It’s perhaps intuitive to think that we portray ourselves and communicate differently via digital media than we do offline, but that all digital media functions in much the same way.  Alas, new research from the University of Pennsylvania highlights how this isn’t really the case.

The research finds that when we use our smartphones, we tend to reveal more personal information about ourselves than we do when using a desktop computer.  This is not simply a matter of us using different platforms on our phones, for our tweets, for instance, are more likely to be written from the first person and disclose negative emotions when written on our phones.

Similarly, when we view adverts that request personal information from us, we’re more likely to provide it when we view the ad on our phone versus our computer.

Lower inhibitions

“Writing on one’s smartphone often lowers the barriers to revealing certain types of sensitive information for two reasons; one stemming from the unique form characteristics of phones and the second from the emotional associations that consumers tend to hold with their device,” the researchers explain.

The paper highlights how the small nature of our phones can make viewing and creating content harder than on our computers.  This results in users narrowly focusing on completing the task, and shutting out external factors that might inhibit our self-disclosure.

Secondly, we tend to associate our phones with familiarity and comfort, because they’re with us all the time and play such a crucial role in our lives.  They’re akin to ‘adult pacifiers’, that bring considerable comfort to us.  It create the same kind of comfortable ‘safe zone’ that we experience when talking with friends rather than strangers.

The findings emerged after the researchers analyzed several hundred thousand tweets, and thousands of restaurant reviews from TripAdisor.  Each piece of content contained the device people used to post it.  The researchers used natural-language processing alongside human judgments of self-disclosure to analyze each piece of content for trends.

The researchers believe their findings have clear implications for both firms and consumers.  For instance, if a company wants to get a deeper understanding of their consumers, they may be better off interacting with them via smartphones than via computers.  Similarly, they may wish to encourage reviews to be left via our phones because they’re more likely to be honest.