Involuntary Embarrassing Exposures in Online Social Networks: A Replication Study

Abstract

In this study, we carry out a methodological replication of the research done by Choi et al. (2015) published in Information System Research. In the original study, the authors integrate the privacy and teasing literatures under a social exchange framework to understand online involuntary exposures. The original study was conducted on students from Southeast Asia. Our study uses a significantly larger sample of college students in the United States. Our replication results show that whereas most of the hypotheses supported by the original results on behavioral responses replicate with high consistency (8 out of 12 hypotheses), the results that deal with the effects of network commonality on perceived privacy invasion and perceived relationship bonding did not replicate (4 out of 12 hypotheses). These results could stem from a failed manipulation of network commonality. We look into the possible rationales for this and show what would be an effective manipulation in our context. Further, we expand the original study by testing an additional embarrassing scenario catered to our subject pool. The results suggest that perceived privacy invasion and perceived relationship bonding affect individual’s behavioral responses to embarrassing exposures.