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June 15, 2012
7 notes

Online community, from The Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology

This was a very useful chapter when I was writing about community and networks for my PhD thesis in 2009. Social Networks and Online Community, by Caroline Haythornthwaite, is a great overview of the main topics of interest in  trying to untanlge the effects of the web on our social environment.

Here are a few of my notes:

* can community exist without a geographic touchstone? Haythornthwaite argues one can “liberate community from its physical setting” by looking at the basis of community as interaction. It’s in the interactions between online community members where you see the richness and the social-emotional connotations that are implied in generic definitions of community:

Interactions such as the exchange of information and advice, social support, mutual help and provision and receipt of services can have the cumulative impact of creating trust…shared history and language and known expectations about behaviour that support the community and identify common goals.

that’s on page 121 of the Handbook.

* “community” has been under threat by industrialisation and urbanisation, leading to the decline of society (an increase in crime, decreased quality of life): 

Each new disruption in the (imagined) ideals of home and town is met with resistance and fear of the further degradation of our daily experiences.”

p.122

* here’s a very traditional definition of community from 1887 by Tonnies:

Gemeinschaft: … a collective based on strong interpersonal ties, face-to-face interaction, a shared focus and common purpose, language and identity

p. 122

* i like this:

…the emergence of community online is as much a surprise to online participants as it is to non-participants

She reminded me of Howard Rheingold’s seminal study of the WELL, an online messaging board full of the great and the good in internet history, known as the birthplace of the online community movement. He published his observations as The Virtual Community in 1993. It was the first to describe the online collectives in this way, and for this we are thankful.

She also reminded me of Ray Oldenberg’s concept of Third Places - the “great, good” environments that are inherently and uniquely neutral - like parks, cafes, etc - where interactions are playful and are locations where people across social statuses interact and co-exist.

And then, crucially, she turns to the network view of community, a kind of post-modern, perspective on connections that has emerged from a methodology that links people together based on who is connected with whom. These social network graphs have become more popular since sites like Facebook started letting people draw them: they usually reveal unexpected and fascinating collectives of people with lots of mutual friends, plus surprising interconnections that people may not have known existed until they saw the topography of their social spaces.

Specifically, this comes from Barry Wellman’s concept of “liberated” communities that are personally constructed, experienced by individuals. The social, he argues, is essentially subjective. Haythornthwaite is a disciple of Wellman; they are both at the University of Toronto, but she also believes in the group collective notion of community. She describes technologically-facilitated liberated communities thus:

…an external view of lost, local community does not need to translate into an individual lacking in community. As the time of the early studies, contacts were found to be maintained across distance by telephone calls and visiting by car and place. Means of contact now include the full range of CMC, as well as the ubiquitous cell phone and continued travel bty car and plane. Indeed, community is now so liberated that it can be reinforced nearly anywhere at anytime with mobile computing and phone communication.


page 125. emphasis added


A great chapter. Citation:

Haythornthwaite, C. (2007). Social Networks and Online Community. In A. Joinson, K. McKenna, T. Postmes and U. Reips (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology, Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Tags: untanglingtheweb untangling the web UTTW uttwthebook guardian observer community academic psychology research

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April 24, 2012
"..all societies see death as a transition for the person who dies. How people prepare themselves for this transition and how the survivors behave after a death has occurred varies a great deal but even here there are common themes…Crying, fear and anger are so common as to be virtually ubiquitous and most cultures provide social sanction for the expression of these emotions in the funeral rites and customs of mourning which follow bereavement…Western cultures, which tend to discourage the over expression of emotion at funerals, are highly deviant."

—

from Parkes, C.M., Laungani, P. and Young, B. (1997). Death and Bereavement Across Cultures. Psychology Press: Hove, UK. 

And a nice reality check for Modern (Wo)Man:

Each generation and each society has come up with its own solutions to the problem of death and has enshrined them in a complex web of beliefs and customs which, at first glance, seem so diverse as to be impossible to digest. Yet there are common themes that run through all of them.

Let’s see how they present themselves on the web then, shall we?

The authors of this edited volume are psychiatrists, and highly respected in the field of grief and bereavement.

Tags: UTTW death guardian observer psychology untangling the web untanglingtheweb uttwthebook uttw

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February 16, 2012
3 notes
"Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn’t be caught."

—

Online, Anonymity Breeds Contempt. A historical perspective on anonymity from an article on internet trolling on NYT.com in 2010.

BUT! Anonymity isn’t the only issue. Here’s a report from The Guardian in 2007 including this quote from Dr Chris Fullwood, “internet researcher”:

Removing anonymity may have some small effect, but not a massive one. This is because a number of factors contribute towards what psychologists call online disinhibition. Removing one of them - the anonymity - and not removing any of the others means it will probably still occur as people remain invisible and so can disassociate their online from their offline persona.

(note many of the links in the guardian article are broken/old!)

Tags: uttw untanglingtheweb untangling the web uttwthebook observer guardian nyt hate identity online disinhibition effect psychology anonymity

Link
October 12, 2011
25 notes
People develop feelings of ownership for a variety of objects, material and immaterial in nature. We refer to this state as psychological ownership. Building upon and extending prior scholarship we offer a conceptual examination of this construct. After defining psychological ownership, we address “why” it exists and "how" it comes into being. We propose that this state finds its roots in a set of intra-individual motives (efficacy and effectance, self-identity, and having a place to dwell). In addition, we discuss the experiences that give rise to psychological ownership and propose several positive and negative consequences of this state. Our work provides a foundation for the development of a comprehensive theory of psychological ownership and the conceptual underpinnings for empirical testing.

Pierce, J.L., Kostova, T. & Dirks, K.Y. (2003, Mar). The state of psychological ownership: integrating and extending a century of research. Review of General Psychology, Vol 7(1): 84-107

(full text)

This article attempts to integrate an enormous body of research throughout history, including social psychology, child development, consumer behaviour, cross-cultural psychology, sociology and demography and workplace psychology. A mean feat.

Here are a few choice quotes:

Etzioni writes that ownership is a “dual creation, part attitude, part object, part in the mind, part ‘real’” (1991: 466)

On the particular context of “ownership”:

There is diverse literature that suggests that the psychology of possession is well rooted in people socialized by a Western heritage.

emphasis added

There are notions of “possessions as part of the extended self”:

Mann writes, “What I own feels like a part of me” (1991: 211). Sartre (1943/1969), in his treatise on “being and nothingness,” notes that “to have” (along with “to do” and “to be”) is one of the three categories of human existence and that “the totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being … I am what I have … What is mine is myself” (p. 591-592). 

On ownership of non-physical objects:

While ownership is generally experienced as involving person-object relations, it can also be felt toward non-physical entities such as ideas, words, artistic creations, and other people. Isaacs (1933), for example, observed feelings of ownership among children towards nursery rhymes and songs —they were ‘theirs’ if they heard them first and no one else had a right to sing or hear them without their permission.

They outline three senses of ownership in their definition:

Psychological ownership answers the question –“What do I feel is mine?” and its conceptual core is a sense of possession (Wilpert, 1991) towards a particular target (e.g., the products of one’s labor, toys, home, land, significant others). Second, psychological ownership reflects a relationship between an individual and an object (material or immaterial in nature) in which the object is experienced as having a close connection with the self.

Third, the state of psychological ownership (i.e., mine-ness and/or our-ness)… is a condition, of which one is aware through intellectual perception. It reflects an individual’s awareness, thoughts, and beliefs regarding the target of ownership. This cognitive state, however, is coupled with an emotional or affective sensation. Feelings of ownership are said to be pleasure producing per se

emphasis added.

They distinguish between psychological and legal ownership (although admit that they are possibly related):

legal ownership is recognized foremost by society, and hence the rights that come with ownership are specified and protected by the legal system. In contrast, psychological ownership is recognized foremost by the individual who holds this feeling. Consequently, it is the individual who manifests the felt rights associated with psychological ownership. 

Furthermore, psychological ownership can exist in the absence of legal ownership, as noted by Furby (1980), Isaacs (1933), and Etzioni (1991), among others. Finally, people can legally own an object (e.g., automobile, home), yet never claim the possession as their own -“it never seems to belong to me” (McCracken, 1986: 79). According to McCracken (1986), under these conditions the individual simply fails to claim the object as ‘theirs’ because they do not find personal meaning in the object’s symbolic properties, a necessary precondition for the experience and claiming something as ‘mine’.

Interestingly, their list of “satisfactions” attributed to ownership reflects the research covered in last week’s column, “home”:

Porteous (1976) offered that there are three satisfactions which derive from ownership: (1) control over space per se; (2) personalization of space as an assertion of identity; and, (3) stimulation (achieved, for example, by thinking about, using, improving, or defending one’s possessions/territory). It has also been argued (e.g., Ardrey, 1966; Duncan, 1981; Porteous, 1976; Weil, 1952) that possessions help create ‘a place,’ symbolically captured by the concept of ‘home,’ and its capacity to provide the individual with a context in which to dwell, a sense of psychic comfort, pleasure and security (cf. Dreyfus, 1991; Heidegger, 1967; Steiner, 1978).

There are two camps in the origins of ownership debate which divide roughly into the “nature” vs “nurture” debate: the biological faction argue that we have an innate need for possession driven by our requirements for security, food and reproduction (evidence: animal ownership practices), whereas the social faction propose that it’s a phenomenon learned at an early age to do with control (evidence: different cultural constructions/conceptions of ownership).

They consider exclusiveness:

people have an inherent drive to gain and to defend an exclusive property. For Darling (1937, 1939), territory is in essence a psychological expression

Part of this has to do with the way that a sense of ownership emerges, which they suggest are:

controlling the ownership target (object), coming to know the target intimately, and investing the self into the target

in more detail:

the greater the amount of control a person can exercise over certain objects, the more they will be psychologically experienced as part of the self

…

psychological ownership reflects an intimate relationship or a psychological proximity of the owner to the owned

…

Sartre (1943) even suggested that buying an object was simply another form of creating an object as it too stems from the fruits of our labor. Thus, that which stems from our labor, be it our work or the widget that we make, much like our words, thoughts, and emotions are representations of the self. The most obvious and perhaps the most powerful means by which an individual invests him/herself into an object is to create it. Creation involves investing time, energy, and even one’s values and identity. “Things” are attached to the person who created them because they are his/her product, they derive their being and form from his/her efforts; hence, the individual who has created them owns them in much the same way as he/she owns him/herself (Durkheim, 1957).

On the (important) role of culture in psychological ownership:

psychological ownership is very tightly linked to the concept of self and the concept of self, in turn, is in part socially prescribed and affected by culture (cf. Erez & Early, 1993)… psychological ownership is partly ‘learned’ through socialization practices, which again are culturally determined.

…

Thus, culture is an important condition that needs to be examined to better understand the phenomenon of psychological ownership. Reflected in traditions, customs, norms, mores and beliefs in a society, culture shapes the individual’s self-concept and values with regard to control, self-identity, self-expression, ownership, and property.

emphasis added

So much more in this article. A great overview.

Tags: untanglingtheweb untangling the web uttw guardian IP ownership intellectual property academic intellectualproperty definition psychology

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August 01, 2011
13 notes
"…the phenomena of identity development and change may be understood in terms of the appropriation of shared narratives into one’s personal life story on the one hand, and the creation of new narratives or modification of existing narratives on the other."

—

Mankowski, E & Rappaport, J. (1995). Stories, Identity, and the Psychological Sense of Community. In R.S. Wyer (ed.) Advances in social cognition: the real story (221-226), Routledge.

Also interesting, on why people create their own narratives that fall outside the group’s norms:

Community and cultural narratives often fail to represent experiences that are part of an individual’s personal stories; group norms may suppress or deny these stories and the aspects of identity that they represent. Without the validation of the community or culture through storytelling, these identities may be extremely difficult to experience and maintain. Individuals may attempt to seek our new narratives to support these identities.

and on the role of art and storytelling:

If the index for a story serves as a kind of shorthand device that enables recall, or embellishment, with a great number of details that would otherwise be forgotten, then art, in its various forms (visual, performance, verbal) serves as the keeper of a society’s memory, and, in turn, its identity.

Tags: uttw untangling the web untanglingtheweb guardian story psychology storytelling identity

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May 19, 2011
13 notes
"In operant conditioning, a variable-interval schedule is a schedule of reinforcement where a response is rewarded after an unpredictable amount of time has passed. This schedule produces a slow, steady rate of response."

—

Variable Interval Schedule

So this is apparently why I obsessively check my email/twitterstream ALL THE TIME.

HT @jemimakiss, from her recent Observer article about digital detoxes.

This phenomenon can result in some magnificently bizarre behaviour. Psychologist BF Skinner described the attempts at control based on a variable-interval schedule in a classic article from 1947: ‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon (First published in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168-172).

In this article, Skinner describes the behaviour of a pigeon that was rewarded with food and water at random intervals. To make sense of this effect that had no apparent (or logical) cause that it could learn, the pigeon began to create patterns that it believed created the reward.

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior.  Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

I haven’t yet started dancing on one foot or spinning around twice to stimulate a new text message, twitter mention/DM or email, but I have integrated behavioural patterns - like checking my phone the instant I wake up or arrive at a destination - into my daily digital routine.

Tags: untangling the web untanglingtheweb uttw guardian holiday digital detox psychology b.f. skinner behaviour

Link
April 21, 2011
9 notes
Virtual Attraction: What Rocks Your Boat

Levine, D. (2000). Virtual Attraction: what rocks your boat. Cyberpsychology & Behavior. 3(4): 565-573.

I first read Levine’s paper in 2003, when I was starting my MSc in Social Psychology. It subsequently became an important part of my thinking about how relationships - romantic and platonic - are formed online. I particularly like the way she maps an existing offline romantic relationship framework on the online experience, drawing parallels between the two (thus, assuming the similarities of online and offline social experience), and explaining the differences by highlighting where the theory doesn’t match the shortcomings of computer-mediated communication.

Abstract:

Flirting online is not the same as flirting face-to-face. The beauty of the virtual medium is that flirting is based on words, charm, and seduction, not physical attraction and cues. The online world gives those people who do not fit a stereotypical model of human beauty a chance to be Don Juans and Carmen Mirandas and have an equal opportunity to be found desirable. For those considered beautiful by societal standards, it gives them a chance to be attractive to others for reasons other than their physical qualities (i.e., intellect, charm, interests, etc.). It is possible to account for the richness and depth relationships can take on via this seemingly impersonal medium by applying psychosocial theories of intimate attraction as well as describing the qualities of interpersonal interactions that take place online. Components of attraction as based on the theory of the development of face-to-face relationships are explored, and then considered in terms of how these theories hold up under a new application. Examples of stories of people who have begun relationships online are used to illustrate. Implications for future research are explored.

Full text (pdf)

her key elements of relationship formation (with my notes in parentheses):

  • proximity and frequency of contact (you’ve got to see one another regularly to form emotional bonds. Offline, this might mean the watercooler or a common class, or a similar group of friends; online, this might mean hanging out in the same environments and making people aware of you by updating your status frequently.)
  • self-presentation (this is where the web really stands out, and where it potentially falls down: you can create your Ideal Self through your text and your images, but when it comes to producing the goods face-to-face, you’d better be able to deliver.)
  • similarity (people are attracted to people they perceive to be similar to themselves; by being in a topic-based chatroom or seeing that you are connected to similar people or read similar feeds, this produces the notion of similarity online)
  • reciprocity & self-disclosure (we like people who like us back, and the more they tell us about them, the more we tell them about us: the perception of closeness and intimacy is increased online)
  • expectation and idealisation (of similarity, of attraction: self-generated based on the explicit or implict cues proffered by another person - see also Spears & Lea’s SIDE Model (1994) for the effects of anonymous environments on perceptions of similarity, and its implications for liking; also expectations and idealisation of desire)

Tags: untangling the web untanglingtheweb uttw guardian love relationship deb levine research attraction psychology

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April 20, 2011
10 notes

Interview: Professor Monica Whitty (University of Leicester)

Professor Monica Whitty is a researcher at the University of Leicester with a hefty back catalogue of books, articles and chapters about online love. I contacted her to find out about the changes she’s observed in love - from the development of relationships to infidelity - since the dawn of the Web.

Read More

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Link
April 20, 2011
12 notes
The Cyberspace Era: The Best and Worst of Times for Lovers

From Psychology Today, by Prof Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (read more of his online love posts on Psychology Today here).

He argues that the web demands that couples must make more romantic compromises. The connections made online are often accompanied by intense (but short-term) emotional spikes, and the availability of potential (attractive) others provide sufficient temptation.

Tags: untanglingtheweb untangling the web uttw guardian love relationship psychology aaron ben-ze'ev

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April 20, 2011
8 notes
"The paradox of the internet is that you have less information about each other and this ambiguity often makes love more intense."

—

How Well Should You Know Your Online Lover?

From Psychology Today, by Professor Aaron Ben-Ze’ev

Tags: untanglingtheweb untanging the web uttw guardian love relationship psychology aaron ben-ze'ev