PsychBook Research

The role of statistics in psychology

Survey under the surface: interpreting the NCI/NELL/Mulley Communications Facebook eye-tracking study

It was reported in the Sunday Business Post, and it got a bit of attention elsewhere, so I’d like to introduce you to the most recent Irish research to look at Facebook. Entitled ‘Face the Facts: An eye-tracking study investigating how Irish users engage with advertising and media on Facebook’ and authored by Caroline Fox, Abi Reynolds, Stephan Weibelzahl and Javin Li at the National College of Ireland, on behalf of Mulley Communications.

At the outset, this is not published psychological research but a usability report, so this critique will inevitably be somewhat at a remove to what is normally reviewed here. Moreover, given that this study did not use representative sample (40 participants, selected via convenience sampling, mostly aged between 17 and 25), media reports extrapolating from its results, (e.g. that 75% of Irish Facebook users log on every day), are unfounded. It’s simply far too small a sample to be generalised to the population at large; besides, Facebook’s own statistics state that 50% of users log in every day – a much lower figure, underscoring the unrepresentative nature of the sample.

Nevertheless, and besides this being one of very few eye-tracking studies of Facebook (none of which have been published in scholarly journals though, I might add), it has thrown up some interesting data from a psychological perspective. Moreover, given the implicit purpose of the study, advertisers should also read on.

As I said, this is not a journal article: no literature review, no hypotheses, no peer-review, no discussion, no references etc. but it would represent a very good starting point for a B.A./B.Sc. or even M.Sc. research project, (there’s a hint for some of you!) because it throws up quite a lot of issues, which can only be answered by more in-depth research, but also, again, because of the nature of the study, there’s a business (marketing/advertising) edge to the subject matter which could make further research very lucrative.

The aim of the study was “to gain a better understanding of the habits users exhibit when engaging with advertising and media in Facebook” (Fox, Reynolds, Weibslezahl & Li, p. 8, 2010). What this basically amounted to was eye-tracking users when they were on Facebook, with particular interest in their viewing of advertisements. From my psychology research background, I have issues with the ‘Research objectives’ and the study that was carried out, simply because too many concepts/variables are mentioned and too few things are defined, so I’ll have to leave those to one side, because, again, this is a usability report, not a journal article.

In that respect, given that this report is ostensibly looking at how the advertisements on Facebook are ‘used’ – this being a usability report – with an eye-tracking study, it would be preferable to carry out a more in-depth study with fewer participants – particularly those who have actually clicked on Facebook ads before, or simply observing the naturalistic saccades and fixations of Facebook users while on the site, without giving task/activity protocols as was done here. Alternatively, given that the study is really stretching what a ‘usability report’ connotes, a much larger sample should have been used and an experiment (i.e. hypotheses!) conducted.

However, what’s done is done, and now that some data has been collected, there are some very interesting points. It’s worth bearing in mind, despite the criticisms that I’ve just given, that I do believe that this report has unearthed findings worthy of basing future studies upon – both in terms of research and marketing.

Now while Fox et al. (2010) did look at a lot of things, what I found most interesting was that:

– users spend more time looking at adverts when on their Profile page, than when on their News Feed page

Now, they also found that users go to News Feed first, and that they spent most of their time there. But that’s not the interesting point.

If 71% of users looked at adverts while on their profile page, but only 31% while on the News Feed page

this would suggest that users are more conscious of advertisements on their Profile page, for whatever reason.

This is of critical importance. It doesn’t really matter that users spend less time here. I know that there are many problems with this study, but this figure alone – we don’t need to look for statistical significance, confidence intervals, within-groups differences, or any of that – 71% is a lot more than 31%.

But why?

The first explanation is from the data:

Users spend more time on the News Feed page than on their Profile Page. In other words, when on their own New Feed page, they have more than enough fresh information there, without looking at ads. Hence, their Profile page is simply a different page, so they are more likely to look around there.

The second explanation is from the context:

The most active traffic on Facebook is the New Feed page: it contains the updates from all Friends and other Pages. When they look at their own Profile page, it will only contain updates that they have made themselves, and things which other people have posted on their Wall, which they will have probably seen before, and which is obviously only a fraction of the News Feed that they are used to. Hence, because there is less information here, they look to the ads.

The third explanation is from psychology:

When using Facebook, and looking at other peoples’ pages, the page that users land on is the Profile page. Everyone knows this, and users implicitly know this about their own page. Hence, when a user looks at their own profile page, they are looking at the ‘face’ that they are presenting to the rest of Facebook. Obviously they are going to be interested in the advertisements that appear there, because those are the products/services that other people will associate with them.

Wrong!

The advertisements that anyone sees on Facebook reflect their own interests, not the interests of the person whose profile they are looking at. Hence, you can never control what products/services that I will associate you with if I view your profile page. The ads that you view on Facebook depend on your interests, not the interests of the person whose profile you are viewing. So if you look at my profile and see ads for gay monkey porn, that’s because you’re interested in gay monkey porn, not me!

But this is really important for advertising – because, if this research is right, and users are most interested in the ads that appear on their own Profile pages, but currently have no way of controlling what ads appear there – then clearly there is a niche waiting to be exploited. Or at least, a new revenue stream that Facebook have yet to consider. More research – both qualitatively, interviewing users about their deeper attitudes to ads, pages, products, services and their relationship to them; and quantitatively, empirically eye-tracking users while on the site – is warranted in this area.

The simple point is that the News Feed and Profile pages represent the inside/outside, back end/front end  – private/public – of the Facebook experience: it is to be expected that users will view them differently. Though more research is needed here, both Facebook and advertisers ought to consider the difference between users passively viewing advertisments, and actively being associated with them. Of course, user ‘like’ Fan Pages, which Fox et al. (2010) do mention, but that’s quite distinct from having advertising on your own Profile page. Anyway, one way or another, more research is needed!

Reference:

Fox, C. Reynolds, A., Weibelzahl, S. & Li, J. (2010). Face the facts: An eye-tracking study investigating how Irish users engage with advertising and media on Facebook. Usability report, retreived June 30, 2010 from http://mulley.ie/research/MulleyFacebookStudy.pdf Dublin, Ireland: National College of Ireland/National E-Learning Laboratory [On behalf of Mulley Communications].

Image via Flickr

Job-seeking, social networking and the law: It’s a lot like Facebook stalking

As I’ve mentioned before, companies are increasingly looking at potential employees profiles on social networking sites. Just like online dating, all this extra information can have both advantages and disadvantages, for the eh, client and um, service provider.

I realise this after reading this post: Is It Legal To Use Social Network Data When Hiring? While much of the press about recruitment and Facebook has focussed on the risk to jobseekers of companies screening them out of contention because of, shall we say, inappropriate behaviour recorded in photographs and so on, this post took the opposite tack.

What Howard Greenstein explains is by using social media recruitment purposes employees may discover information about candidates that they cannot legally use in the selection process. He gives this example:

Take the case of a start-up owner who needs new assistant. He asks his network or his HR person to get candidates. He interviews an outstanding woman candidate and practically offers her the position during the interview. Then he finds out via her Facebook status after the interview that she’s 3 months pregnant. The owner knows that 6 months from now when she’s out giving birth, it will be the busy season, when he can’t afford to be without help. Legally he can’t act on this information.

I’m going to go right ahead and assume that the law is pretty much the same all over most of the developed world about this type of thing. However, what’s not the same is how informed, or ethically minded, the employer – this varies quite a lot. I mean, while the article suggests that businesses “separate the information gathering, so the person who does the online search isn’t part of the hiring chain” so that information isn’t disclosed inappropriately, like above, I can’t see this happening in practice for a while yet.

This is where the similarity with Facebook stalking comes in, and this is where jobseekers have to keep their wits about them, and know their rights.

You know what it’s like – boy meets girl*, boy and girl have a few chats, boy and girl go out on a date. This being the 21st century, boy and girl Facebook stalk each other relentlessly. Boy and girl have another date, boy and girl can’t remember where they got information they know about each other. Did they tell them, or did they get it from Facebook stalking?

Of course, in that situation it’s entirely up to yourself what to do. If you caught the other person, mentioning something you ‘said’, how would you react? Would you query it? or would you simply let it slide, because if you pull them up on it, you mightn’t get lucky …

But in a job interview, if you get asked a question that doesn’t seem quite right, cast your mind back and try to remember if it refers to something which was on your CV or the material you submitted. By all means, if your suspicions are aroused, ask your panel if they have been googling you.

The point is simply this, as a jobseeker, you’re supposed to research the company you want to work for – this is expected of you, and you probably should mention this in the interview. However, while companies are increasingly using social media during recruitment (more recent article here), and Greenstein’s post recommends that they do, they are unlikely to be totally open about this, especially in the interview process. (I could be wrong about this – has a panel ever complemented you on your holiday photos?)

Bottom line: know your rights, and be aware that being passed over because of information revealed on the social networking sites may not be legal. Plus, it’s an interview, not a date. I daresay a potential employers prefer savvy recruit over a meek one and either way, if you don’t ask, it’s you who could get screwed, and not in a good way.

* Apologies for the inherent heteronormative/mongamous bias: this is simply easier to write than ‘a certain number of people meet each other …’ etc.

Image from How to not fail the crap out of a job interview

Face of things to come: The philosophy of Facebook

(Credit: Audrey Fukuman, www.sfweekly.com)

As I predicted, the privacy debate about Facebook came to nothing, as it appears that Facebook growth ACCELERATED in the last month, thereby proving the old adage that ‘any publicity is good publicity’. The bottom line is that the vast majority of Facebook’s users really don’t care enough about the privacy issues to stop using it.

However, at the same time, I wonder how many users agree with Facebook’s underlying philosophy, which is to: “Making the World More Open and Connected”. This is the unofficial mission statement of Facebook, which we recently discovered, via Mark Zuckerberg’s bizarre quasi-Masonic hoodie design (above), as he sweated his way through a terrible performance at the All Things D Conference.

The bottom line is, if Facebook want to make the world more open and connected, then that implies a belief that people inherently want to share and connect with each other – there’s a certain assumption about human nature built into that statement which must hold true for it to succeed – for the net to work. As I’ve said before, I think that this only holds true for a certain subset of the population, but of course I could be wrong.

He’s also recently said that he expects to have one billion users of Facebook, at some stage though not this year. That link has some interesting comments from Zuckerberg himself, including a now-customary gaffe (he doesn’t seem to think there’s much difference between running a public company to a private one!). There’s also a more in-depth interview over at Inside Facebook, but to be honest, for all the ‘exclusive-ness’ of the title, I don’t think he gives much away.

So, that’s what things will look like in the near future: a billion people in the same system, all sharing and connecting with each other, in a more open world. But what does this mean for human psychology?

I can say a few things with absolute certainty.

1. It’s pretty naive to think that this won’t affect our psychological make-up. You can quote me on that: ‘Social networking sites will change human psychology’. Seriously – consider the alternative: using a novel communication system, for significant and regular periods of time, for a sizeable fraction of the entire human population, will have no effect on our subjective experiences? Yeah, right.

2. There will be both positive and negative effects, which will effectively cancel each other out over time. People will eventually get used to social networking, but it will take a while. Since the earliest introduction of ‘technology of the self’, there have been concerns about mental health, and this one is no different: we’ll get over it. What changes use of social networking will have on human psychology I can only speculate on, but I do intend to find out shortly – watch this space!

3. Facebook’s growth will not be stopped by technical or privacy issues, both of which will be continue to surface, and be loudly debate by the ‘tech élite’, because the public at large doesn’t care about them. Facebook will only be challenged if  a rival platform emerges, which is not only better designed, more technically sophisticated, and all that type of thing, but which is built on an alternative philosophy – a different view of what it means to be human. I do wonder how long that will take ….

Recent press coverage: Interviews in Business & Finance, and Irish Independent

A few links to a couple of interviews I’ve given recently, with thanks to Adam Maguire and John Costello.