clear priorities. Instead, we analyze them as complex organizations torn between starkly different justifications of their missions. Focusing on the case of Meta, we inductively analyze the company's public materials and identify three evaluative logics that shape the platform's decisions: an engagement logic, a public debate logic, and a wellbeing logic. There are clear trade-offs…
Presence and Pronouns: An Exploratory Investigation into the Language of Social VR
As social virtual reality (VR) continues to grow as a medium for digital communication, sustaining presence among communicators remains one of the main constructs that researchers and practitioners use to assess the quality of user experience. In the present paper, we explore language patterns as a behavioral link to presence. We accomplished this through an exploratory text analysis of over 4,800 min of conversation in social VR, consisting of o…
Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed
Human communication is increasingly intermixed with language generated by AI. Across chat, email, and social media, AI systems suggest words, complete sentences, or produce entire conversations. AI-generated language is often not identified as such but presented as language written by humans, raising concerns about novel forms of deception and manipulation. Here, we study how humans discern whether verbal self-presentations, one of the most perso…
From 65 to 103, Older Adults Experience Virtual Reality Differently Depending on Their Age: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Study in Nursing Homes and Assisted Living Facilities
There is growing interest in applications of virtual reality (VR) to improve the lives of older adults, but the limited research on older adults and VR largely treats older adults as a monolith, ignoring the substantial differences across 65 to 100+ year olds that may affect their experience of VR. There are also few existing studies examining the experiences and challenges facing those who facilitate VR for older adults (e.g., caregiving staff).…
Too tired to connect: Understanding the associations between video-conferencing, social connection and well-being through the lens of zoom fatigue
Authentic First Impressions Relate to Interpersonal, Social, and Entrepreneurial Success
This article examines how verbal authenticity influences person perception. Our work combines human judgments and natural language processing to suggest verbal authenticity is a positive predictor of interpersonal interest (Study 1: 294 dyadic conversations), engagement with speeches (Study 2: 2,655 TED talks), entrepreneurial success (Study 3: 478 Shark Tank pitches), and social media engagements (Studies 4a–c; N = 387,039 Tweets). We find that …
People, places, and time: A large-scale, longitudinal study of transformed avatars and environmental context in group interaction in the metaverse
As the metaverse expands, understanding how people use virtual reality to learn and connect is increasingly important. We used the Transformed Social Interaction paradigm (Bailenson et al., 2004) to examine different avatar identities and environments over time. In Study 1 (n = 81), entitativity, presence, enjoyment, and realism increased over 8 weeks. Avatars that resembled participants increased synchrony, similarities in moment-to-moment nonve…
Social media mindsets: A new approach to understanding social media use and psychological well-being
Social media mindsets are the core beliefs that orient individuals’ expectations, behaviors, attributions, and goals about social media’s role in their lives. In four survey studies (N = 2,179), we show people hold distinct mindsets about the amount of agency they have over their social media use (“in control” vs. “out of control”) and the valence of its effects (“enhancing” vs. “harmful”) that are meaningfully related to psychological well-being…
Quantifying the Systematic Bias in the Accessibility and Inaccessibility of Web Scraping Content From URL-Logged Web-Browsing Digital Trace Data
Social scientists and computer scientists are increasingly using observational digital trace data and analyzing these data post hoc to understand the content people are exposed to online. However, these content collection efforts may be systematically biased when the entirety of the data cannot be captured retroactively. We call this often unstated assumption the problematic assumption of accessibility. To examine the extent to which this assumpt…
Linguistic Markers of Inherently False AI Communication and Intentionally False Human Communication: Evidence From Hotel Reviews
To the human eye, AI-generated outputs of large language models have increasingly become indistinguishable from human-generated outputs. Therefore, to determine the linguistic properties that separate AI-generated text from human-generated text, we used a state-of-the-art chatbot, ChatGPT, and compared how it wrote hotel reviews to human-generated counterparts across content (emotion), style (analytic writing, adjectives), and structural features…
Embedding Societal Values into Social Media Algorithms
Social media influences what we see and hear, what we believe, and how we act-but artificial intelligence (AI) influences social media.By changing our social environments, AIs change our social behavior: as per Winston Churchill, "We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us."Across billions of people on platforms from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube to TikTok, AI decides what is at the top of our feeds (Backstrom 2016; Fischer 2020), who we …
Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2020 US election
A digital media literacy intervention for older adults improves resilience to fake news
Older adults are especially susceptible to fake news online, possibly because they are less digitally literate compared to younger individuals. Interventions for older adults have emerged to improve digital literacy, although there has been little evaluation of their effectiveness in improving older adults’ resilience to fake news. We report the results of a digital literacy intervention for older adults administered during the 2020 U.S. election…
Effects of Using Artificial Intelligence on Interpersonal Perceptions of Job Applicants
Text-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly integrated into a host of interpersonal domains. Although decision-making and person perception in hiring and employment opportunities have been an area of psychological interest for many years, only recently have scholars begun to investigate the role that AI plays in this context. To better understand the impact of AI in employment-related contexts, we conducted two experiments in…
Credibility Perceptions and Detection Accuracy of Fake News Headlines on Social Media: Effects of Truth-Bias and Endorsement Cues
This article focuses on message credibility and detection accuracy of fake and real news as represented on social media. We developed a deception detection paradigm for news headlines and conducted two online experiments to examine the extent to which people (1) perceive news headlines as credible, and (2) accurately distinguish fake and real news across three general topics (i.e., politics, science, and health). Both studies revealed that people…
Will You Go on a Date with Me? Predicting First Dates from Linguistic Traces in Online Dating Messages
From conveying intimacy (“I like you”) to irritation (“stop messaging me!”) and dissatisfaction (“I don’t think we’ll work out”), language use plays a fundamental yet often overlooked role in the initiation of relationships. In online dating, daters exchange messages to determine how interested they are in a partner and whether they would like to go on a first date with them. In two studies, we examined whether linguistic features present in onli…
Language Style Matching as a Predictor of Social Dynamics in Small Groups
Synchronized verbal behavior can reveal important information about social dynamics. This study introduces the linguistic style matching (LSM) algorithm for calculating verbal mimicry based on an automated textual analysis of function words. The LSM algorithm was applied to language generated during a small group discussion in which 70 groups comprised of 324 individuals engaged in an information search task either face-to-face or via text-based …
Profile as promise: A framework for conceptualizing veracity in online dating self-presentations
This research explores how users conceptualize misrepresentation (their own and others’) in a specific genre of online self-presentation: the online dating profile. Using qualitative data collected from 37 online dating participants, we explore user understandings of self-presentational practices, specifically how discrepancies between one’s online profile and offline presentation are constructed, assessed, and justified. Based on our analysis, w…
AI-Mediated Communication: Definition, Research Agenda, and Ethical Considerations
We define Artificial Intelligence-Mediated Communication (AI-MC) as interpersonal communication in which an intelligent agent operates on behalf of a communicator by modifying, augmenting, or generating messages to accomplish communication goals. The recent advent of AI-MC raises new questions about how technology may shape human communication and requires re-evaluation – and potentially expansion – of many of Computer-Mediated Communication’s (C…
The Disclosure-Intimacy Link in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Attributional Extension of the Hyperpersonal Model
The present research investigated whether the attribution process through which people explain self-disclosures differs in text-based computer-mediated interactions versus face to face, and whether differences in causal attributions account for the increased intimacy frequently observed in mediated communication. In the experiment participants were randomly assigned to a face-to-face or computer-mediated interaction with a confederate who made ei…
Verbal Irony Use in Face-To-Face and Computer-Mediated Conversations
Speakers use a range of cues to signal ironic intent, including cues based on contrast with context, verbal, and paralinguistic cues. Speakers also rely on cues provided by addressees regarding comprehension of irony. When such cues are unavailable, speakers may be less willing to use irony because of the risk of miscommunication, and addressees may be more likely to misinterpret irony. The present study tested these hypotheses by examining the p…
On Lying and Being Lied To: A Linguistic Analysis of Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication
This study investigated changes in both the liar's and the conversational partner's linguistic style across truthful and deceptive dyadic communication in a synchronous text-based setting. An analysis of 242 transcripts revealed that liars produced more words, more sense-based words (e.g., seeing, touching), and used fewer self-oriented but more other-oriented pronouns when lying than when telling the truth. In addition, motivated liars avoided c…
Linguistic Obfuscation in Fraudulent Science
The rise of scientific fraud has drawn significant attention to research misconduct across disciplines. Documented cases of fraud provide an opportunity to examine whether scientists write differently when reporting on fraudulent research. In an analysis of over two million words, we evaluated 253 publications retracted for fraudulent data and compared the linguistic style of each paper to a corpus of 253 unretracted publications and 62 publicati…
Social Identification and Interpersonal Communication in Computer-Mediated Communication: What You Do Versus Who You Are in Virtual Groups
Journal Article Social Identification and Interpersonal Communication in Computer-Mediated Communication: What You Do versus Who You Are in Virtual Groups Get access Zuoming Wang, Zuoming Wang 1Department of Communication Studies, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5268 1Corresponding author: Zuoming Wang; Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joseph B. Walther, Joseph B. Walther 2Department of Communic…
Language Use in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Role of Coordination Devices
In text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC), people's language use and task performance can be affected by whether explicit coordination devices (e.g., a turn marker) are available. Analyses of 37 dialogues that emerged in text-based, CMC environments support Clark's (1996, 1997) proposal that a communication setting that disrupts the regulation of turn-taking will both undermine higher level language processes (i.e., the construal of mea…
An Explication of Identity Shift Theory: Getting Our Shift Together
First articulated in 2008, the concept of identity shift refers to the process of self-transformation that is the result of intentional self-presentation in a mediated context. As research into identity shift has become increasingly prevalent, our understanding of the concept’s mechanisms and constraints has become more detailed and in depth. We now have a greater understanding of the process and limitations of identity shift: an understanding su…
The Roles of Politeness and Humor in the Asymmetry of Affect in Verbal Irony
Four experiments were conducted to assess the roles of politeness and humor in the asymmetry of affect observed in verbal irony production. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated different replies (ironic, literal, or "no response") made to hypothetical scenarios for their politeness and humor, respectively. Participants in Experiment 3 were given the response options rated in the 2 previous experiments and were asked which response they woul…
Social media mindsets: A new approach to understanding social media use and psychological well-being
Social media mindsets are the core beliefs that orient individuals’ expectations, behaviors, attributions, and goals about social media’s role in their lives. In four survey studies (N = 2,179), we show people hold distinct mindsets about the amount of agency they have over their social media use (“in control” vs. “out of control”) and the valence of its effects (“enhancing” vs. “harmful”) that are meaningfully related to psychological well-being…
Can a social robot be too warm or too competent? Older Chinese adults’ perceptions of social robots and vulnerabilities
Older Adults, Social Technologies, and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Challenges, Strengths, and Strategies for Support
COVID-19 is a threat to everyone's health but can be especially devastating to older individuals. To prevent spread of the virus, social distancing has become the norm worldwide. However, with social distancing comes significantly less face-to-face interaction, which may be particularly harmful to older adults given their existing levels of loneliness. While social technologies can be used to provide critical social interaction during this time o…
The Construction of Away Messages: A Speech Act Analysis
Previous research suggests that "away messages" in instant messaging express informational and entertainment communicative goals while displaying a users' identity. This study investigated the extent to which these communicative goals are reflected in the language structure of away messages, by examining the speech acts performed through the production of 483 away messages crafted by 44 participants. The messages were also analyzed for the use of…
Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2020 US election
Folk Theories of Online Dating: Exploring People's Beliefs About the Online Dating Process and Online Dating Algorithms
How do online daters come to understand and make sense of their online dating experiences and the algorithms that underlie online dating platforms? Across two mixed-method studies, we take a metaphoric approach to identify and explore people's folk theories about traditional dating, online dating, and online dating algorithms. In Study 1, we take a quantitative approach and use an innovative wiki-survey procedure to identify individuals' folk the…
The Role of Subjective Construals on Reporting and Reasoning about Social Media Use
The ways people estimate and make sense of the time they spend with social media should be influenced by the subjective construals that they draw on to guide their perceptions and behaviors on social media. Through qualitative analysis of 60 interviews, we identify how subjective construals of social media can influence two distinct processes relevant to the study of social media effects. First, we find that the process of estimating and self-rep…
Social language processing: A framework for analyzing the communication of terrorists and authoritarian regimes
Social Language Processing (SLP) is introduced as an interdisciplinary approach to assess social features in communications by terrorist organizations and authoritarian regimes. The SLP paradigm represents a rapprochement of theories, tools and techniques from cognitive science, communications, computational linguistics, discourse processing, language studies and social psychology. The SLP paradigm consists of three broad stages: (1) linguistic f…
People, places, and time: A large-scale, longitudinal study of transformed avatars and environmental context in group interaction in the metaverse
As the metaverse expands, understanding how people use virtual reality to learn and connect is increasingly important. We used the Transformed Social Interaction paradigm (Bailenson et al., 2004) to examine different avatar identities and environments over time. In Study 1 (n = 81), entitativity, presence, enjoyment, and realism increased over 8 weeks. Avatars that resembled participants increased synchrony, similarities in moment-to-moment nonve…
Linguistic Markers of Inherently False AI Communication and Intentionally False Human Communication: Evidence From Hotel Reviews
To the human eye, AI-generated outputs of large language models have increasingly become indistinguishable from human-generated outputs. Therefore, to determine the linguistic properties that separate AI-generated text from human-generated text, we used a state-of-the-art chatbot, ChatGPT, and compared how it wrote hotel reviews to human-generated counterparts across content (emotion), style (analytic writing, adjectives), and structural features…
Priming Effects of Social Media Use Scales on Well-Being Outcomes: The Influence of Intensity and Addiction Scales on Self-Reported Depression
To understand behavior on social media, researchers have created and validated dozens of scales. Many can be sorted into two main categories: those that focus on the intensity of social media use and those that focus on addictive aspects. These scales tend to result in different conclusions regarding people's well-being: studies asking about addiction find that social media use is often associated with higher reported depression scores, whereas s…
Should I Share That? Prompting Social Norms That Influence Privacy Behaviors on a Social Networking Site: Should I Share That
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. Stu…
Building resilience to misinformation in communities of color: Results from two studies of tailored digital media literacy interventions
Interventions to build resilience to misinformation should consider the needs of communities of color, who experience (mis)information in unique ways. We evaluated digital media literacy interventions to improve misinformation resilience among four communities of color in the United States (Black, Latino, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Native American), which were designed by the nonprofit PEN America and community partner organizations. We ass…
Internal Fractures: The Competing Logics of Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are too often understood as monoliths with clear priorities. Instead, we analyze them as complex organizations torn between starkly different justifications of their missions. Focusing on the case of Meta, we inductively analyze the company's public materials and identify three evaluative logics that shape the platform's decisions: an engagement logic, a public debate logic, and a wellbeing logic. There are clear trade-offs…
Impression Formation in Computer-Mediated Communication Revisited: An Analysis of the Breadth and Intensity of Impressions
Following either a text-based, synchronous computer-mediated conversation (CMC) or a face-to-face dyadic interaction, 80 participants rated their partners' personality profile. Impressions were assessed in terms of both their breadth (the comprehensiveness of the impression) and intensity (the magnitude of the attributions). Results indicated that impressions formed in the CMC environment were less detailed but more intense than those formed face…
Language Use in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Role of Coordination Devices
In text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC), people's language use and task performance can be affected by whether explicit coordination devices (e.g., a turn marker) are available. Analyses of 37 dialogues that emerged in text-based, CMC environments support Clark's (1996, 1997) proposal that a communication setting that disrupts the regulation of turn-taking will both undermine higher level language processes (i.e., the construal of mea…
Lol: Humor Online
No abstract available
Verbal Irony Use in Face-To-Face and Computer-Mediated Conversations
Speakers use a range of cues to signal ironic intent, including cues based on contrast with context, verbal, and paralinguistic cues. Speakers also rely on cues provided by addressees regarding comprehension of irony. When such cues are unavailable, speakers may be less willing to use irony because of the risk of miscommunication, and addressees may be more likely to misinterpret irony. The present study tested these hypotheses by examining the p…
How Do Communication and Technology Researchers Study the Internet
As a partial review of the field of communication and technology, this essay revisits Newhagen and Rafaeli's (1996) Journal of Communication article that asked why communication researchers should study the Internet. Research directions, findings, and theories are discussed under the organization of the 5 important qualities of the Internet that Newhagen and Rafaeli identified: multimedia, hypertextuality, packet switching, synchronicity, and int…
The Construction of Away Messages: A Speech Act Analysis
Previous research suggests that "away messages" in instant messaging express informational and entertainment communicative goals while displaying a users' identity. This study investigated the extent to which these communicative goals are reflected in the language structure of away messages, by examining the speech acts performed through the production of 483 away messages crafted by 44 participants. The messages were also analyzed for the use of…
The Roles of Politeness and Humor in the Asymmetry of Affect in Verbal Irony
Four experiments were conducted to assess the roles of politeness and humor in the asymmetry of affect observed in verbal irony production. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated different replies (ironic, literal, or "no response") made to hypothetical scenarios for their politeness and humor, respectively. Participants in Experiment 3 were given the response options rated in the 2 previous experiments and were asked which response they woul…
On Lying and Being Lied To: A Linguistic Analysis of Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication
This study investigated changes in both the liar's and the conversational partner's linguistic style across truthful and deceptive dyadic communication in a synchronous text-based setting. An analysis of 242 transcripts revealed that liars produced more words, more sense-based words (e.g., seeing, touching), and used fewer self-oriented but more other-oriented pronouns when lying than when telling the truth. In addition, motivated liars avoided c…
Separating Fact From Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles
This study examines self-presentation in online dating profiles using a novel cross-validation technique for establishing accuracy. Eighty online daters rated the accuracy of their online self-presentation. Information about participants' physical attributes was then collected (height, weight, and age) and compared with their online profile, revealing that deviations tended to be ubiquitous but small in magnitude. Men lied more about their height…
Identity Shift in Computer-Mediated Environments
The present study uses a public commitment framework to examine how computer-mediated self-presentations can alter identities. Participants were asked to present with one of two traits, extroversion or introversion, in public or private computer-mediated communication. Public presentations were online, whereas private presentations took place in a text document. Only participants that presented themselves publicly internalized the trait presentat…
Putting Your Best Face Forward: The Accuracy of Online Dating Photographs
This study examines the accuracy of 54 online dating photographs posted by heterosexual daters. We report data on (a1) online daters' self-reported accuracy, (b) independent judges' perceptions of accuracy, and (c) inconsistencies in the profile photograph identified by trained coders. While online daters rated their photos as relatively accurate, independent judges rated approximately 1/3 of the photographs as not accurate. Female photographs we…
Language Style Matching as a Predictor of Social Dynamics in Small Groups
Synchronized verbal behavior can reveal important information about social dynamics. This study introduces the linguistic style matching (LSM) algorithm for calculating verbal mimicry based on an automated textual analysis of function words. The LSM algorithm was applied to language generated during a small group discussion in which 70 groups comprised of 324 individuals engaged in an information search task either face-to-face or via text-based …
Social Identification and Interpersonal Communication in Computer-Mediated Communication: What You Do Versus Who You Are in Virtual Groups
Journal Article Social Identification and Interpersonal Communication in Computer-Mediated Communication: What You Do versus Who You Are in Virtual Groups Get access Zuoming Wang, Zuoming Wang 1Department of Communication Studies, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5268 1Corresponding author: Zuoming Wang; Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joseph B. Walther, Joseph B. Walther 2Department of Communic…
Looks and Lies: The Role of Physical Attractiveness in Online Dating Self-Presentation and Deception
This study examines the role of online daters’ physical attractiveness in their profile self-presentation and, in particular, their use of deception. Sixty-nine online daters identified the deceptions in their online dating profiles and had their photograph taken in the lab. Independent judges rated the online daters’ physical attractiveness. Results show that the lower online daters’ attractiveness, the more likely they were to enhance their pro…
Mirror, Mirror on my Facebook Wall: Effects of Exposure to Facebook on Self-Esteem
Contrasting hypotheses were posed to test the effect of Facebook exposure on self-esteem. Objective Self-Awareness (OSA) from social psychology and the Hyperpersonal Model from computer-mediated communication were used to argue that Facebook would either diminish or enhance self-esteem respectively. The results revealed that, in contrast to previous work on OSA, becoming self-aware by viewing one's own Facebook profile enhances self-esteem rather…
From Dispositional Attributions to Behavior Motives The Folk-Conceptual Theory and Implications for Communication
This chapter introduces a new theoretical account of attribution—the folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanations (Malle, 1999)—to communication and discusses its implications for understanding communication phenomena. This new perspective has emerged from concerns about classic attribution theory, based on the person-situation distinction, and its ability to account for the cognitive complexity and social functions of attributions. The folk-c…
Social language processing: A framework for analyzing the communication of terrorists and authoritarian regimes
Social Language Processing (SLP) is introduced as an interdisciplinary approach to assess social features in communications by terrorist organizations and authoritarian regimes. The SLP paradigm represents a rapprochement of theories, tools and techniques from cognitive science, communications, computational linguistics, discourse processing, language studies and social psychology. The SLP paradigm consists of three broad stages: (1) linguistic f…
Profile as promise: A framework for conceptualizing veracity in online dating self-presentations
This research explores how users conceptualize misrepresentation (their own and others’) in a specific genre of online self-presentation: the online dating profile. Using qualitative data collected from 37 online dating participants, we explore user understandings of self-presentational practices, specifically how discrepancies between one’s online profile and offline presentation are constructed, assessed, and justified. Based on our analysis, w…
The Disclosure-Intimacy Link in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Attributional Extension of the Hyperpersonal Model
The present research investigated whether the attribution process through which people explain self-disclosures differs in text-based computer-mediated interactions versus face to face, and whether differences in causal attributions account for the increased intimacy frequently observed in mediated communication. In the experiment participants were randomly assigned to a face-to-face or computer-mediated interaction with a confederate who made ei…
What Lies Beneath: The Linguistic Traces of Deception in Online Dating Profiles
This article investigates whether deceptions in online dating profiles correlate with changes in the way daters write about themselves in the free-text portion of the profile, and whether these changes are detectable by both computerized linguistic analyses and human judges. Computerized analyses (Study 1) found that deceptions manifested themselves through linguistic cues pertaining to (a) liars' emotions and cognitions and (b) liars' strategic …
Digital deception
The prevalence of both deception and communication technology in our personal and professional lives has given rise to an important set of questions at the intersection of deception and technology, referred to as ‘digital deception’. These questions include issues concerned with deception and self-presentation, such as how the Internet can facilitate deception through the manipulation of identity. A second set of questions is concerned with how w…
Understanding unavailability in a world of constant connection
research-article Share on Understanding unavailability in a world of constant connection Authors: Jeremy Birnholtz Northwestern University Northwestern UniversityView Profile , Jeff Hancock Cornell University Cornell UniversityView Profile , Madeline Smith Northwestern University Northwestern UniversityView Profile , Lindsay Reynolds Cornell University Cornell UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 19Issue 5September + Oc…
Absence Makes the Communication Grow Fonder: Geographic Separation, Interpersonal Media, and Intimacy in Dating Relationships
Many people assume that it is challenging to maintain the intimacy of a long-distance (LD) relationship. However, recent research suggests that LD romantic relationships are of equal or even more trust and satisfaction than their geographically close (GC) counterparts. The present diary study tested an intimacy-enhancing process, in which LD couples (a) engage in more adaptive self-disclosures and (b) form more idealized relationship perceptions …
Self-Affirmation Underlies Facebook Use
Social network sites, such as Facebook, have acquired an unprecedented following, yet it is unknown what makes them so attractive to users. Here we propose that these sites' popularity can be understood through the fulfillment of ego needs. We use self-affirmation theory to hypothesize why and when people spend time on their online profiles. Study 1 shows that Facebook profiles are self-affirming in the sense of satisfying users' need for self-wo…
Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
Significance We show, via a massive ( N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.
Psychology (63 works) · Social Psychology (49 works) · Computer Science (44 works) · Social media (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · World Wide Web (20 works) · Impact of Technology on Adolescents (18 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Linguistics (16 works) · Deception (15 works)