Abstract
The present research applies symbolic self completion theory (SCT) to explain online behaviors and predict what users will post on Instagram. Across three experiments, we tested whether medical and law students who sense incompleteness with respect to their professional identity goals engage in compensatory self-symbolizing by increasing their online posting of respective indicators of goal attainment (e.g., medical coats, court clothes). Study 1 found that incomplete medical students post more medicine-related symbols. Study 2 replicated this effect in a sample of law students and clarified that students’ self-symbolizing posts specifically relate to their incomplete goal (law career) and not to other non-pertinent domains (university life). Finally, Study 3 demonstrated that incomplete medical students only engage in self-symbolizing when their incompleteness refers to their career goal and not to other careers they do not aspire to (a law career). Implications for understanding online behavior, preventing negative consequences of self-symbolizing on social media, and deepening the study of self-completion processes are discussed.
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Data Availability
The research materials used in the present studies are available from the corresponding author upon request. The data that support the findings described in the paper are available at Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/rvx5p/?view_only=50b178044fca4221a731579bf755dc3d.
Notes
The present experiments addressed populations of university students on purpose. As students from the same schools (e.g., medical school, law school) generally share the same identity goals (e.g., becoming a physician, becoming a lawyer), they represent the best case for studying symbolic self-completion processes (e.g., Gollwitzer et al., 2009).
We focused on professional/career identity goals as a choice of convenience. First, targeting a career goal enables recruiting homogeneous samples with the same identity goal by sampling in respective university courses (e.g., medicine faculties). Second, completeness towards career goals is relatively easy to manipulate through a bogus feedback procedure; the predisposition (or readiness) to become the aspired-to professional can be varied to induce temporary incompleteness feelings. Third, among other goals, past research already focused on career goals for testing SCT predictions.
At the time of the study, all participants were students enrolled in the medical school of an Italian private university in Milan.
We debriefed participants individually and in person. We started out with explaining SCT and how we wanted to test it in the present study. We were clear about the bogus nature of the presumed psychological readiness test, explicating why we used negative/positive feedback to induce incompleteness/completeness. Finally, we dedicated unlimited time to answer each participant’s questions. Once participants had no questions anymore, we gave them our contact information if any further questions might come up later.
At the time of data collection, all participants were enrolled in the law schools of various Italian public universities. Specifically, our participants came from all parts of Italy (i.e., north, central, and south).
Participants assigned to the two conditions did not complete the online questionnaire in equal proportions. This disproportion was presumably due to our incompleteness manipulation. As revealed by the debriefing sessions of the current and past studies applying the same bogus feedback procedure (Sciara et al., 2022), participants who receive negative feedback more frequently lose interest during completion than their counterparts and thus drop from the online survey before the dependent variables are assessed (i.e., before Instagram posting). An equivalent in-person procedure resolves this disproportion (see Study 1).
We asked participants to read a debriefing text that explicated to them in detail the nature of our procedure, with a transparent description of the bogus psychological test and a clear justification for the use of such an experimental paradigm. To also inform the people who did not take part in the study or had left the study before completion, we posted public debriefing messages on all the private and public pages we had used to recruit the sample. We also gave participants the opportunity to contact us via email and ask any further questions that might arise.
Among the excluded participants, 2 were in the medicine-related incomplete condition, 4 in the medicine-related complete condition, 6 in the law-related incomplete condition, and 3 in the law-related complete condition.
At the time of the study, all participants were enrolled in medical schools of public or private Italian universities. This time, unlike Study 1, our medical students came from all parts of Italy (i.e., northern, central, and southern).
Participants read a debriefing text that explicitly described how the negative/positive feedback was randomly assigned to participants. Also, we provided participants with the option to contact us via email/video-call and ask further questions at any time.
Social Media Stories are a tool for sharing ephemeral content that expires in 24 h. Posting such a story means publishing a very short video, or a few-seconds showing an image or short text that disappears after a day and generally tells others of thoughts and happenings at the very moment they are happening (Bayer et al., 2016).
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Sciara, S., Contu, F., Regalia, C. et al. Striving for identity goals by self-symbolizing on Instagram. Motiv Emot 47, 965–989 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-023-10039-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-023-10039-w