“Your Life Sucks,” but I think “You Deserved It”: Social approval and disapproval of messages on FMyLife.com

•We performed a content analysis of the FMyLife.com rating system.•We found if the poster showed remorse, raters tend to vote “your life sucks.”•Posters purposely causing pain, harm, or acting sans thinking “deserved” disapproval.•Elements of Social Judgment Theory play a role in the rating process...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers in human behavior 2015-03, Vol.44, p.220-229
Main Authors: DiTunnariello, Nancy, Farrell, Laura C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communication
Communities
Counting
Group Norms
Human behavior
Ideologies
Internet
Judgments
Messages
Norms
Online
Social Judgment Theory
Social networking
Social Support
Virtual communities
Websites
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Summary:•We performed a content analysis of the FMyLife.com rating system.•We found if the poster showed remorse, raters tend to vote “your life sucks.”•Posters purposely causing pain, harm, or acting sans thinking “deserved” disapproval.•Elements of Social Judgment Theory play a role in the rating process of posts.•Raters implore social judgment based on universal ideologies, ethics, and morals. This study used Social Judgment Theory (SJT) (Sherif & Hovland, 1961; Sherif, Sherif, & Nebergall, 1965) as a lens to understand how dominant societal standards for social support manifest in raters’ judgments of postings on a pop-culture website. The pop-culture website, FMyLife.com (FML) was analyzed to see if there were major themes within the community’s norms consistent with those of society. A total of 25,220 posts were analyzed for major themes on how raters rate posts from those looking to commiserate about their situation online. Since generic standards of conduct and norms apply in groups and at the individual level via computer-mediated communication, (Marques, Abrams, & Serodio, 2001; Wang, Walther, & Hancock, 2009), examples of common themes that relate to universal norms and ideologies are discussed pertaining to the two options of the FML website – “your life sucks” and “you deserved it.” Ten percent of posts for each option were then chosen at random to secure a frequency count for posts found within the themes. Results exhibit how elements of SJT play a role in the rating process of posts, and directions for future research are suggested.
ISSN:0747-5632
1873-7692
DOI:10.1016/j.chb.2014.11.046