Social cognitive theory in online Social networks

Social cognitive theory(STC), used in psychology, education, and communication, focuses on what and how people learn from one another through observation, imitation, and modeling. Figure1 shows the relationship between person, behavior and environment. According to SCT, person, behavior and environment, they are reciprocal causation. In this blog, I want to talk more about this reciprocal causation in online social networks.

Figure 1

Firstly, person and environment: portions of an individual’s knowledge acquisition can be directly related to observing others within the context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences. For example, we can learn knowledge from QA SNS website (E.g. figure2); we can learn some innovative idea from http://www.36kr.com/ and so on. On the other hand, through peoples interaction, sharing experience, ideas and media, social networks environment and resources become richer. But not all information or resource is appropriate and beneficial for people. How to make the best use of social networks resources and how to supervise and hit the bad resources is another important topic for us to think over, especially for children and teenagers.

Figure2

Secondly, person and behavior: in the lesson, we have talked three concept of “self”, the individual self ——based on personal traits that differentiate the self from all others; the relational self——based on connections and role relationships with significance others; the collective self——based on group membership that differentiates “us” from “them”. In the social networks, people would like to present themselves, create a particular impression, build the connections with friends or anyone they like. In the facebook, you can share your latest information, feelings, and pictures and so on, which shows your personal difference from others and create your favorable impression. So, you will have fans or followers. On the other hand, because of the friendship, you like to scan and make some response your friends’ latest information in social network. Then, comparing our behaviors and opinions with those of others is helpful to establish the correct or socially approved way of thinking and behaving. For example, you see a lot of wonderful travelling pictures shared by your friends in his homepage, which will also activate you to go travelling. But, deindividuation is another aspect of what social networks bring to us. It means that anonymity enables engagement in behavior people would normally refrain from performing. So some negative behavior such as swindle, flame war and hostile blog comments would damage the quality of human interactions. As so far, how to deal with such problems is also another topic.

Finally, environment and behavior: maybe as mentioned above, I have involved some interrelationship between both. Here, I want to talk something about imitation and modeling. Modeling teaches new behaviors, influences the frequency of previously learned behaviors, even may encourage previously forbidden behaviors. The social networks, for example, social media and online games, directly and efficiently stimulate people’s sense and influence people’s behavior, especially for teenagers who lack self-control. So, how to guide teenagers to make best use of and enjoy social network is also another important topic.

In short, we analyze the social cognitive theory in online social networks and hope to improve social network more and more, in order to benefit our life.