Antecedents of social media addiction in high and low relational mobility societies: Motivation to expand social network and fear of reputational damage.

Contrary to previous studies on the antecedent factors of social media addiction, we focused on the social environmental factor of relational mobility (i.e., the ease of constructing new interpersonal relationships) and investigated its relationship with social media addiction. People in low relational mobility societies have fewer opportunities to select new relationship partners and consequently feel a stronger need to maintain their reputation. We hypothesized that (1) people in low relational mobility societies are more strongly addicted to social media because they estimate that greater reputational damage will be caused by ignoring messages and (2) people in low relational mobility societies estimate greater reputational damage than actual damage. We conducted two online experiments with 715 and 1,826 participants. Our results demonstrated that (1) there is no relationship between relational mobility and social media addiction and (2) people in both high and low relational mobility societies overestimate reputational damage. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the social media addiction mechanism differs between societies: (3) people in low relational mobility societies estimate greater reputational damage, whereas (4) people in high relational mobility societies are more motivated to expand their social networks; both mechanisms strengthen their social media addiction. Based on these results, we propose interventions for moderating social media addiction in both high and low relational mobility societies.

Effect of asking questions and providing knowledge on attitudes toward organic foods among Japanese consumers.

Some people overestimate the benefits of certain kinds of foods, such as organic foods, while others underestimate it. Previous studies have found that reducing people's self-assessed knowledge successfully moderated these extreme attitudes. In this study, we investigated interventions to reduce people's self-assessed knowledge and to moderate attitude extremity. We examined extreme attitudes toward organic foods and investigated the effects of implementing two intervention methods to moderate their attitude: (1) providing knowledge on organic food after asking them some questions and (2) simply providing them with knowledge. We conducted a two-factor mixed-design experiment with 653 college-educated Japanese women. In the first condition, before knowledge provision, participants were asked to answer questions about organic foods and were then informed of the correct answer and whether their answer was correct (Q&A Intervention). This step was based on an intervention conducted in a previous study to reduce their self-assessed factual knowledge. In the second condition, participants were simply provided with knowledge without being asked to answer any questions (Simple Intervention). The results showed that both intervention methods, on average, decreased the participants' self-assessed knowledge and attitude extremity. Therefore, simply providing knowledge may be effective in reducing their self-assessed factual knowledge and moderating their extreme attitudes toward organic foods.