Social feedback promotes positive social sharing, trust, and closeness.

Abstract

Positive social sharing is an interpersonal emotion regulation strategy that enhances positive affect and social belonging, particularly when met with positive social feedback. Despite the ubiquity of positive social sharing both in person and online, what drives this behavior is not well understood. We hypothesized that positive social feedback serves as a reward that reinforces sharing behavior and strengthens social bonds. Participants made trial-by-trial choices about whether to share social media photos with peers who returned positive (“likes”) or negative (“dislikes”) feedback. Unbeknownst to participants, peer conditions were manipulated to yield varying amounts of positive and negative feedback. Social bonding was subsequently measured using a trust game and subjective closeness ratings. Participants shared more with peers who provided greater rates of positive feedback. This effect generalized to trust decisions and subjective feelings of closeness and varied individually as a function of interpersonal emotion regulation in daily life.

Perceived responses, capitalization, and daily gratitude: Do age and closeness matter?

“…Attaining these positive outcomes could promote frequent capitalization attempts to experience the benefits. As initial evidence of the association between positive capitalization feedback and future capitalization attempts, people share a greater number of their social media photos when receiving a higher rate of positive feedback in the form of a "like" (Brudner et al, 2023). From the enjoyable experience of reliving the positive event, receiving social support, and reaping capitalization's benefits, trait active-constructive PRCA from in-person interactions could subsequently encourage future capitalization attempts in daily life.…”