1. Psychster Inc.
Psychster Labs Presents
Robert Wilson
Washington University in St. Louis
Facebook in the Social Sciences:
What do we know and where do we go?
6.22.2012 webinar hosted by: Contact our speaker:
David C. Evans Ph.D. david@psychster.com Robert Wilson robertwilson@go.wustl.edu
Psychster Inc. facebookinthesocialsciences.org
psychster.com
@Psychster

2. facebook.com
901 million monthly active users
125 billion friend connections
300 million photos uploaded per day
80% of our monthly active users are
outside the U.S. and Canada.
3500+ employees
Valued at about $100 billion Psychster Inc.

3. Purpose of today’s talk…
“The biggest challenges
Facebook has to solve are
the same challenges
[faced by] the social
sciences”
-Cameron Marlow
Head of FB Data Team
What has empirical research in the
social
sciences discovered about Facebook?
MIT Technology Review
Psychster Inc.

4. REVIEW OF THE FACEBOOK LITERATURE
Conducted with Sam Gosling and Lindsay Graham
This is the first major review of the Facebook literature
Wilson, R.E., Gosling, S.D., & Graham, L.T. (2012). A review of
Facebook research in the social sciences. Perspectives in
Psychological Science, 7(3), 203 - 220
Psychster Inc.

5. To be included as relevant in our
final review, a source must have:
1. specifically investigated Facebook
2. been published in a peer-reviewed
academic journal or peer-reviewed
conference proceedings
3. reported empirical findings
Psychster Inc.

6. Cartoon by Randall Munroe Psychster Inc.

7. Who studies Facebook?
• Scholars of law, economics, sociology,
and psychology, to information
technology, management, marketing,
and computer-mediated
communication.
• A large international presence
• In short….everyone is trying to better
understand the impact of Facebook
Psychster Inc.

8. Why study Facebook?
1. Behavior residue leaves concrete,
observable data.
2. To understand contemporary society, social
scientists must study Facebook.
3. Necessary to carefully examine the positive
and negative effects of Facebook on
society.
Psychster Inc.

9. Psychster Inc.

10. 900 450
Users and Articles: Totals by Year
800 412 400
22,000 commercial
organizations allowed to join
700 350
FB expands to add high
school networks
Total Users (millions)
600 300
Total # of Articles
FB expands to Anyone over 13 yrs
Stanford, Columbia, with an email allowed
500 250
and Yale to join
articles
800 college 226
400 networks allowed 200
to join
300 Feb, 2004: 150
FB founded
at Harvard 138
200 100
70
100 50
0 1 9 22
0 0
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
LAUNCH FB Wall FB Photos FB Mobile, FB FB in Spanish, Introduction Launch of Launch of
DATE OF News Feed, Platform French, and of the ‘Like’ FB Places Timeline
FEATURES: and API and Video German. button and and video
Launch of FB FB Payments calling
Connect
Psychster Inc.

11. 5 Key questions
1. Who is using Facebook and what are users
doing while on Facebook?
2. Why do people use Facebook?
3. How are people presenting themselves on
Facebook?
4. How is Facebook affecting relationships
among groups and individuals?
5. Why are people disclosing personal
information on Facebook despite potential
risks?
Psychster Inc.

12. Psychster Inc.

13. Who is using Facebook and what are
users doing while on Facebook?
Facebook Stats:
 average user has 130 friends
 contributes 90 pieces of content per
month
 connected to an average of 80
community pages, groups, and
events
http://newsroom.fb.com/ Psychster Inc.

14. Facebook Data Team
• 12 person team of in-house researchers
• Have full access to the anonymized web logs of all Facebook users
• They plan on doubling their staff this year
MIT Technology Review,
Psychster Inc.
Facebook Data Team

15. Facebook Data Team
2 recent studies with the
Universita degli Studi di Milano
N = 721 million users, 69 billion
friendships
(a) 92% of users were connected by only four degrees of
separation
(b) researchers found a curvilinear, highly skewed
distribution such that 20% of users had fewer than 25
friends, 50% of users had over 100 friends, and a small
percentage of people had close to 5,000 friends
(c) the average number of Facebook friends in the United
States was 214 Psychster Inc.

16. Research Methods
1) Recruitment of participants in offline
contexts
2) Recruitment of participants via
Facebook applications
3) Data crawling of public info
Ninety-seven (24%) of the 412 articles in our review
focused on descriptive analysis of Facebook users
Psychster Inc.

17. Demographic Findings
• n = 77,954
• In the U.S., the
breakdown of
ethnicities on Facebook has grown more
diverse over time and currently mirrors the
proportions represented in the U.S. population
Chang, Rosenn, Backstrom, & Marlow, 2010
Psychster Inc.
http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/?p=1011

18. Demographic Findings
Top 5 countries
- U.S. (155 million)
- Indonesia (36.6 million)
- U.K. (29.8 million)
- India (25.5 million)
- Turkey (28.4 million)
Carmichael, 2011
For a breakdown of users by continent, see
www.internetworldstats.com/facebook. htm). Psychster Inc.

19. 2. Why do people use
Facebook?
Seventy-eight (19%) articles examined what motivates
people
to use Facebook.
Psychster Inc.

20. To keep in touch with friends?
Weak verses strong ties
Social grooming?
=?
Psychster Inc.

21. Minimizing loneliness?
 It’s complex
 Active verses passive FB use
Burke et al., 2010
Wise, Alhabash, & Park, 2010
Psychster Inc.

22. Relieve boredom?
Facebook use remained high regardless
of how busy people were
Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert, 2009
Psychster Inc.

23. What motivates people to contribute
content?
Internal motives and external influence
54% of interactions between pairs of
users who interact infrequently were
directly attributable to Facebook’s
birthday reminder feature
Viswanath et al., 2009
Psychster Inc.

24. 3. How are people presenting themselves on
Facebook?
Fifty (12%) of the articles in our review
investigated identity presentation
Identity presentation centers on the user
profile
Psychster Inc.

25. Are users presenting
themselves accurately on
Facebook?
Researchers tested whether profiles represented
idealized virtual identities or accurate portrayals of the
users’ personalities
Strangers’ ratings of participants based solely on the
participants’ user profiles were compared with an
accuracy criterion and with participants’ ideal-self
ratings.
Takeaway: Facebook profiles convey fairly accurate
personality impressions of profile owners
Gosling, Gaddis, & Vazire, 2007
Psychster Inc.
Back et al., 2010

26. Why might people present themselves
accurately?
1) Friendships usually start offline
2) People generally want to be seen by
others as they see themselves
3) Contributions by others is difficult to
control
Psychster Inc.

27. But might some people self-enhance?
What about narcissists?
Can you spot the self-enhancer?
Buffardi & Campbell, 2008
Psychster Inc.

28. Content contribution by others
A curvilinear relationship exists between a
user’s number of friends and observers’
ratings of the user’s attractiveness and
extraversion
 the attractiveness of the people leaving
posts on a user’s wall affected impressions
of the user
Walther, Van Der Heide, Hamel, & Shulman, 2009 Psychster Inc.

29. How is Facebook affecting relationships
among groups and individuals?
Research on social interactions was
studied frequently, in 112 (27%) articles.
Positive and negative impacts between:
Student-faculty; employee-management;
business-customer; doctor-patient; ect.
Psychster Inc.

30. Impact for business-customer
relationship
FB involvement shown to increase customer
activity
FB gives businesses instant customer
feedback
Dholakia & Durham, 2010
Pantano, Tavernise, & Viassone, 2010
Psychster Inc.

31. Impact for student-faculty relationship
 Students predicted a positive classroom
environment and high motivation when a teacher
shared more personal information on his or her
Facebook profile page
 But other literature warns of being seen as “creepy”
 only 4% of users’ wall posting refer to
education, and the vast majority of students report not
contacting university staff for any reason
 A thorough review of this area exists (Hew, 2011)
Lipka, 2007; Madge, Meek, Wellens, & Hooley, 2009 ;
Mazer, Murphy, & Simonds, 2009; Selwyn, 2009 Psychster Inc.

32. Impact for business-employee relationship
Evaluating job candidates on Facebook?
Employers can inadvertently learn about a
candidate’s marital status, age, and other off-
limits info
These are topics that are not legal bases for
hiring decisions according to equal
opportunity laws in the United States
Karl, Peluchette, & Schlaegel, 2010a, 2010b; Kluemper & Rosen, 2009 Psychster Inc.

33. Impact for business-employee
relationship
Some applicants are judged with disproportionate
severity when they post inappropriate material.
Ex. females typically judged more harshly
Takeaways:
a) Don’t post inappropriate material on
FB
b) Employers may be open to
discrimination lawsuits
Psychster Inc.

34. Tension across social spheres
on FB?
Users’ friends on Facebook often include
overlapping social groups
(e.g., family, friends, employers)
Does this overlap cause tension?
Users implement a number of strategies to
mitigate tension
Lampinen et al., 2009 Psychster Inc.

35. 5. Why are people disclosing personal
information on Facebook despite potential
risks?
Research on privacy and personal
information disclosure was the focus of 75
articles (18%) in our review.
Facebook is only as good as the content
that users share
Motivation to promote sharing
 Balanced with concern for privacy
Psychster Inc.

36. Privacy perception studies
 Over 50% of participants provided their current address
and 40% of participants provided their phone number, but
only a handful of individuals changed the highly permissive
privacy settings
 Awareness of privacy and security issues had increased
over time
 But a disparity between users’ privacy concerns and
behavior
Ex. 16% of respondents who reported being “very worried”
about the possibility that a stranger knew where they lived
and the location of their classes still revealed both pieces of
information on their Facebook profile
Acquisti & Gross, 2006 Psychster Inc.

37. The privacy paradox
Privacy concerns were primarily determined by the
perceived likelihood of a privacy violation and
much less by the expected damage
Privacy concerns and disclosure were not
negatively correlated, suggesting that they may not
be two ends of the same spectrum but
independent behaviors influenced by different
aspects of personality
Krasnova, Kolesnikova, & Guenther, 2009; Christofides et al., 2009;
McKnight, Lankton, & Tripp, 2011 Psychster Inc.

38. The privacy paradox
An influence of social learning on
information disclosure
New members were closely monitoring and
adapting to what their friends were doing
and that the experiences in the first 2 weeks
predicted long-term sharing.
Psychster Inc.

39. CONCLUSIONS
1. Who is using Facebook and what are users
doing while on Facebook?
2. Why do people use Facebook?
3. How are people presenting themselves on
Facebook?
4. How is Facebook affecting relationships
among groups and individuals?
5. Why are people disclosing personal
information on Facebook despite potential
risks?
Psychster Inc.

40. Continuing Research
Facebook represents a fundamental shift in
the role of the Internet in daily life
Research has been revealing but much
remains to be discovered
We are maintaining a website that provides
researchers with a rolling bibliography of
Facebook articles.
Facebookinthesocialsciences.org Psychster Inc.

41. Useful Links
Bibliography of social networking sites - maintained by danah boyd:
http://www.danah.org/researchBibs/sns.php
Facebook Data Team website: http://www.facebook.com/data
FB Data Team’s most recent publications.
http://www.facebook.com/data/app_190322544333196
The Facebook Project – A great general resource site
http://www.thefacebookproject.com/about/index.html
Internet Research Ethics - A resource on best practice internet research
methods and ethical considerations: http://internetresearchethics.org/
World distribution stats of Facebook users:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm
Psychster Inc.

42. Robert Wilson
Thank you! Washington University in St. Louis
Info:
http://facebookinthesocialsciences.org/
Paper:
Your school library or
http://pps.sagepub.com/content/7/3/203
Recording:
http://psychster.com
Psychster Labs:
info@psychster.com
@Psychster Psychster Inc.