Adolescent Norm Enforcement on Social Media

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Adolescents and emerging adults spend a significant portion of their time interacting online. Does peer interaction online affect social judgments? Given that much of their social interaction takes place online, it is important to understand how adolescents and emerging adults understand online social rules on social media.

Current Social Domain Theory research provides insight into how individuals use domains of social reasoning to interpret in-person social situations. The theory suggests that judgements of moral violations are less likely to be affected by social norms than conventional violations, yet more research is needed to see if online social norms work similarly.

The current study seeks to examine age and domain differences in responses to moral, conventional, and multifaceted violations in a social media setting, with varying peer norms of majority-criticizing or majority-supportive of the violation. We attempted to mimic online interactions by asking participants to judge comments on Instagram posts.

There are three sets of hypothetical Instagram posts involving three domain situations: (a) conventional, (b) multifaceted, and (c) moral. Within each of the sets there are two situations reflecting majority-criticizing or majority-supportive peer comments. The race of users in the posts will be approximately matched to the race of the participant to ensure that participants feel part of the in-group and make judgements as such.

Participants will be asked to (1)rate how acceptable one criticizing peer comment is on a post and (2)rate how acceptable the same comment would be if made in-person.

We expect adolescents and emerging adults will consider the domain of the post when they judge others’ criticizing comments. Across ages, we expect that participants will approve of comments that criticize moral violations.

Judgments of others’ criticizing comments are expected to be affected by the content of previous peer comments; however, this effect is only expected for posts describing conventional and multifaceted violations. We do not expect social norms to affect moral judgments.

Judgments about violations of multifaceted challenges to parent rules are expected to differ by age groups, with adolescents being more encouraging of challenges to parent rules than emerging adults in their judgments of others’ comments. We do not expect age differences for moral violations.

It is expected that participants will judge criticizing peer comments as more acceptable in all domains online than in a face-to-face situation.

Repeated measures analyses of variance will be conducted, with age as a between subject variable and domain and norms as repeated measures variables and judgements of criticizing peer comments and judgements of criticizing peer comments made in-person as dependent variables.

Data collection will begin October 2020 and analyses have not yet been completed. Data collection is expected to be completed between October 2020 and January 2021. Data analysis is planned for February 2021. Because the data collection is all online, we are confident it will be complete in the next few months.

The current study has been preregistered on the OSF (https://osf.io/6n43d/?view_only=1e9464c3cb9c4c239d2e96fefff333aa). Materials have already been made available. Raw data will be made available once data collection is complete.

Authors

• Ryanne N Schaad, Saint Joseph’s University
  Presenting Author

• Clare E Conry-Murray, Saint Joseph’s University
  Non-Presenting Author