A new paper, titled The Social Network: How Friends' Online Behavior and Belongingness Needs Influence Political Activity was recently published in Policy and Internet, and examines social influence in the decision to engage in political activities online.
Are people more likely to become more politically active through social media when they observe thattheir friends are active? Previous research has shown that an individual's likelihood of engagingpolitically is influenced by observations of how friends act through social media, but relatively little isknown about how such social influence through social media interacts with personality features. Weargue that individuals with high belongingness needs will engage in political activity if they believethat this is expected from the social groups they belong to. To evaluate this hypothesis, a surveyexperiment was designed (n=289) in Qualtrics. We had two experimental conditions (friends orextended network) in which we informed participants that the most shared or“liked”online materialamong their friends or extended network on Facebook was a specific petition. In a control condition,they were informed that they were shown a random petition. To increase the credibility of themanipulation, we asked participants to log into a fictive app that supposedly downloaded theirFacebook data. We show that individuals are more likely to engage politically if they observe that their friends have been politically active on Facebook, but only if they have high belongingness needs.
The paper is found here.