Impressions matter more than privacy: The moderating roles of affordances in the relation between social anxiety and online safety-seeking behaviors

Though socially anxious individuals tend to seek safety, little is known about whether this relationship depends on context, including the affordances of social networking sites (SNSs) to provide anonymity and publicness, and whether safety-seeking can be explained by impression management, privacy calculus or both. Based on the psychobiological model of social anxiety, we conducted two studies (Study 1: N = 103, Study 2: N = 1,184) to examine the contextual dependence of safety-seeking behaviors and to disentangle which types of concerns mediate the effect of social anxiety on safety-seeking behaviors. Results indicated that socially anxious individuals tend to seek safety on SNSs, and this tendency is stronger in less anonymous SNSs. Both evaluative concerns and privacy concerns mediate the relation between social anxiety and safety-seeking behaviors, while the indirect effect of evaluative concerns is stronger than that of privacy. Publicness of an SNS strengthened these indirect effects. These findings highlight the importance of safety perceptions in different online environments, and thereby enrich the literature related to social anxiety and social media use.