The Impact of Social Norms on Adolescents’ Self-Presentation Practices on Social Media

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat offer adolescents many opportunities to control how other users see and perceive them. By observing their peers’ self-presentations and receiving feedback on their own self-presentations from them, adolescents learn what is typical (descriptive norms) and appropriate (injunctive norms) on different social media platforms. Based on computer-assisted face-to-face surveys with German Instagram and/or Snapchat users aged between 14 and 16 years ( N = 1,002), we examined the impact of descriptive and injunctive norms on adolescents’ self-presentation practices on social media. Drawing on the theory of normative social behavior and the affordances approach, we also considered the norm-moderating factors of outcome expectations, group identity, platform differences, and perceived content persistence. We provide evidence that both descriptive and injunctive peer norms influence adolescents’ staged self-presentations, authentic self-presentations, and presentations of everyday life, although none of the moderating factors reached practical significance.