Being Authentic vs. Pleasing Others: Adolescents’ Selective Self-Presentation on Social Media

• In Event: 1-165 - Individual Differences in Adolescents’ use of Communication Technology

Integrative Statement

Selective self-presentation, exhibiting “aspects of the self in a controlled and socially desirable fashion” (Walther, 2007, p. 2329), is pervasive during adolescence, when youth aim to attain peer approval, status, and recognition (Sussman et al., 1994). Social media have supplied a new context that intensifies self-presentation concerns and provides easily accessible social status information (i.e., number of followers, likes, etc.). Through affordances such as visualness, social media foster peer norms stressing the importance of physical attractiveness and compelling adolescents to post interesting, likable, and attractive images (Lenhart, Smith, Anderson, Duggan, & Perrin, 2015; Nesi, Choukas-Bradley, & Prinstein, 2018; Yau & Reich, 2018). To examine selective self-presentation behavior ¬–a common, but understudied phenomenon¬– we explored adolescents’ motives for posting, deleting, and censoring on social media with particular attention to differences between gender, heavy and sporadic users, and social media platforms.
Using semi-structured interviews with an ethnically diverse sample of 29 U.S. 9th grade students (48% female; 14% African American, 21% Asian American, 52% European American, 3% Latino/a, 3% multi-ethnic), we asked how they decide what to post, what they delete, and what they considered posting, but then decided not to post. Using an iterative coding process (Saldana, 2016), transcripts were coded first by recognizing emerging themes and then broken down into specific codes (see Table 1).
When deciding what to post, heavy social media users generally gave other-focused reasons (see Table 1 & 2): posting major events to appear interesting to others (e.g., vacation photo with mountains in background), consulting others before posting (e.g., “friend said I should post it”), for entertaining others (e.g., “others will find it funny”), or aesthetically pleasing photos. Comparatively, sporadic users provided more self-focused reasons: posting a major event because they were “proud of it”, appearance (i.e., looked good in photo), and memory storage (e.g., to remember information for later). Girls were more likely to be heavy users and other-focused whereas boys tended to be more sporadic users and gave self-focused reasons.
Reasons for deletion and censorship did not differ across levels of social media use, but heavy users deleted and censored more than sporadic users. The most common reason for deletion was because the photo was out-of-date or no longer represented them (e.g., old photo of teen or posted when younger). For censorship, most participants decided not to post something to avoid or manage conflict (e.g. “it would have been insensitive or mean to say”).
Selective self-presentation varied by platform and audience. Teens experienced pressure to please others, delete, and censor more on Instagram compared to Snapchat. Teens were more likely to be authentic and care less about others on social media that had fewer followers¬– most of whom were close friends.

Authors

• Angela Calvin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• B. Bradford Brown, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author