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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-appearance-of-propriety dept.

Social media provides a new environment that makes it possible to carefully edit the image you want to project of yourself. A study from Lund University in Sweden suggests that many people are prepared to pay to "filter out" unfavorable information.

Economists Håkan Holm and Margaret Samahita have investigated how we curate our social image on the web using game theory.

Previous studies have been conducted on, for example, how anonymity affects our willingness to act pro-socially, and thus our concern for social image. However, the internet and social media now make it possible to edit the image we want to project of ourselves retroactively. One can therefore expect other, -- less impulsive, mechanisms to control this behavior. The purpose of the study was therefore to better understand online behavior.

Each subject participated in a cooperative situation with an anonymous person, and the participants earned real money during the experiment. They could be "good" and cooperate a lot, which is costly, or be less cooperative, which costs less. They then found out that information about how much they actually cooperated could be published online along with their name, but that they could avoid this publication if they paid to censor the information. It turned out that those who cooperated less, valued the censorship highest which meant that information about this group's actions tended to be filtered out.

"That the image people share of themselves is 'softened' on the internet is perhaps not that surprising. What is new is that this is shown under experimental control and that the will to 'filter out' is so strong that one is prepared to pay for it," explains Håkan Holm.

Hakan J. Holm, Margaret Samahita. Curating social image: Experimental evidence on the value of actions and selfies. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2018; 148: 83 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2018.02.008


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