PAPER V: FINAL PAPER

FACEBOOK RUDENESS 2

Facebook Rudeness: How Comments May Affect One’s Attitude and Behavior

Maria V. Ortega

Florida International University

Facebook Rudeness: How Comments May Affect One’s Attitude and Behavior

Now days, it is often seen how social media, in every aspect, has been a contribution to an attitude of rudeness along individuals. While navigating in social media, we are all exposed to a significant amount of people in which we can communicate just by a click, this interaction might not always be in a positive way, resulting in rude interactions that may cause a psychological effect on the individual. Facebook has been known as the most popular social platform in the world, it that has been used for billion of people around the world, with the intention of interacting through private messaging, status updates, group discussions and even comments (Cionea et al., 2017). The main focus of this study if to analyze the influence of different comments conditions, in one’s personality and behavior.

Online comments have become an important topic in society since they are now part of our daily life. People tend to express their thoughts and statements through comments, some in a civil manner but also others in an aggressive and disrespectful way, against an individual or a group (Weber et al., 2020). These comments can therefore affect an individual’s behavior and even expectations about themselves. According to Weber et al. (2020), other user’s comments may even alter the perception of issues, attitude change and negative emotions. Today, most of individual’s actions are based on a desire to obtain social approval from others, meaning that the individual will match the behavior to the response of others. It has been proved that conformity is an online behavior that is directly influenced by other’s feedback, also known as comments, resulting in a shift on one’s online setting preference when faced with other’s comments (Colliander, 2019).

Different comments on Facebook can directly affect and individual’s perception of who they are and their beliefs, having the ability as well to influence one’s behavior, even outside of the media platform. In a particular study, Kim and Kim (2019), showed that comments, depending on the communication style, have effects on an individual’s attitude and reasoning evaluation. Especially, individuals who are exposed to uncivil comments ended up with greater levels of negative emotions, resulting in a significant difference in attitude towards new information. These relates to our study because they provided an insight into how comments sections and social media environment, provides a space for people to share their thoughts and form their attitude, by discussing with others.

Exposure to comments not only influence people in a negative way, but it can also be a positive influence into one’s personality and behavior. Posting polite comments is a way of avoiding disrespectful and rude content, even though the truth is not being said. A study performed by Spottswood and Hancock (2016), a sample of Facebook users were chosen to examinate how a positive face concern affects prosocial lying in public and private Facebook content. This study found that being concerned for another’s positive face encourages users to post positively messages about and to each other on Facebook. The most people understand the need to avoid rudeness, the better we will understand how human communication is influenced by social norms, online communication, or interaction, and unconscious influences from other’s comments.

To get some insight into how Facebook rudeness affects an individual, we designed a study that shows how other people’s different comments condition influence an individual’s personality and behavior. Participants in this particular study are FIU students, and they were asked to look at stranger’s comments on their own post. Depending on the comment that was presented, participant fell in one of three conditions, where they would either feel influenced, not influenced, or average influenced.

Our hypothesis was that participants in the condition for influenced would score higher in negative behaviors engagement than participants in the not influenced and average influenced condition, so they would agree more with negative statements such as: “Everyone is rude”, or “I won’t be accessing Facebook again”, while disagreeing more with positive statements. On the other hand, participants in the not influenced condition would score higher in positive behaviors, as they would agree with positive statements as: “I’ll keep interacting on Facebook” or “People are really nice in social media” and disagree more with negative statements when compare to those in the influenced and average influenced condition.

References

Spottswood, E. L., & Hancock, J. T. (2016). The positivity bias and prosocial deception on facebook. Computers in Human Behavior, 65, 252–259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.08.019

Colliander, J. (2019). “This is fake news”: Investigating the role of conformity to other users’ views when commenting on and spreading disinformation in social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 97, 202–215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.03.032

Weber, M., Viehmann, C., Ziegele, M., & Schemer, C. (2020). Online Hate Does Not Stay Online – How Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Mediate the Effect of Civil Negativity and Hate in User Comments on Prosocial Behavior. Computers in Human Behavior, 104, 106192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106192

Cionea, I. A., Piercy, C. W., & Carpenter, C. J. (2017). A profile of arguing behaviors on Facebook. Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 438–449. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.08.009

De keersmaecker, J., & Roets, A. (2017). ‘Fake news’: Incorrect, but hard to correct. The role of cognitive ability on the impact of false information on social impressions. Intelligence, 65, 107–110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2017.10.005

Kim, Y., & Kim, Y. (2019). Incivility on Facebook and political polarization: The mediating role of seeking further comments and negative emotion. Computers in Human Behavior, 99, 219–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.05.022