Sharing beyond Slacktivism: the effect of socially observable prosocial media sharing on subsequent offline helping behavior

ABSTRACT

New forms of youth social and political participation have been termed ‘Slacktivism’ – low-cost online forms of social engagement that decrease subsequent offline participation. Previous experimental work has provided support for a ‘Slacktivism effect,’ but it is unclear if this theoretical model applies to youth media sharing on social networking sites. This study uses a novel sharing simulation paradigm to test the effect of publicly vs. anonymously sharing a social cause video on subsequent willingness to engage in offline helping behavior. Results show that publicly (as compared to anonymously) sharing a selected video on one’s own Facebook wall led to a greater willingness to volunteer for an issue-related cause. Participants’ existing use of social media for engagement in social issues/causes moderated the effect, such that only participants low in use of social media for social engagement were susceptible to the sharing manipulation. Implications for reconceptualizing media sharing as a unique form of online participation beyond ‘Slacktivism’ are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• civic engagement
• impression management
• sharing
• social media
• psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daniel S. Lane is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the ways in which communication on social media can leverage identities and social connections to promote participation in political and social change [email: [email protected]].

Sonya Dal Cin is associate professor (Communication Studies) and research associate professor (Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research) at the University of Michigan. Dr Dal Cin’s research concerns the effects of mediated and unmediated social influence on health and well-being among adolescents and emerging adults [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 Facebook is selected because it is the most widely used social network in the USA (Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart, & Madden, 2015). Facebook is also an environment which typically contains a disproportionate number of close-ties (Hampton, Goulet, Rainie, & Purcell, 2011).

2 Number of views represents an objective metric of ‘shareability.’

3 Application requests for access to users’ Facebook information and functionality are a common occurrence for almost any software that interacts with the Facebook.com API. The design of the simulated app was such that it strictly mimicked (visually and procedurally) the typical experience of a Facebook application requesting permission to share.

4 Crano, Brewer, and Lac (2014) note that when pretest measures are likely to make participants reactive to the treatment, a posttest-only design is more appropriate.

5 All analyses were rerun with unsatisfied participants removed and similar results were found, with slightly increased main and interactive effect sizes.