Location cue on social media posts affects user response to others’ experiences

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The old maxim “location, location, location” may be as important in the social media landscape as it is in real estate. When a social media post about a user’s personal experiences, feelings or beliefs includes geographic information, that location cue may affect how much readers like and empathize with the poster, according to a study led by Penn State researchers.

They found that location cues influenced perceived homophily — or the similarity felt by a user to the original poster in terms of attitudes, values and background. This in turn predicted users’ likelihood to like the post and empathize with the poster. The research team’s findings are currently available online in advance of print publication in the journal New Media & Society.

“Our work is a psychological study about online human nature,” said study co-author S. Shyam Sundar, Evan Pugh University Professor and James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects at Penn State. “When you’re told on social media that a person is posting from a particular location, that location cue activates all kinds of thoughts in your head, like familiarity with the location and perceived similarities with the original poster. Those psychological traces affect how you respond to the posted message.”

The researchers used an online survey platform to recruit 240 social media users in China, where a policy mandating that social media companies display a user’s approximate location went into effect in 2022. Then they composed two messages — one about fear of marriage originating from familial tensions, the other about anxiety and uncertainty arising from peer pressure — and formatted them to look like they were posted to a popular social media app. The posts displayed one of four different locations: Beijing, the capital city of China; Guizhou, a Chinese province; the United States; and no location.

Participants read a post about one of the two topics and seen as coming from one of the four locations. Then they answered questions about their perceptions and reactions to the message and the poster, such as how geographically close the poster and the experience described in the post were to the reader’s location; how similar the poster seemed to the reader in terms of attitude, values and background; and how much they liked and empathized with the poster.

The researchers found that location information had a significant effect on perceived homophily, specifically in terms of attitudes, values and backgrounds. Participants reported a higher level of perceived homophily in terms of attitude and values with posters from Beijing compared to the other three location conditions. In terms of backgrounds, they reported a lower level of homophily with posters from the United States compared to Beijing and Guizhou. The researchers also found that such homophily perceptions explained how the displayed user location affected readers psychologically: A higher level of perceived homophily was associated with more liking of and empathy with the poster as well as less perceived social distance.

“These findings suggest that a simple location cue can influence individuals’ evaluations of the poster by affecting perceived homophily, even though in reality the displayed user location on a post may not always reflect the poster’s origin; the person may simply be traveling or studying in a different location,” said Yansheng Liu, first author of the study and a doctoral candidate in mass communications at Penn State.

Liu further explained that these findings imply that displayed location information on social media might create a new criterion for social categorization of strangers, meaning it serves as a label that guides how individuals perceive others.

In addition, the study found that readers’ perceived spatial distance with the poster and the experience described in the post did not play an important role in how location cues affect them psychologically.

“Although the original purpose for mandating location disclosure was to foster accountability and credibility of social media posts, we discovered that location has deeper psychological meanings for users, shaping how they read and react to what other people share online,” Sundar said.

Jingshi Kang, research assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and a former visiting scholar at Penn State, also contributed to the work.