Personality-Driven Social Media Curation: How Personality Traits Affect Following Decisions on Twitter
Datum
2023-03-24
Autor:innen
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Verlag
University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
As social media occupies an increasingly important place in people’s lives, new opportunities are presented for people to select and modify their online environments. On many platforms, users have significant control over what kind of information and experiences they are exposed to. For example, on Twitter, virtually everything users see is a function of their decisions about what accounts to follow. What drives those decisions? My dissertation explores the extent to which personality is reflected in our social media environment by examining the relationship between personality traits and the accounts that users follow on Twitter. Particularly, what features of accounts influence following decisions and how personality traits of users align with characteristics of Twitter accounts. Exploring the relationship between who we are and the decisions we make online provides a better understanding of how characteristics, such as personality traits, drive the curation of our social environments.
Overall, findings indicate that personality does influence the decisions we make about which Twitter accounts to follow and in turn, how our social media environment is curated. The strength and stability of this relationship shows some heterogeneity across traits, though is generally comparable to the effect of some commonly used demographic variables. Personality traits of users also align with characteristics of Twitter accounts and moderate the effect of different Twitter profile features on our following decisions, highlighting potential psychological processes that drive following decisions. For example, extraverts want to feel connected to popular accounts and seek content on topics that lots of other people care about while Neuroticism is associated with following accounts that conform to gender and age norms. Perhaps most notably, these relationships demonstrate remarkable generalizability when tested on a set of real-world followed accounts. Though this research is a first step in exploring the influence of personality on the vast number behaviors that occur on social media, these findings establish foundational knowledge and inform future research.