Understanding Digital Hoarding Behaviors of Social Media Users from a Stress Coping Perspective

Despite the information value brought by social media, the abundance of information on social media also contributes to digital hoarding. However, the underlying mechanisms about how digital hoarding behaviors in the social media context are formed has not been well studied. Thus, capturing the unique features of social media, this study tries to explore the impacts of information characteristics on digital hoarding from a stress coping perspective. Specifically, we identify three key information characteristics of social media namely information narrowing, information redundancy and information overload, and proposes that these information characteristics affect digital hoarding through two key cognitive appraisals namely perceived value uncertainty and cognitive load. Further, individuals\u27 information-seeking self-efficacy is proposed to moderate the relationship between cognitive appraisals and digital hoarding. A survey was administered to examine the proposed research model. The theoretical and practical implications are thoroughly examined and discussed finally