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Getting Acquainted with Groups and Individuals: Information Seeking, Social Uncertainty and Social Network Sites

Getting Acquainted with Groups and Individuals: Information Seeking, Social Uncertainty and Social Network Sites

This video was recorded at 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Boston 2013. This study examined whether the relationship between information-seeking and social uncertainty differed when information was sought about a specific individual (e.g. a new housemate) or a group (e.g. a group of new housemates). An online experiment recruited 488 first-year undergraduates in the weeks immediately before starting a new university. Four information-seeking strategies (Ramirez, Walther, Burgoon & Sunnafrank, 2002) successfully modeled how students sought information about each other using Social Network Sites. Whereas an interactive strategy predicted lower social uncertainty about individuals than groups, a passive strategy predicted higher social uncertainty for indi- viduals and lower social uncertainty for groups. Findings are discussed in the context of impression formation, specif- ically Entitativity (Hamilton & Sherman, 1995).

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