PsychBook Research

Collecting and analysing psychological research on the most popular social networking site in the world today.

Author Archive

Just to keep you on your toes: More Facebook design changes

As I’ve said before, whether or not this is a deliberate strategy on their part, Facebook alters the site’s architecture every couple of months. The link below provides an early release of what the next changes might look like – but what the improvement is supposed to be, I haven’t a notion. More Facebook Design […]

12 June 2010 at 15:32 - Comments

Who says research is slow? Content analysis of responses to a Facebook post 2 hours ago

This is a little bit worrying for Facebook. I’ve always been fascinated by how fast people reply to Facebook’s own posts, so when I was reading the Facebook Links page about an hour ago I saw that within 10 minutes there had already been 147 comments to a link to their new Privacy page. However, […]

9 June 2010 at 21:10 - Comments

Good news everyone! How social media can make the world a better place

My professional judgment is that Facebook, like any other ‘technology of the self’ (Foucault, 1984) is morally neutral. Hence it can be used for good, as well as not-so-good purposes. Today I’ve listed three stories that illustrate the positive power of social media – none of which I’ve taken from Facebook’s blog, mind you.   […]

5 June 2010 at 15:52 - Comments

Episode 2 – How Facebook got everyone hooked

Responding to recent controversy about Facebook and ‘addiction’, cyberpsychologist Dr Ciarán Mc Mahon brings expert opinion to the debate by explaining how Facebook has become so popular, and suggesting how users can better manage their use of the site. In this video release, he breaks down the appeal into 7 key design elements, relating each […]

3 June 2010 at 22:47 - Comments

Episode 1

A brief summary of recent events – Facebook, privacy, phishing and so on – some hints about forthcoming research, and next Wednesday’s episode: the 7 habit-forming components of Facebook’s design.     Technorati Tags: facebook,psychology,privacy

31 May 2010 at 18:27 - Comments