The Curse of Online Friends: The Detrimental Effects of Online Social Network Usage on Well-Being

In the pursuit of happiness, it has been conventionally accepted that more friends would bring us a better quality of life. However, with the advent of social networking sites, unprecedented social influence has pervaded our daily lives. Across two studies we show that even though people feel more satisfied with their lives when they view the friends added on Facebook, reading friends’ posts reduces their well-being. This is because the more friends people have on Facebook, the more ostentatious information they see. The resultant drop in life satisfaction occurs because people fail to draw a connection between the number of friends and the amount of ostentatious information. Moreover, this decrease in life satisfaction is mediated by envy. We contribute to the literature on consumer well-being by identifying a novel and ubiquitous phenomenon of making social comparisons with hundreds of people, a phenomenon that arose with the advent of social networking and was previously outside the scope of social comparison literature

When in Doubt, Elaborate?

Online consumer-generated reviews contain two types of information: core (the review itself) and auxiliary (information accompanying reviews such as details about the reviewer and the review-generating process). Prior work has focused primarily on the former, despite the latter being commonplace. In this paper, we consider how a common type of auxiliary information — disclosure statements about incentives received by reviewers — affects review persuasiveness. Disclosure likely induces uncertainty about reviewer trustworthiness, leading consumers to discount reviewers’ opinions when forming expectations about product quality. However, we show this is not always the case. Instead, the extent to which disclosing incentives affects review persuasiveness depends on whether consumers deem their disclosure-induced uncertainty to be integral or incidental to judgment formation. This occurs through a metacognitive process in which consumers elaborate on the relevance of their uncertainty. Using a field study and three experiments, we show that when disclosure-induced uncertainty about reviewer trustworthiness is deemed to be integral, product evaluations are affected by this uncertainty. However, when uncertainty is incidental to judgment formation, product evaluations are unaffected