Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan.
PLoS One. 2024 Apr 18;19(4):e0300681. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0300681. eCollection 2024.
Contrary to previous studies on the antecedent factors of social media addiction, we focused on the social environmental factor of relational mobility (i.e., the ease of constructing new interpersonal relationships) and investigated its relationship with social media addiction. People in low relational mobility societies have fewer opportunities to select new relationship partners and consequently feel a stronger need to maintain their reputation. We hypothesized that (1) people in low relational mobility societies are more strongly addicted to social media because they estimate that greater reputational damage will be caused by ignoring messages and (2) people in low relational mobility societies estimate greater reputational damage than actual damage. We conducted two online experiments with 715 and 1,826 participants. Our results demonstrated that (1) there is no relationship between relational mobility and social media addiction and (2) people in both high and low relational mobility societies overestimate reputational damage. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the social media addiction mechanism differs between societies: (3) people in low relational mobility societies estimate greater reputational damage, whereas (4) people in high relational mobility societies are more motivated to expand their social networks; both mechanisms strengthen their social media addiction. Based on these results, we propose interventions for moderating social media addiction in both high and low relational mobility societies.
与以往关于社交媒体成瘾的前置因素的研究不同，我们关注的是社会环境因素中的关系流动性（即构建新人际关系的容易程度），并研究了它与社交媒体成瘾的关系。在关系流动性较低的社会中，人们选择新的人际关系伙伴的机会较少，因此更强烈地需要维护自己的声誉。我们假设：（1）关系流动性较低的社会中的人们更容易沉迷于社交媒体，因为他们估计忽略信息会造成更大的声誉损害；（2）关系流动性较低的社会中的人们估计的声誉损害比实际损害更大。我们进行了两项在线实验，共有 715 名和 1826 名参与者。我们的研究结果表明：（1）关系流动性与社交媒体成瘾之间没有关系；（2）无论是在高关系流动性还是低关系流动性的社会中，人们都高估了声誉损害。此外，我们还证明了社会媒体成瘾机制在不同社会中的差异：（3）在关系流动性较低的社会中，人们估计的声誉损害更大，而（4）在关系流动性较高的社会中，人们更有动力扩展自己的社交网络；这两种机制都加强了他们对社交媒体的成瘾。基于这些结果，我们提出了在高关系流动性和低关系流动性社会中调节社交媒体成瘾的干预措施。
