The Buckingham

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Sam Gosling, a psychology professor at University of Texas at Austin, has discovered that using the means of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, can be just as convenient as studying Psych 101 students.  Gosling has discovered that people have more of the tendency of expressing their real personalities on social media networks rather than idealized versions of themselves.

“We no longer have the excuse of relying on self-reports of undergraduates,” Gosling say. “We can now reach out to other groups and see the actual electronic traces of their behavior.”

Melissa Lee Phillips of the American Psychological Association reports Gosling’s research and the negatives of using social media as a part of research.  Phillips discusses the most popular issue of social media first; privacy and confidentiality.  The argument is that using a bit of information from Facebook could bring into question of the author’s consent. However, according to Emily Christofides, a social psychology PhD candidate at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, the information you post on facebook is “technically publicly available.” Another snag regarding privacy and confidentiality is after gathering consent, there still can be the issue of researching a friend profile of the author that did not allow permission for their content to be used.

Accessing Data is another problem for researchers when using social media in their studies.  Phillips centers on Facebook for this particular topic and how it’s terms of service aren’t as accessible for researchers. But they’ve found ways around it. For instance, creating a page and having study participants like it so they can look into their profiles and gathering access by asking “study participants to download summaries of their own data.”

It’s become more apparent that gathering information automatically is the better way to gather information as social media sites have the right to change their software and conditions overnight. Gosling comments, “A study of Facebook a year ago is no longer relevant to what Facebook can do now. Researchers need to be aware that, without warning, their research can be derailed.”

Demographics in social media can also tamper with studies in research as they change constantly, but it can help the study of human behavior as studies have shown that teenagers stop using facebook as frequently when their parents join, and jealousy increases in relationships when both partners have facebook. Studies of human behavior through social media have also increased with smart phones using social media as major components in their software.

Gosling says, “We can find out what people are doing, where they go and why, how they communicate, what music they listen to, what emails they send, what they’re interested in, what they take photos of,” he says. “With addition of smartphones, social media uses for psychologists are going to explode.”

Dr. David Rand of Harvard University discovered that “complex social networks encourage their members to be friendlier and more cooperative, with the possible payoff coming in an expanded social sphere; selfish behavior can lead to an individual being shunned from the group and left – literally.”

Janice Wood, Associate News Editor of Psych Central reports on Rand’s research that examines social interaction as a “fluid, and ever-changing process.” In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Rand discovers that this new approach is the “closest scientists have come to describe the way the planet’s 7 billion inhabitants interact daily.”

This particular research has led to the discovery of people being much nicer and friendlier to others because they have more control of who and what they’re interacting with. This is what Rand and his colleagues consider the deep relationship between cooperation and social networks.

Co-author and sociology professor Dr. Nicholas Christakis says, “Cooperation is a fascinating topic. We found that if you allow people to rewire their social networks, cooperation persists in the population. I believe this paper is the first to show, empirically, how that relationship works. As humans, we do two unique things: We re-shape the social world around us, and in so doing, we create a better place for ourselves by being nice to each other.”

Rand constructed an extensive study involving 800 volunteers, who were broken into groups of 20 and 30.  The study was set up as a game to allow each player to start off with the same number of points, but then later asked to make the decision to be generous to give out points to anyone that they made a connection with.  The study showed that people that acted more generously were the ones who were given more points instead of the people who acted selfishly. This study also showed that the volunteers that remained selfish became twice as likely to become generous after being “shunned” from the group. This helps further the idea of cooperation remaining high within social networks.

“As a result, when you have a network that’s dynamic, you see stable, high levels of cooperation, whereas in a static network you see a steady breakdown of cooperation,” Rand says.