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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. The Psychology of Connectivity: Follower Counts and Identity

Author : Swati Bhatt

Published in: The Attention Deficit

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Information exchange is embodied in the sharing model which originated as a simple communal gossip session. On a digital platform, the network reached by communal gossip is enormous. Sharing in the virtual world builds self-esteem and confers virtual status where power is synonymous with follower counts on social media and generates a feel-good dopamine spike. But sharing is accompanied by comparison, judgment, anxiety and fear, only assuaged by additional self-revelation. The psychology of sharing creates a flywheel of ever-increasing exchange resulting in massive digital content.

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Footnotes
1
Twitter follower counts for Nobel prize-winning economists vary from 4.52 million for Paul Krugman to 247,000 for Joseph Stiglitz and 140,000 for Richard Thaler. Numbers for academic economists who write extensively on urgent policy issues such as trade also vary from 118,000 for Dani Rodrik and 116,000 for Kaushik Basu to 13,000 for Ken Rogoff. See IDEAS (2019) for details.
 
2
Tamir et al., unpublished working paper, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, 2019.
 
3
Individuals choose actions in the short term consistent with certain identities, but they can choose identity itself, as well as change the behavioral norms consistent with that identity, in the long term (Kranton 2016).
 
4
Akerlof writes “New Yorkers enjoy, for example, being able to engage in mutual pride-taking over a win by the Yankees. Therefore, just as agents’ desire for self-esteem motivates disidentification with Boston [Red Sox], the desire for peer esteem motivates New Yorkers to forge a common group identity” (Akerlof and Kranton 2000).
 
Literature
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Metadata
Title
The Psychology of Connectivity: Follower Counts and Identity
Author
Swati Bhatt
Copyright Year
2019
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21848-5_3