People Interaction on Social Media (Essay Sample)

People Interaction on Social Media Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation People Interaction on Social Media Psychology provides techniques, concepts and cognitive theories to social media studies that look at the way people interact with the media. People devote approximately 30 to 40 percent of all speech toward talking about oneself, yet this number jumps to roughly 80 percent of the social media posts. According to the psychological concept of the mind and emotional involvement, talking face-to-face can be messy as well as emotionally involved. People do not have the time to think of what to say to each other, and they must read body languages and facial cues. The concept of self and identity also asserts that people manipulate their bodies, behavior, and mind to achieve some ideal of inner perfection (Hogan, 2010). When it comes to online, humans have the time to build and refine what to say, a phenomenon the psychologists refer to as self-presentation (Hogan, 2010). In other words, people have the time to position themselves the manner in which they want to be seen by the others. The feeling humans get from self-presentation online is adamant such that viewing one’s Facebook profile has demonstrated increased self-esteem. Researchers found that humans express stronger emotional reactions toward unfair offers from other humans compared to the same proposals from computer counterparts (Margalit, 2014). This finding and other neuroimaging results suggest that social interactions as compared to the computer interactions activate a consistent set of brain zones. These brain areas are responsible for making inferences regarding other human thoughts. One of the distinguishing human social cognition attributes is people’s tendency to create replicas of other minds that help the humans to make inferences regarding the mental status of others (Margalit, 2014). When interrelating with other people, humans automatically make implications regarding them without being deliberately aware of that. People cannot help but brood over what they think about, their intentions, the meaning of their facial expressions, and so on (Margalit, 2014). As a result, social interactions become so demanding due to this predisposition. This finding suggests that interaction with other human partners needs more emotional involvement and more cognitive effort compared to interacting with computers (Hogan, 2010). Also, there is a significant difference in the activation strength between human reactions toward other people and computers. This difference occurs because when a person interacts with another person, they cannot control the emotional involvement invested in such interaction course. Specific brain areas get activated automatically once human mental radar perceives another person (Margalit, 2014). Therefore, it feels so easier for humans to interact with social media because they do not require emotional or cognitive involvement, making the relation much easier. According to cognitive and behavioral psychology, nonverbal signals in face-to-face interactions add a magnitude of depth into the interaction and yet demand both emotional and cognitive effort (Margalit, 2014). This extra effort is spared in the online communication which is founded on constrained or minimal social cues wherein most of such signals are summed up in punctuations or emoticons (Fullwood et al., 2015). Thus, people can easily hide their emotions behind a tweet, a Facebook post, or an email. These platforms assist people to project any image they desire. Moreover, synchronized behavior is not possible ...