It Is About the Web and the User: The Effects of Web Use Depend on Person Characteristics

The World Wide Web recently became one of the primary information sources and an important means of communication in the developed world, and it continues its triumphal advance throughout the developing world. Psychological knowledge about the impact of the web on the perception of (social) reality stands in sharp contrast to the intense web use. Hence, Sparrow and Chatman (in this issue) voice an important research deficit. They correctly state that human information processing is not substantially different when the web is used (versus any other information source) and most research in psychology—in particular in cognitive and social psychology—has already been conducted at the computer for several decades, partly even online as the authors correctly point out. Thus, we do not need a web-psychology that is starting from scratch. Nonetheless, there is a need for more psychological research targeting the influence of web use on cognitive and social processing, because some tools available on the web create situations with (combinations of) characteristics that exist either rarely, not to the same extent, or even not at all beyond the web. These media characteristics might ultimately result in unexpected or unique cognitive, motivational, and behavioral responses such as those outlined in the target article. In this vein, Sparrow and Chatman (this issue) delineate an important avenue for (social) psychological research. Moreover, they provide an overview of existing research and highly relevant avenues for future studies. They are taking practices frequently applied in our digital lives and characteristics of the web as starting points for the analysis of the web’s impact on memory processes, persuasion, beliefs, and social interaction. This approach led to an impressive set of important insights about the effect of the use of search engines and other tools available on the web (e.g., Sparrow, Liu, & Wegner, 2011; Ward, 2013). In this commentary, I argue that to gain a more complete picture of the impact of the web on social and cognitive processing, research should consider not only media characteristics, but also user characteristics. In other words, considering anything, from interindividual differences, states, current goals, or mind-sets to activated knowledge, anything that might influence the way how the web is used and how (the information provided by) the web is received, could help to facilitate the understanding and the prediction of human social and cognitive processing online (Bargh & McKenna, 2004). This is in particular true for those differences between individuals that have the potential to interact with the characteristics of the web and its tools. As is evident from the research summarized next, some person characteristics even have the power to reverse the impact of media characteristics on the outcomes of web use. Thus, not considering person characteristics might lead to the wrong conclusions and recommendations for media use. I set out to first summarize research on social influence in computer-mediated versus face-to-face communication. This work provides a prototypical, excellent example that person characteristics (here the salient aspect of the self-concept) can reverse the effect of media characteristics (here anonymity of others during communication). The next section summarizes research demonstrating how online knowledge sharing is affected by (a) individuals’ prior knowledge in relation to the information available online as well as (b) their (chronic and situational) social motivation. The final example refers to the interaction between person and media characteristics and how they impact on the outcomes of web-based information search. Going beyond these examples, the concluding section outlines how some characteristics of the web might interact with certain individual-level variables and thereby identify avenues for future research.