The Impact of Social Norms on Adolescents’ Self-Presentation Practices on Social Media

Zillich, Arne Freya; Wunderlich, Annika (2024): The Impact of Social Norms on Adolescents’ Self-Presentation Practices on Social Media. Social Media + Society, 10 (4). ISSN 2056-3051

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat offer adolescents many opportunities to control how other users see and perceive them. By observing their peers’ self-presentations and receiving feedback on their own self-presentations from them, adolescents learn what is typical (descriptive norms) and appropriate (injunctive norms) on different social media platforms. Based on computer-assisted face-to-face surveys with German Instagram and/or Snapchat users aged between 14 and 16 years (N = 1,002), we examined the impact of descriptive and injunctive norms on adolescents’ self-presentation practices on social media. Drawing on the theory of normative social behavior and the affordances approach, we also considered the norm-moderating factors of outcome expectations, group identity, platform differences, and perceived content persistence. We provide evidence that both descriptive and injunctive peer norms influence adolescents’ staged self-presentations, authentic self-presentations, and presentations of everyday life, although none of the moderating factors reached practical significance.

• Dokumententyp: Artikel (LMU)
• Organisationseinheit (Fakultäten): 15 Sozialwissenschaften > Kommunikationswissenschaft
• DFG-Fachsystematik der Wissenschaftsbereiche: Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften
• DFG: Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - 456658166
• DFG: Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - 491502892