Why Can’t I Stop Using Social Media Problematically? The Impact of Norm and Neutralization from the Regulatory Focus Perspective

ABSTRACT

Problematic social media use has increasingly become an issue in schools and companies. Individuals often attempt to reduce their problematic use, but some may not be successful. This implies that there are both impeding and maintaining factors influencing problematic use and that different individuals may follow different mechanisms during problematic use. Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory and regulatory focus theory, our study develops a theoretical model to describe how impeding factors (here, injunctive norms) and maintaining factors (neutralization) influence individuals’ intention to reduce problematic use through guilt, as well as how the effects of these factors are moderated by individuals’ regulatory focus. The results provide strong support for our model. While injunctive norms have a stronger effect on prevention-focused users, the effect of neutralization is stronger on promotion-focused users. Our study highlights the importance of regulatory focus to our understanding of the differential impact of injunctive norms and neutralization and suggests that future studies further examine how individuals experience cognitive dissonance following different mechanisms. Our results suggest that when trying to reduce students’ problematic social media use, teachers need to follow different approaches for individuals with different types of regulatory focus.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive dissonance theory
• dark side of IT
• injunctive norms
• neutralization
• problematic use of IT
• regulatory focus theory
• social media

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the grant of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71771040; 71831003).

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. As described next, our study selected using social media during class as the context and used university students as its sample. The problematic use of social media in such a scenario refers to unplanned and impulsive social media use for nonteaching purposes during class, which can hurt individuals’ academic performance. Here, nonteaching purposes mean that social media use does not deal with the class the students are currently attending. Therefore, using social media during class is still problematic if students are attending Class A but try to finish tasks from other teachers (e.g., the teacher from Class B or their supervisors).

2. Another similar concept is subjective norms from the theory of reasoned action [1]. Since injunctive norms are based on individuals’ perception of social approval, individuals influenced by injunctive norms desire to do what is appropriate [53]. On the other hand, individuals influenced by subjective norms look to important others to guide their behaviors [1]. Perception of what important others expect them to do (subjective norms) may or may not be consistent with what is appropriate (injunctive norms) [17]. It is possible that individuals’ important others may expect them to engage in problematic social media use in certain contexts. For example, someone’s partner may expect him/her to reply to her/his update on social media even when he/she is at work. Therefore, subjective norms are not selected as the impeding factor in our model.

3. Using the second-order formative construct with covariance-based structural equation modeling raises the issue of identification. As described in the literature [9,10, 77], the formative construct needs to emit at least two paths to other reflective variables so that it can be identified. Although adding a path from neutralization to intention to reduce problematic use can solve the issue of identification, this approach is not appropriate. Adding such a path and analyzing with covariance-based structural equation modeling essentially make neutralization a second-order reflective construct, whose first-order reflective indicators include guilt and intention. In other words, the conceptual meaning of neutralization depends on reflective constructs that make neutralization identifiable [58]. Obviously, such an approach makes the conceptual meaning of neutralization problematic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zilong Liu

Zilong Liu ([email protected]) is a professor in the School of Management Science and Engineering, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, China. His research interests include information privacy and social media. He has published his studies in Decision Sciences, Information & Management, Information Systems Journal, Computers in Human Behavior, and other journals.

Xuequn Wang

Xuequn (Alex) Wang ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a senior lecturer in Edith Cowan University, Australia. He received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from Washington State University. Dr. Wang’s research interests include social media, online communities, knowledge management, and human–computer interaction. His research has appeared in MIS Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Information & Management, Information Systems Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, and others.

Jing Chen

Jing chen ([email protected]) is a master’s student in the School of Management Science andEngineering, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, China. Her research interests focus 745on social media.