Research operations in product development
SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE EFFECT ON ALTRUISM
2014
A case study focusing on the effect social media has on Altruism in a All-or-None  decision making game.
CREATING THE EXPERIMENT
I was promoted to lab manager in one of the research labs I worked in at Stony Brook University, and I was able to create and run my own experiment.
The study looked at the effect that social media usage had on decision making, using the medium of an All-or-Nothing decision making game.
My Duties:
Background research
Creation of the survey questions
Recruiting the participants
Running the participants through the experiment
Data analysis
Writing a 12-page paper about the experiment and the results
This project was done under an Independent Research class at Stony Brook University. Normally, undergraduate students do Independent Research by contributing to a study already in progress. However, the Graduate researcher I was working with had me work completely on my own and create my own research experiment.
With this project, every step of the experiment was on me. I had to quickly develop the type of self-discipline to work on my own and finish deadlines to help me complete my project on time early on my research career.
TOPIC
Altruism: a costly act that confer economic benefits on other individuals.
Medium: All-or-None (AoN) game. People choose on whether to keep a certain amount of money for themselves, or allow a certain amount of money to go to another person, measured by social distance.
Background: Research shows that the closer the person is to another person, the more altruistic characteristics will be exhibited by those people.
Reason for research: Altruism is effected by the social interactions that we have, and since in today’s society, social media is a huge part of how we interact with each other, it is reasonable that social media can effect our decision making when in comes to Altruism.
METHOD
Participants:
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76 undergraduate students at Stony Brook University
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Compensated with course credit.
Setting:
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They were sat down at a computer
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Given two different surveys to control for ordering effects.
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Run one at a time in a small room.
Altruism:
The first survey was the Decision Making game All-or-None.
Participants were showed the instructions on the right.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (to control for ordering effect)
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the amount of money offered decreased in value
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the amount of money offered increased in value
The participants were asked whether they would accept money for them alone or a variety of amount of money for another person. *Shown below*
SURVEY QUESTIONS
The participants were asked a total of 17 questions on social media usage, such as:
what platforms they had accounts on
hours of use per day/week
how active they were on social media
what activities they engaged in on those platforms
The answers to these questions were used to sort these participants into quantitative categories, with each option transformed into a number describing they amount of social media usage.
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THE EFFECT THAT SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE ON ALTRUISM
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Results:
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No significant correlation between social media usage and altruism through All-or-Nothing game.
Conclusions:
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Recent studies that have shown social media can have both positive and negative effects on our connectedness with each other. Studies have shown that social media use can enhance our connectedness and well-being, and even increase our altruistic side when it came to charity contributions, one might expect that participants who used more social media would show more altruistic characteristics across various social distances. However, no effect was found.
Limitations:
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Our participation pool was limited to Stony Brook University students. Since a majority of students use social media, there was not a decent amount of participants that do not use social media at all.
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The study only look at what people say their social media is, not what it actually is through tracking.
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People may overestimate or underestimate their internet usage, the participants may not have answered some of the questions correctly.
NEXT STEPS
What I would add to this study if I were able to work more on this topic:
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The sample population were only college students, so there was not much variety in age. Since most college students use social media, there is less variety in social media usage.
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Since this research project was small, I could only ask their social media usage. With more resources, I would have access to data from their actual social media accounts.
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A more accurate study would have access to a tracker that tracked people's social media usage over a period of time.