Updated Statuses: Understanding Facebook Use through Explicit and Implicit Measures of Attitudes and Motivations

Heather Shoenberger ^{1 *}, Edson Tandoc Jr. ¹

Abstract

The overall purpose of these studies was to explore whether underlying motivations could predict frequency of Facebook use, use of social connection features and use of selfexpression features. We sought to explain both general and specific uses of Facebook by accounting for the influences of motivations, attitudes and motivation activation systems. In addition to established scales on attitude and motivation, we employed the Mini-MAM scale which is a new tool intended to index two separate motivational systems that exist in each human. In brief, those who have higher appetitive scores are more likely to seek novel stimuli while those who have higher in defensive scores tend to avoid novel stimuli. Study one showed that our adopted measure of attitudes only predicted Facebook use in general while motivations only predicted specific uses of Facebook. In contrast, we found that the MiniMAM-scale predicted most of our dependent variables, pointing out surprising and interesting relationships. Study two was run in an effort to add support and validation to study one.

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