96 Who Are Our Friends?
alter friendship processes. Here, I briefly review four prominent lines of research,
including scholarship on (1) warranting and impression formation, (2) relational
maintenance and media multiplexity, (3) social capital and social support, and
(4) psychosocial well- being outcomes. This list of topics is offered as a description
of the literature to date versus an exhaustive list of what could be studied. Toward
that end, the chapter concludes with specific calls for theoretically and practically
relevant future research.
Warranting and Impression Formation
Social media affords people the opportunity to surreptitiously discover information
about others (Westerman, Van Der Heide, Klein, & Walther, 2008), a phenomenon
popularly known as “creeping” (or, more pejoratively, “stalking”) a person’s social
media profile. Concomitantly, a burgeoning body of scholarship has considered
processes of impression formation via social media. Toward this end, and building
from previous work in the social information processing theory tradition (Walther,
1996), Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, and Tong (2008) considered the
warranting value of information on social media, or the extent to which a profile
viewer trusts that information presented on the profile is accurate. In contrast to
earlier forms of online communication such as e- mail, which contain only informa-
tion included by the message sender, social media profiles often contain informa-
tion from a mixture of sources. For example, a typical Facebook profile contains
identity markers chosen by the profile owner, such as their hometown, political
beliefs, profile picture, and current status message; other information originates
from other users, such as tagged photos or posts to the timeline (previously known
as the “wall”). Although the profile owner can manage information from others (e.g.,
deleting unwanted timeline posts or untagging photos), it is generally less manipu-
lable than information presented directly by the owner, and in some cases the user
cannot manipulate it at all (as in the case of Facebook photos on another person’s
account that are not tagged). Thus, profile viewers place greater trust in informa-
tion from others, although the extent of such trust may depend on the specific type
of impression sought; for example, Walther, Van Der Heide, Hamel, and Shulman
(2009) found more robust support for the warranting hypothesis regarding judg-
ments of physical attractiveness than for judgments of extraversion. Additionally,
sex of the profile owner may alter judgments of warranting value, as participants in
Walther et al.’s (2008) study evaluated statements of dubious moral character posi-
tively for men but negatively for women.
In addition to the explicit statements of friends, more latent characteristics of
friends and profile owners may also influence processes of impression formation.
Some evidence indicates that the physical attractiveness of a person’s friends, as por-
trayed in their profile pictures, influences evaluation of the physical attractiveness
of the profile owner (Walther et al., 2008). Likewise, Van Der Heide, D’Angelo, and