How and to whom people share

Abstract

The global expansion of the use of online communities, including social networking sites, necessitates a better understanding of how people self-disclose online, particularly in different cultures. In a scenario-based study of 1,064 respondents from the United States and China, we aimed to understand how self-disclosure is affected by communication mode (face-to-face vs. online), type of relationship and national culture. Our findings show that national culture interacts with communication mode and type of relationship to affect the extent of self-disclosure. Our analysis also suggests that peoples' disclosure depends on characteristics of the relationship, e.g., closeness and openness. Our results shed new light on how online communities might be designed for users in different cultures and for intercultural collaboration. Author KeywordsSelf-disclosure, communication mode, relationship, culture, social networking sites ACM Classification KeywordsH5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.In this study, we investigate 1) how self-disclosure is affected by communication mode and the closeness and openness of the relationship, and 2) if and how the patterns of self-disclosure vary across national culture. Through this research, we gain insight into how to design better online communities to support interpersonal relationship development. In particular, we aim to inform the design of online communities and social networking software to support diverse cultures and, to a lesser extent, intercultural interaction. To do so, we conducted a scenario-based study with a global IT company's employees in the U.S. and China to investigate how communication mode (face-to-Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

Disclosure of sensitive behaviors across self-administered survey modes: a meta-analysis

“…For example, North Americans tend to disclose more than Chinese (Chen, 1995), Japanese (Schug, Yuki, &Maddux, 2010), or East Europeans (Maier, Zhang, & Clark, 2013) under face-to-face conditions. However, in computer-mediated environments self-disclosure increases for Asians, which has been attributed to the fact that members of collectivistic cultures are more reserved in face-to-face interactions to avoid violating social norms (Zhao, Hinds, & Gao, 2012). Descriptive results could not corroborate these results in the current meta-analysis (see Table 5) because few effects were available from outside the United States.…”

Self-Confidence Trumps Knowledge

“…Cross-cultural studies in the area of computer security and privacy studied the differences in privacy concerns and behavior between different cultures and explored the reasons underlying these differences (e.g., [2,3,12,32,53,57]). For example, Almakrami compared the self-disclosure practices of Saudis on Facebook with those of Australians [2].…”

“…Various research efforts compared the privacy (but not security) concerns of Internet users from Asian countries with those of their counterparts from western countries [27,29,34,35,53,52,57]. In general, most of these efforts concluded that the Asian users are less concerned about their online privacy than users from western countries.…”

A Systematic Assessment of National Artificial Intelligence Policies: Perspectives from the Nordics and Beyond

“…Haddad et al compare two different interface designs among older adult Caucasians and East Asians and find preference differences in interface design [22]. Social media usage has also been investigated cross-culturally, highlighting differences in self-presentation [53], self-disclosure [52], as well as tasks such as brainstorming [47]. These studies have typically contrasted American and Chinese user populations.…”