The Psychology of Friendship - Oxford University Press (2016)

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Friendship and Social Media

Andrew M. Ledbetter

In summer 2014, Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock reported an experiment where,
without obtaining explicit informed consent, the researchers manipulated Facebook
users’ news feeds to suppress status messages with either positive or negative
emotional words. Results of the study demonstrated that emotions expressed via
Facebook spread contagiously, such that those who viewed more negative status
messages posted similarly negative messages, and likewise for those whose news
feed contained positive updates. Although obtained effect sizes were small (gen-
erally less than 2% across approximately 700,000 participants), reaction in the
popular press was not. One writer decried the experiment as “unethical” due to its
lack of informed consent, arguing “Facebook intentionally made thousands upon
thousands of people sad” (Waldman, 2014). The New  York Times’ conclusion was
equally damning: “To Facebook, we are all lab rats” (Goel, 2014).
Although it is far beyond the scope of this chapter to arbitrate research ethics, the
Kramer et  al. (2014) study demonstrates the visceral emotions attached to social
media— emotions arising, in no small part, from the centrality of the technology in
initiating and maintaining interpersonal relationships. Although some research has
devoted attention to understanding family (Child & Westerman, 2013) and romantic
relationship (Fox & Warber, 2013) processes across social media, this chapter reviews
research on friendship, which is the most common type of relationship enacted across
major social media platforms such as Facebook (Sosik & Bazarova, 2014). In fact,
“friend” is often a colloquial term for a social media connection, a fact that I consider
in the first portion of this chapter. Then, I  review dominant strands of friendship
research in the social media literature to date; finally, in light of this recent- but- rich
scholarship, the final portion of the chapter considers directions for future research.

Defining Social Media and (Re)defining Friendship

Among published research, boyd and Ellison (2007) have offered the most fre-
quently cited definition of social networking sites: “web- based services that allow