Online social regulation: When everyday diplomatic skills of harmonious disagreement break down

DOI

In group discussions, people rely on everyday diplomatic skills to socially regulate the interaction, maintain harmony, and avoid escalation. This article compares social regulation in online and face-to-face (FtF) groups. It studies the micro-dynamics of online social interactions in response to disagreements. Thirty-two triads discussed, in a repeated measures design, controversial topics via text-based online chat and FtF. The fourth group member was a confederate who voiced a deviant (right-wing) opinion. Results show that online interactions were less responsive and less ambiguous compared with FtF discussions. This affected participants’ social attributions: they felt their interaction partners ignored them and displayed disinhibited behavior. This also had relational consequences: participants experienced polarization and less solidarity. These results offer a new perspective on the process of online polarization: this might not be due to changes in individual psychology (e.g., disinhibition), but to misattributions of online behavior.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/KGDVLV
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmaa011
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/KGDVLV
Provenance
Creator Roos, Carla ORCID logo; Koudenburg, Namkje ORCID logo; Postmes, Tom ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Digital Competence Centre
Publication Year 2022
Rights CC0 Waiver; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact Digital Competence Centre (University of Groningen)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/csv; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet; application/x-spss-sav
Size 118526; 146292; 67839; 137110
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences