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Widespread on social networking sites (SNSs), envy has been linked to an array of detrimental outcomes for users’ well-being. While envy has been considered a status-related emotion and is likely to be experienced in response to perceiving another’s higher status, there is a lack of research exploring how status perceptions influence the emergence of envy on SNSs. This is important because SNSs typically quantify social interactions and reach with metrics that indicate users’ relative rank and status in the network. To understand how status perceptions impact SNS users, we introduce a new form of metric-based digital status rooted in SNS metrics that are available and visible on a platform. Drawing on social comparison theory and status literature, we conducted an online experiment to investigate how different forms of status contribute to the proliferation of envy on SNSs. Our findings shed light on how metric-based digital status influences feelings of envy on SNSs. Specifically, we could show that metric-based digital status impacts envy through increasing perceptions of others’ socioeconomic and sociometric statuses. Our study contributes to the growing discourse on the negative outcomes associated with SNS use and its consequences for users and society.
In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird untersucht, in wie weit physikalische Experimente ein flow-Erleben bei Lernenden hervorrufen. Flow-Erleben wird als Motivationsursache gesehen und soll den Weg zu Freude und Glück darstellen. Insbesondere wegen dem oft zitierten Fachkräftemangel in naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Berufen ist eine Motivationssteigerung in naturwissenschaftlichen Unterrichtsfächern wichtig. Denn trotz Leistungssteigerungen in internationalen Vergleichstests möchten in Deutschland deutlich weniger Schüler*innen einen solchen Beruf ergreifen als in anderen Industriestaaten. Daher gilt es, möglichst früh Schüler*innen für naturwissenschaftlich-technische Fächer zu begeistern und insbesondere im regelrecht verhassten Physikunterricht flow-Erleben zu erzeugen.
Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird das flow-Erleben von Studierenden in klassischen Laborexperimenten und FELS (Forschend-Entdeckendes Lernen mit dem Smartphone) als Lernumgebung untersucht. FELS ist eine an die Lebenswelt der Schüler*innen angepasste Lernumgebung, in der sie mit Smartphones ihre eigene Lebenswelt experimentell untersuchen.
Es zeigt sich, dass sowohl klassische Laborexperimente als auch in der Lebenswelt durchgeführte, smartphonebasierte Experimente flow-Erleben erzeugen. Allerdings verursachen die smartphonebasierten Experimente kaum Stressgefühle.
Die in dieser Arbeit herausgefundenen Ergebnisse liefern einen ersten Ansatz, der durch Folgestudien erweitert werden sollte.
There are numerous situations in which people ask for something or make a request, e.g. asking a favor, asking for help or requesting compliance with specific norms. For this reason, how to ask for something in order to increase people’s willingness to fulfill such requests is one of the most important question for many people working in various different fields of responsibility such as charitable giving, marketing, management or policy making.
This dissertation consists of four chapters that deal with the effects of small changes in the decision-making environment on altruistic decision-making and compliance behavior. Most notably, written communication as an influencing factor is the focus of the first three chapters. The starting point was the question how to devise a request in order to maximize its chance of success (Chapter 1). The results of the first chapter originate the ideas for the second and third chapter. Chapter 2 analyzes how communication by a neutral third-party, i.e. a text from the experimenters that either reminds potential benefactors of their responsibility or highlights their freedom of choice, affects altruistic decision-making. Chapter 3 elaborates on the effect of thanking people in advance when asking them for help. While being not as closely related to the other chapters as the three first ones are, the fourth chapter deals as well with the question how compliance (here: compliance with norms and rules) is affected by subtle manipulations of the environment in which decisions are made. This chapter analyzes the effect of default settings in a tax return on tax compliance.
In order to study the research questions outlined above, controlled experiments were conducted. Chapter 1, which analyzes the effect of text messages on the decision to give something to another person, employs a mini-dictator game. The recipient sends a free-form text message to the dictator before the latter makes a binary decision whether or not to give part of her or his endowment to the recipient. We find that putting effort into the message by writing a long note without spelling mistakes increases dictators’ willingness to give. Moreover, writing in a humorous way and mentioning reasons why the money is needed pays off. Furthermore, men and women seem to react differently to some message categories. Only men react positively to efficiency arguments, while only women react to messages that emphasize the dictator’s power and responsibility.
Building on this last result, Chapter 2 attempts to disentangle the effect of reminding potential benefactors of their responsibility for the potential beneficiary and the effect of highlighting their decision power and freedom of choice on altruistic decision-making by studying the effects of two different texts on giving in a dictator game. We find that only men react positively to a text that stresses their responsibility for the recipient by giving more to her or him, whereas only women seem to react positively to a text that emphasizes their decision power and freedom of choice.
Chapter 3 focuses on the compliance with a request. In the experiment, participants are asked to provide a detailed answer to an open question. Compliance is measured by the effort participants spend on answering the question. The treatment variable is whether or not they see the text “thanks in advance.” We find that participants react negatively by putting less effort into complying with the request in response to the phrase “thanks in advance.”
Chapter 4 studies the effect of prefilled tax returns with mostly inaccurate default values on tax compliance. In a laboratory experiment, participants earn income by performing a real-effort task and must subsequently file a tax return for three consecutive rounds. In the main treatment, the tax return is prefilled with a default value, resulting from participants’ own performance in previous rounds, which varies in its relative size. The results suggest that there is no lasting effect of a default value on tax honesty, neither for relatively low nor relatively high defaults. However, participants who face a default that is lower than their true income in the first round evade significantly and substantially more taxes in this round than participants in the control treatment without a default.
People engage in a multitude of different relationships. Relatives, spouses, and friends are modestly to moderately similar in various characteristics, e.g., personality characteristics, interests, appearance. The role of psychological (e.g., skills, global appraisal) and social (e.g., gender, familial status) similarities in personal relationships and the association with relationship quality (emotional closeness and reciprocity of support) were examined in four independent studies. Young adults (N = 456; M = 27 years) and middle-aged couples from four different family types (N = 171 couples, M = 38 years) gave answer to a computer-aided questionnaire regarding their ego-centered networks. A subsample of 175 middle-aged adults (77 couples and 21 individuals) participated in a one-year follow-up questioning. Two experimental studies (N = 470; N = 802), both including two assessments with an interval of five weeks, were conducted to examine causal relationships among similarity, closeness, and reciprocity expectations. Results underline the role of psychological and social similarities as covariates of emotional closeness and reciprocity of support on the between-relationship level, but indicate a relatively weak effect within established relationships. In specific relationships, such as parent-child relationships and friendships, psychological similarity partly alleviates the effects of missing genetic relatedness. Individual differences moderate these between-relationship effects. In all, results combine evolutionary and social psychological perspectives on similarity in personal relationships and extend previous findings by means of a network approach and an experimental manipulation of existing relationships. The findings further show that psychological and social similarity have different implications for the study of personal relationships depending on the phase in the developmental process of relationships.