Dr. Sonja Utz

Social network sites

We have conducted research on the following topics

• privacy concerns and self-presentation (e.g. are Hyvers concerned about their privacy? Which factors influence the choice of privacy settings?)
• need for popularity and the use of SNS. The need for popularity turned out to be an important predictor of SNS use and the psychological consequences of SNS use
• impression formation on SNS)
• the effects of political campaigns on Hyves (e.g., who pays attention to the campaign, does interaction with the voters result in a more positive evaluation?)

Selected publications:

Utz, S. & Beukeboom, C.J. (2011). The role of social network sites in romantic relationships: Effects on jealousy and relationship happiness. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 16, 511-527

Utz, S. (2010). Show me your friends and I will tell you what type of person you are: how own profile, number of friends, and type of friends influence impression formation on social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 15, 314-335.

Utz, S. (2009). The (potential) benefits of campaigning via Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 221-243.

Utz, S. & Krämer, N. (2009). The privacy paradox on social network sites revisited: The role of individual characteristics and group norms. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research in Cyberspace. http://www.cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2009111001&article=2

Electronic word-of-mouth

On consumer-communities such as epinions.com, ciao.de or kieskeurig.nl, consumers can write reviews about products or services. I am interested in two questions: Why do people write reviews on these sites (e.g. reputation, altruism,…) and how do people use these reviews to make decisions. What is more important, the reviews on a consumer community or factors like the reputation of a company? The first question has been addressed by an online survey among users of the German consumer community yopi.de, the second is studied in (web) experiments.

Selected publication:

Utz, S. (2009). Egoboo vs. altruism: the role of reputation in online consumer communities. New Media & Society, 11, 371-388.

WebCare and crisis communication - online reputation management

Negative reviews impact consumer choice (see research topic electronic word-of-mouth), and more and more companies start to react on negative reviews on consumer communities, blogs, or Twitter. But what is the best reaction? Together with my colleagues Peter Kerkhof and Camiel Beukeboom, I am examining the effects of various reactions on product evaluation, company evaluation, and buying intention. The first experiments contrasted the effects of apology and denial (see my work on the reparation of trust in eBay); the next experiment will focus on the role of authenticity.
Together with Friederike Schultz I examine the effects of communication strategy and media in crisis communication.

Selected publication:

Schultz, F. Utz, S., & Göritz A. (2011). Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis communication on twitter, blogs and traditional media. Public Relations Review, 37, 20-27.

Strategic information sharing

Sharing information or knowledge is an important part of communication, especially in organizational settings. However, since knowledge is power and sharing information could imply a loss of this competitive advantage, people often are reluctant to share information. Sharing information can be viewed as a social dilemma, more specific, a public good dilemma (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002). Research on social dilemmas has almost exclusively used paradigms in which points or coins were shared, thereby neglecting the fact that information differs from commodities. Information is not lost when shared, information can also vary in quality, and the value of information changes if more people have the same information. People can therefore show strategic behavior, e.g. sharing low quality unimportant information to make a cooperative impression, but still withholding the really important information. Together with Wolfgang Steinel (Department of Organizational and Social Psychology, University of Leiden) I developed a paradigm that allows studying these strategic aspects of information sharing. By varying the relevance and sharedness of information and manipulating the social motive of the participants, we can show that people show indeed strategic information sharing behavior and withhold deliberately important information. Another project in cooperation with Esther van Leeuwen (Department of Social Psychology, VU University) focuses on the effects of self-esteem on strategic information sharing. Individuals with a low self-esteem share more information when sharing information implies status and showing off with knowledge impresses others. Individuals with high self-esteem share less information in this case, probably because they feel that they have earned it and are allowed to keep it for themselves.

Selected publication:

Steinel, W., Utz, S., & Koning, L. (2010). The good, the bad and the ugly thing to do when sharing information: Revealing, concealing and lying depend on social motivation, distribution and importance of information. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113, 85-96.

The reparation of trust in eBay

Trust is a fundamental problem in online markets in which buyers and sellers don’t know each other, cannot communicate face-to-face and in which many interactions are only one-shot interactions. Reputation systems are a solution to this problem. Buyers and sellers can give each other positive, neutral, or negative feedback. These ratings can be accompanied by short comments. Prior research has shown that reputation of a seller influences probability of sale and end price. However, it has not been studied how a seller can repair trust after having received negative feedback. This is even more important because eBay is a noisy environment – things go wrong without the fault of the seller, e.g. a parcel gets lost in the mail, computers crash, people have accidents. I am interested in how trust can be repaired by the short reactions that sellers can give on the negative feedback comments. What is the most effective strategy – apology, denial, attribution to noise? And in how far is this moderated by the type of trust violation (competence-based vs. morality-based trust violation)? These questions have been studied in laboratory and field experiments Currently, the actual reactions of sellers on eBay are analyzed (supported by a CCSS-fellowship grant).

Selected publication:

Utz, S., Matzat, U., & Snijders, C. (2009). Online Reputation Systems: The Effects of Feedback Comments and Reactions on Building and Rebuilding Trust in Online Auctions. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 13, 95-118.

Media use in interpersonal relationships

Several smaller studies focused on media use in interpersonal relationships. One project examined media use in long-distance friendships and detected an interesting asymmetry between absolute and relative measures of communication. Although people used relatively less email communication in closer long-distance friendships, they wrote more emails to a close long-distance friend. For phone call, both measures showed an increase. Even in close friendships, email communication was not really intimate – for the real important topics, most respondents used the phone. Another study examined how people manage various email addresses. In the early days of the Internet, an university address indicated status and the early users looked down to people with aol or compuserve addresses. Nowadays, most people have several email addresses and many use them deliberately depending on the context.

Selected publications:

Utz, S. (2007). Media use in long distance friendships. Information, Communication, and Society, 10, 693-712.

Utz, S. (2004). Enter your email-address: How German Internet users manage their email addresses. Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 7, 241-246.

Effects of priming on behavior in social dilemmas

Social dilemmas are situations in which individual and collective interests are in conflict. I was interested in the effects of priming, the subtle activation of specific concepts, on cooperation in social dilemmas. In several studies I primed participants for example with I- or competence-primes and examined whether the effects were moderated by social value orientation. Competitors, who associate competence with individual rationality, i.e. competition, exhibit lower levels of cooperation when primed with competence, whereas prosocials, who association competence also with collective rationality, tend to show higher levels of cooperation. In a similar way, I primes further strengthen the effects of social value orientation.

Selected publications:

Utz, S. (2004). Self-construal and cooperation: Is the interdependent self more cooperative than the independent self? Self and Identity, 3, 177-190.

Utz, S. (2004). The effects of I primes on cooperation – activation of an independent self-construal or activation of self and central values? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 769-776.

Utz, S., Ouwerkerk, J.W., Van Lange, P.A.M. (2004). What is smart in a social dilemma? Differential effects of priming competence on cooperation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 34, 317-332.

Social identification and interpersonal attraction in virtual communities

Already as a student, I got interested in virtual communities, and I pursued this interest in my PhD project. In the late nineties, most virtual communities were text-based, like the adventure role-playing games which I studied (multi-user-dungeons, MUDs). My PhD project focused on the antecedents and consequences of social identification with virtual communications, later, I also looked at interpersonal relationships.

Utz, S. (2003). Social identification and interpersonal attraction in MUDs. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 62, 91-101.

Utz, S. (2000). Social Information Processing in MUDs: The development of friendships in virtual worlds. Journal of Online Behavior, 1 (1). Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http://www.behavior.net/JOB/v1n1/utz.html