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The prevalence of technology-based activities in the lives of individuals is raising increasing attention on the possible effects they may have on individuals’ emotions and feelings. Specifically, the ubiquitous human interaction through social network sites (SNS) is expected to affect one’s subjective well-being, a construct that relates to people’s evaluation of their lives. These evaluations include emotional reactions to events, moods, and judgments they form about their life satisfaction and fulfillment (Diener et al., 2003).
While the active contribution of SNS content can have positive aspects (Boughzala, 2016; Carlson et al., 2016; Verduyn et al., 2015), there is increasing evidence for the negative relationship between viewing social network sites and well-being (Krasnova et al., 2015; Labrague, 2014; Pantic et al., 2012; Shaw et al., 2015; Smith & Kim, 2007; Tandoc et al., 2015; Verduyn et al., 2015). For example, it has been suggested that excessive use of social media sites can result in strong pathological and maladaptive psychological dependency on social media (Turel & Serenko, 2012) and a tendency to discontinue interactions (Turel, 2015). It has also been shown that online social networks use can be linked with perceived loneliness (Matook et al., 2015) and that envy plays a significant role in SNS use (Krasnova et al., 2015). Overall, given the range of possible effects related to SNS, different individuals may have different emotions and feelings associated with the use of social networks (Krasnova et al., 2015). These feelings may be termed social networks affective well-being (SNAWB), and in this research, we ask how one’s SNAWB affects his/her decision behavior online.
Theory related to emotion and action suggests that similarities in emotional structure may trigger similarities in action tendencies (Frijda, 1987). This means that when an arbitrary system renders its users to (subconsciously) build an emotional structure similar to that of social networks, actions in that environment may also be moderated by the user’s SNAWB. This may be true even if the purpose and nature of the system or site is unrelated to social networks (which we term a non-SNS site).
Accordingly, in this research, we analyze whether the visual design of a non-SNS site may trigger SNS related emotions due to subtle visual design similarities (which we term design cues) and whether decisions made in that environment are biased and influenced by the SNAWB of the interacting users. In two experiments, we test whether similarities in visual design render SNAWB relevant in decision making, and how that emotional process takes place.
Our two experiments are designed to analyze the extent to which decision making is moderated by SNS design cues found in the non-SNS site in which the decision is made. We analyze both a decision that is primarily driven by rationality and competence (investment decision) and a decision that is more driven by affect (employment decision).
Specifically, since social network content is known to be considerably about outdoor activities and travel, that is, individuals often refer to activities (Hu et al., 2014), as well as positive portrayals of individuals (Hu et al., 2014; Krasnova et al., 2015; Lee-Won et al., 2014), the two decision sites differ in the extent to which they provide cues to positive portrayals of individuals and the outdoors as typically projected in SNS. We establish this by having the pictures of the company executive team portrayed in one site (henceforth, the SNS-triggering site) in a positive manner with an outdoor background, while the pictures of the executive team of the other site are portrayed with no SNS design cues (henceforth, the non-SNS-triggering site). Thus, the non-SNS-triggering site provides a control environment for behavior and emotion, against which we compare behavior and emotion in the SNS triggering site.