People with lots of Facebook friends share a certain trait
People with a lot of Facebook friends share a certain trait
According to a study conducted at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, people with a large number of Facebook friends are driven by material considerations in life. They gather and collect friends as if they were physical objects.
According to a new study, materialists have significantly more friends ł on Facebook in the cf n comparison with people who ers are guided by different values in their daily lives. They treat them like possessions. They also spend a lot more time on Facebook and more often por they share their lives with the lives of other people on social networks b.
Phillip Ozimek, who led the study, proposed a new concept to explain this type of behavior on social networks. He called it the Social Online Self-Regulation Theory.
– Materialists are more likely to use Facebook because they tend to objectify their friends – they acquire them to increase their possessions. Facebook provides an excellent platform for por in the social sciences. It contains millions of profiles along with information about their owners. And it costs nothing, and materialists love free tools – Ozimek explained.
The authors conducted a study on 531 Facebook users, divided into two groups. The first group (242 subjects) was a pilot study. The study on the second group was designed to check the outcome of the in groups.
Both groups filled out questionnaires to assess how b use Facebook, how much por ing with others, how often they think of friends as objects, what benefits they can get from Facebook friends, and whether they are driven by material considerations in life. They were asked were also asked to provide the number of Facebook friends.
Zar both in the pilot group and the follow-up group, the team ł scientists discovered a correlation between a large number of Facebook friends and time spent on Facebook, the propensity to por nn of interacting with others and objectifying friends.
The researchers stressed in their paper that there is nothing wrong with how materialists use the service in social media. Some Some people just achieve their goals this way.
– The medi platforms in social non are too different from other activities in life – they are functional tools for os b, kt re willing to achieve their goals. Someone m head to ask whether Facebook consumption really makes us happy, or whether it remains just an illusion – such questions should be also the subject of future research – assessed Ozimek.
Source background: Heliyon, Science Alert, fot. CC BY-ND 2.0/Flickr/ Spencer E Holtaway
