UC Santa Barbara

Interaction on social networking sites (SNS) occurs in an environment that is rife with a multitude of cues that can prime interpersonal and/or group identities. While many studies on intergroup phenomena have looked at how SNS alter theoretical processes such as group identity salience and communication accommodation, the role of multiple identities in this environment remains underexplored. One area of study that implicitly addresses this multiple identity salience—context collapse—often does so from the perspective of selective self-presentation and privacy concerns but does not address how those multiple co-present groups affect information processing and interpretation. This dissertation attempts to integrate the two frameworks—noting areas that context collapse and intergroup communication can mutually inform each other. I then present two studies that attempt to close this theoretical gap. The first study tests the boundary conditions of identity salience in SNS (specifically, Facebook), and how group identity may be present and serve as a cue for memory/engagement with posts in a Facebook News Feed. Using a novel browsing task to capture participants’ unique social networks, results from Study 1 show that participants do tend to think of their Facebook “friends” in terms of distinct identities (such as temporal and spatial grouping, among others), though multiple identity salience is not particularly common. Additionally, while there are a myriad of reasons participants engage or remember specific posts on a Facebook News Feed, group identity does not seem to be a particularly strong cue for message processing. The second study was an experimental test of how multiple co-present group identities affect accommodation intention and perceptions of the interactants. Participants were randomly assigned to a condition where two fabricated interactants were presented as either from the same identity (Communication student) or multiple identities (Communication student and student from the participant’s high school). The interactants from single or multiple groups commented upon scenarios designed to match with two common identities: Communication students and High School students. Participants then answered items related to accommodation intention and perception of the interactants. Results from Study 2 show that multiple identity salience—alone or in concert with relevant scenarios—do not predict accommodation intention but do have effects on perceptions of the interactants. Implications for both studies are discussed regarding the role of group identity salience, multiple group identification, and accommodation.