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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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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Tuesday March 20 2018, @09:30PM (5 children)

    That some people have more money than sense.

    Advice I received 25 years ago:
    "Don't put anything in email/on the internet that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of your local newspaper*"

    I took that advice and have no need for a "curated" online social image.

    George Carlin definitely had it right [goodreads.com].

    *This was back when local newspapers still existed.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 20 2018, @09:48PM (4 children)

    Yeah, it's really much cheaper and easier just to be the person you want projected. Plus you almost never have to apologize.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday March 20 2018, @10:17PM (3 children)

      Yeah, it's really much cheaper and easier just to be the person you want projected. Plus you almost never have to apologize.

      Amen to that, brother. This shit ain't rocket surgery.

      Better yet, just be the person you are and let the chips fall where they may. With the caveat that if/when you have interests/desires/peccadilloes that you don't want projected into the public sphere -- just don't project them into the public sphere.

      Easy peasy.

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr