Qingyuan Zhang is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, South China University of Technology.
Lingyuan Zhang (Corresponding Author) is a research assistant at the Guangdong Tourism Strategy and Policy Research Center of South China University of Technology.
This paper is the phased result of the humanities and social science research youth fund project of the Ministry of Education "Research on the Collective Memory of 'Moderately Prosperous Society' in the 40 Years of Reform and Opening Up" (project approval number: 19YJC860050) and the basic scientific research business fund of the Central University of South China University of Technology (project approval number: XYZD201918).
A study of the origins
Since WeChat was launched in 2011, the number of users has grown rapidly, and the application functions have continued to expand. This not only makes WeChat a leader among the many social media platforms currently available, but also makes WeChat an operational platform that connects and influences real life. The huge number of users, good user experience and active social relationships make WeChat an important platform for the expression of public opinion at present, and is the most important public opinion field in China today (Xiong Yin, Zhao Zhenyu, 2016).
As one of the research hotspots of social media, based on WeChat analysis of self-presentation in user behavior (Shen Qi, 2015) and the influence of personal social capital changes (Zhao Shuguang, 2014; Zhou Yijin, Wei Jiachun, 2016) have gradually become key areas of related research. Through the continuous innovation and enhancement of functions, WeChat and many social media with different characteristics have profoundly affected the information interaction mode of the whole society on the one hand, and reconstructed the way many users perceive and present themselves in the real and virtual worlds on the other hand (Tong Hui, 2014).
WeChat users produce and transmit time-sensitive and original individual information by creating, selecting, disclosing and replacing personal data images, and personal data images, as the core element of "self-presentation", can often become the key entry point for analyzing users' Internet survival psychology and behavior. A profile image in a social media platform is essentially a companion photo of a personal visual image that, along with the user's social name, serves as a business card for internet presence and interaction. The profile image is not only the first image that potential new friends see each other when they apply to "add friends", but also a relatively stable key visual image that represents the individual in the complex interaction of social media.
However, whether it is a relatively independent virtual world in the early days of the Internet, or a complex world that currently mixes virtual and reality, is the network psychology and network behavior of network users equivalent or equal proportional projection corresponding to the psychological characteristics and behavior habits of real individuals? Academics and the industry have always had diverse views and controversies on this issue. This complex problem is specific to WeChat, and the entry point for observation and research can be found from the relationship between impression management or self-presentation and personality. Personality traits influence and even dominate individual survival and reality psychology and actions. This article further focuses on the choice of weChat users' impression management or self-presentation to the selection of personal data images, and explores whether and how they are affected by the user's personality traits. In addition, the correlation between users' social media performance and behavior and real personality traits is the basic premise of big data analysis in the current fields of marketing, public opinion research and judgment, and social management, so whether the correlation relationship is established and what form it takes is crucial.
II. Literature Review
(1) Research on the relationship between self-presentation and personality traits: Interdisciplinary migration and consistency controversy
With the popularity of the Internet, social media accounts for more and more people's lives, and the self-presentation in social networks has become an entry point for scholars in the fields of communication and sociology and psychology to study the user behavior of social media. It is user-oriented research, exploring the characteristics, specific performance and strategic methods of users' self-presentation in social media. The concept of "self-presentation" (or transcendentation of self) and its theory were first proposed by the sociologist Goffman (1959) on the basis of symbolic interactionism, and are often used in conjunction with the term "impression management." The two concepts are slightly different, in the sense of sociology or social psychology, "impression management" refers to a goal-oriented conscious or unconscious process in which people try to influence the perception of people, things and things by regulating and controlling information in social interaction. "Self-presentation" refers to the individual's efforts to show himself and influence others in order to make others see him according to his wishes. Social media users construct virtual online identities to accommodate spatial parallelism (Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe, 2007), and personal data has become a key tool for individual self-presentation and image shaping (Joinson, 2008). Through the writing of personal information and the upload and exchange of images, people carry out "selective exposure" and "self-impression shaping", creating a "mimetic self" in the Internet, and forming a "performative disclosure" on the side. With the launch and popularity of Twitter and Facebook, scholars began to use these multi-social platforms to conduct interdisciplinary research on social media user profile images.
(2) Research on self-presentation of social media users: WeChat sample value and micro-perspective significance
At present, the research on WeChat's self-presentation mainly revolves around the use of WeChat, and the circle of friends is the main entry point. Scholars discuss the self-presentation of users by studying weChat usage behaviors such as sharing, liking, commenting, and interacting with others such as images in the circle of friends, and analyze the self-presentation characteristics, motivations, strategies, and the impact of self-presentation on interpersonal relationship construction and personal social capital of WeChat users. The self-presentation characteristics, strategies, motivations and other related issues of college students based on the WeChat circle of friends are one of the current research hotspots (Sun Xing, 2016; Zhou Shuang, 2016). With the widespread embedding of memes, group chats and public accounts in the daily lives of the public, research on symbol analysis in the process of information exchange in WeChat groups, network public opinion and user participation behavior under the construction of functional fields of public accounts has also been promoted.
At present, there are few local studies that cut into the self-presentation of social media from the microscopic perspective of "profile image" or "WeChat avatar", and its relationship with personality traits has yet to be carried out. On the one hand, this paper characterizes the image expression provided by the test from the perspective of type division, clearly presents the self-symbol representation trend and impression management tendency of WeChat users, especially the digital indigenous groups, in the network virtual space; on the other hand, based on the perspective of personality traits, it explores the self-presentation with implied meaning and performance possibility, further explores the correlation mechanism between the individual's controlling impression management and the unconscious personality reveal, and tries to spy on the subjective nature behind the image symbols in the virtual network space.
3. Study design and sample situation
(1) Research hypotheses
The "Big Five Personality Model", or five-factor model theory, is one of the most widely used theories in recent years to study the relationship between user personality and behavior. Rosengren (1974) argues that personal differences such as age, gender, and personality affect the use of mass media. Goldberg (1981) proposed to use the "Big Five personality model" to summarize the five basic dimensions of personality, namely neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and compiled a corresponding trait description adjective list descriptive adjectives,tDA), presents a more specific set of personality traits for each of the five generalized factors. The Big Five personality model theory has been successfully applied to popular media such as movies, music, TV shows, books, and cultural events.
The use of different types of personality to distinguish and measure individual differences in social interactions, the combination of personality theory and WeChat profile images, on the one hand, is helpful to better understand the user's social network behavior and the reasons behind it through the data of different personality types; on the other hand, online profile images hide a large amount of information about users, based on their visual characteristics and possible psychological mechanisms, the image is classified and discussed, which is a direct material for understanding people's impression formation and identity management in WeChat. This is of far-reaching significance for exploring the identity construction of users between the virtual and real worlds, user psychological early warning, and network public opinion management.
This study believes that the choice of online profile images is a self-presentation behavior that expects others to see themselves according to their own wishes, and different personality traits such as neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeability, and conscientiousness will affect the choice of online profile images by WeChat users. Based on this, the research hypothesis is proposed:
H1: The higher the personality trait score, the more WeChat users are more likely to use images containing themselves.
It is worth noting that WeChat's various information interaction functions have built a complex communication space that integrates reality and the network. Among them, there are exchange spaces for circles of friends or private or public photo albums and various types of sharing, there are single-person chat windows and group chat windows, and there are open spaces for displaying through shaping personal data. These multi-dimensional cyberspaces are nested in each other, which may cause people to present a different and more diverse self-image in the virtual WeChat space than in the real world. Therefore, this study proposes the hypothesis:
H2: The greater the difference in personality traits, the greater the difference in WeChat users' choice of profile images.
In addition, while examining the relationship between variables, the study was able to present the current distribution of personality traits of the study group and the preferences of using WeChat profile images. There should be significant differences in the structure of personality traits between the two types of WeChat users who use images containing their own, so this study will also examine the correlation between the five factors of personality traits of different types of WeChat users, and put forward the following assumptions:
H3: The stronger the correlation between personality traits, the more WeChat users are more likely to use images containing themselves.
(2) Research methods
Considering that the use of qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews and focus groups will inevitably have the problem of secondary processing of survey subjects, it may lead to a decrease in the credibility of the information obtained and increase the complexity of the analysis. Therefore, this study used a questionnaire method to collect quantitative data on the image usage preferences and personality traits tests of WeChat user groups.
The formal questionnaire contains three parts: WeChat profile image usage, personality quality table, and basic information of respondents. Questionnaires are edited, distributed and recycled through the online survey website "Questionnaire Network". The website supports questionnaire modification during the distribution process, so the questionnaire filling URL used in the pre-survey and the formal survey can be consistent, and the ID that identifies WeChat users can be set to avoid repeated filling in the pre-survey and the formal survey.
The questionnaire section of "WeChat Profile Image Usage Measurement" mainly measures the type of WeChat profile image currently used by WeChat users. This study mainly refers to the image classification in strano (2008) and Wu, Chang and Yuan (2015), combined with interview surveys, and finally formed a profile image classification with 2 large dimensions and 15 sub-dimensions.
The scale used to measure the personality traits of respondents in this study was based on the Reference to Costa and McCrae's Big Five Personality Scale (NEO-FFI-R), and selected the Chinese version of the Big Five Personality Scale (NEO-FFI-R) mentioned in Zhao Jingbo's book Personality and Health. NEO-FFI-R, used to assess the five dimensions or factors of personality, is a five-point Rickett scale that contains 60 questions, five dimensions of neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeability, and conscientiousness, corresponding to 12 questions.
(3) Research objects and samples
This study takes the two generations born after 1980 and grew up with the Internet as the research object, based on the following two considerations: First, they have moved from youth to maturity, and experienced the reciprocating cycle of the rise and decline of many social media platforms in China, SNS website (Tianya.com, Renren.com, etc.), Sina Weibo, and WeChat are all based on the post-80s and post-90s generations as the main users. Secondly, the post-80s and post-90s groups who have experienced more and more Internet childhood have gradually formed a user model with their own characteristics, and have gradually become a mainstream group that embodies the strong characteristics of online indigenous people.
The questionnaire was aimed at the groups currently using WeChat, and the snowball sampling method was used to spread through the WeChat platform. In order to improve the recovery rate and the effective completion rate of the questionnaire, the study set up a paid reward mechanism of 400 "raffle red packets", and each respondent who participated in the survey could randomly select a small amount of red envelopes after completing and submitting the questionnaire.
A random sample survey was formally conducted from January 10 to March 1 and from March 13 to April 1, 2017, and a total of 615 questionnaires were recovered. The questionnaire that expresses the same question before and after and the answer to the opposite question is regarded as an invalid questionnaire, and the effective sample size used for statistical analysis after excluding the invalid questionnaire is 554, which meets the minimum standard of the ratio of the number of items to the number of samples is 1:5, and the efficiency is 90.10%. The Cronbach's Alpha value of the overall scale of the questionnaire was greater than 0.8, and the Alpha value of The Cronbach's alpha value of the five dimensional variables of the personality measurement scale was greater than 0.7; the factor extraction results of this study showed that the KMOs were 0.922, and the personality measurement scale extracted five common factors, indicating that the questionnaire had good reliability and validity.
Among the respondents to this survey, 45.49% were men and 54.51% were women, with an average age of 24.16 years. In terms of educational attainment, the number of junior high school and below, high school, college, bachelor's degree or above is 40, 125, 82, 280 and 27 respectively. In terms of income level, the proportion of groups below 5,000 yuan reached 87.55%, of which the group below 2,000 yuan reached 63.54%. The proportion of groups with other income levels (more than 5,000 yuan) was 12.45%. In terms of status, students accounted for the largest proportion, accounting for 64.98%,; followed by company employees with a proportion of 12.82%,; and other (including public officials, teachers, business managers, farmers, self-employed, retirees, unemployed people, etc.) accounted for 22.20%.
4. WeChat users' personality traits and profile image usage characteristics
(1) Analysis of WeChat users' personality traits
Among the samples in this survey, the average score for conscientiousness was the highest and the average score for neuroticism was the lowest. This may be related to the relatively large number of high-educated samples in this survey, the high-educated group has a relatively strong sense of responsibility, and the thinking and decision-making ability of this group is relatively excellent, can effectively cope with external pressures, and the ability to regulate emotions is also relatively good, which is also the characteristic of the neurotic low-score group. People in the neurotic low-scoring group are less emotional and calm, but this does not equate to the fact that this group often has positive emotional experiences.
The survey data showed that the proportion of neurotic high-scoring groups (with the mean as the boundary point) was much higher than that of high-scoring groups in other personality trait dimensions, and the number of extroverted and conscientious low-grade groups far exceeded their high-level groups. A high neurotic score means a tendency to have psychological stress, unrealistic thoughts, excessive demands and impulses, a better chance to experience negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, depression, and poor ability to think, make decisions, and respond effectively to external pressures. People with low extroversion are quieter, more cautious, don't like to have too much contact with the outside world, and prefer to be alone. Individuals with low conscientiousness generally do not achieve much, but are often considered happy, funny, and good playmates, and prone to impulsive behavior. This also partially confirms the intuitive perception of the current network culture and the characteristics of the young generation such as impetuousness, closure, changeability, low ability to resist pressure, and large emotional changes. These characteristics may affect how WeChat profile images are presented and how people present themselves on social media platforms.
(2) Analysis of the use of WeChat users' profile images
In the sample of this survey, 25.1% of WeChat users currently use profile images that "contain their own images", while 35.6% of users said that they have used "containing their own images" as WeChat profile images.
Among the current uses of "images with your own profile", the most frequent are images of faces facing the camera and images posed alone, followed by images at special moments and images showing humor or creativity, and third images with friends, images that feel romantic. This aspect shows that in the group that chooses to show their avatars to the public, most of them are willing to express their positive identities, which echoes the research views of Cao Fei and others (2015). On the other hand, it can be seen that with respect to the presentation of group images, users tend to use images of individual meaning. Due to the gradual separation of daily life and practical interaction due to technological dependence, WeChat is constantly strengthening the Internet survival atmosphere that is different from the physical space, and many technical space interaction paradoxes such as "both loneliness and carnival" promoted by social media have also continuously formed a new social reality in this atmosphere. Thus, as information in social networks that users can operate and control themselves, the use of images containing themselves may be able to compensate for the weak authenticity that the user himself or herself generates in other uncontrolled aspects.
In the current use of "no profile image with its own", excluding other images that are not in the statistical type queue, the group that uses "star image" is the largest, of which 84.25% is the group aged 18-30, and their expression of celebrity love is more direct and open. Such users do not express the image of the real self, but consciously give the content they want to express in the social network, choose a real and more practical image to symbolize themselves in the virtual world, which not only releases their own interests and hobbies, but also has the tendency to increase attention.
Among the current uses of "Images without own profiles", the second most used is "Images of Animated Anime", followed by "Images of Animals" and "Images of Plants". Studies on social networking motivations and differences in specific behaviors have shown that cultural factors influence the specific usage behaviors of users of social networks. Marcus and Krishinamurthi (2009) study of social network users in Japan showed that users in Japan tend to use animals and cartoons as their profile images. Chinese and Japanese cultures are similar to a certain extent, and popular culture such as anime influences the use of profile images by Chinese and Japanese users.
As can be seen from Table 4, compared with WeChat users who choose not to contain their own images, the personality traits of WeChat users who choose to contain their own images have higher average scores. Table 5 shows that WeChat users with high scores on personality traits other than agreeable have a correlation between their personality traits and whether they use images containing themselves. The hypothesis H1: the higher the personality trait score, the more likely it is to use images containing itself.
(3) Analysis of the relationship between WeChat users' personality traits and image usage
By exploring the Pearson correlation between the big five personality traits, the personality traits are evaluated using the images currently in use, and the correlation between the personality traits and the self-presentation of WeChat users based on profile images is explored.
A large number of Facebook- and Twitter-based user studies have shown that online users' personality traits have an impact on their profile image selection. Wu, Chang, and Yuan (2015) explored the relationship between profile images and users' personalities in the form of live visual studies based on the Facebook platform, and found that users' personality traits have an impact on the choice of profile images, and profile images reflect users' personality traits. This is consistent with the conclusions of most other studies that social networks, including Facebook, reflect users' actual personality traits rather than idealized representations of traits. Through multi-dimensional and high-frequency interactions, social networks often show real personalities, and it is more difficult to construct an idealized identity.
However, from the data in Table 6, it can be seen that the correlation between weChat users' personality traits and the use of personal data images is not significant. The data results do not conform to the research expectations and common sense imagination, and also differ from the conclusions of similar studies abroad. That is, based on the survey results of WeChat users, the profile image does not show the user's personality very well. Therefore, it is not true to assume that H2 "the greater the difference in personality traits, the greater the difference in the choice of WeChat users' profile images". The choice of WeChat users for personal data images may be more of a random expression, or in the influencing factors of WeChat users' use of personal data images, there are other more important mechanisms than the differences between personality traits and tendencies, such as the instant construction of their own pluralistic idealized state.
(4) Correlation analysis between personality traits of WeChat users using different types of images
This study further compares and analyzes the correlation between the five factors of personality traits of weChat user groups using images with their own and not having their own images. In the past research on personality traits as influencing factors, it is more to explore the correlation between personality traits and other hypothetical variables, and rarely has a special study on the correlation between the five factors of personality traits. Based on WeChat users who selected different types of images, this study observed the correlation characteristics between the five factors of personality traits.
The results of the analysis showed that among WeChat users who used images containing their own images as profile images, there was a significant correlation between the five factors of their personality traits. Specifically, it is manifested in: (1) there is a significant positive correlation between neurotic personality and extroverted, open and responsible personality (p<0.001), and the correlation coefficient is between 0.389 and 0.501, indicating that when the user's neurotic personality score is higher, the higher its score on extroverted, open and conscientious personality. (2) There was a significant negative correlation between the pleasant personality and the neurotic, extroverted, open, and conscientious personality (p<0.001), and the correlation coefficient was between -.701 and -.494, indicating that the higher the user's pleasant personality score, the lower the score on neurotic, extroverted, open, and conscientious personality. (3) The relationship between extroversion and conscientiousness showed the most significant relationship, and the correlation coefficient was as high as 0.724.
As can be seen from Table 8, among the respondents who used non-own images as WeChat profile images, there was no correlation between neurotic personality and conscientious personality (p>0.001), and other factors showed a more obvious correlation. Specifically, it is manifested in: (1) there is a certain positive correlation between neurotic personality and extroverted and open personality (p<0.001), and the correlation coefficient is between 0.221 and 0.365, indicating that when the user's neurotic personality score is higher, the higher the score on extroverted, open and responsible personality. (2) There was a significant negative correlation between the agreeable personality and the neurotic, extroverted, open,and conscientious personality (p<0.001), and the correlation coefficient was between -0.560 and -0.354, indicating that the higher the user's pleasant personality score, the lower the score on neurotic, extroverted, open, and conscientious personality.
In general, there is a correlation between the five factors of the personality traits of WeChat users who choose two types of images, but the relationship between strength and weakness, positive and negative correlations is inconsistent. Compared with WeChat users who use weChat users who do not have their own images, the correlation coefficient between the personality traits of WeChat users who use their own images is higher, and the relationship is more significant. That is, to test hypothesis H3: the stronger the correlation between personality traits, the more inclined to use images containing themselves. And there are differences between the two groups in the relationship between neurotic personality and conscientious personality, there is a correlation between WeChat users who use images containing their own images, and there is no correlation between the neurotic personality of WeChat users who use weChat users who do not have their own images.
V Conclusions and discussion
Profile images in social media have different qualities than other images uploaded by users: a user's friends can see other shared images in addition to their profile images, while strangers may only see profile images; more importantly, this image is a symbolic button that they are "actively" facing others, which appear in every chat window or in each circle of friends. Therefore, studying WeChat avatars plays a significant role in understanding profile images in shaping the online identity of social media users. Through the analysis of the personality traits of digital indigenous groups and the use of WeChat profile images, the main research findings are as follows:
First of all, there is a certain pattern between the five factors of personality traits that people project on social media. WeChat users who choose two types of images have five dimensions of personality traits and are grouped in obvious groups, with high-group groups tending to use images containing their own appearance, and low-grouping groups tending to use images that do not contain their own appearance. However, not every dimension of the big five personality shows a significant impact, indicating that there are more influencing factors that need to be considered and designed in the self-presentation behavior of WeChat users' profile image selection. In the future, it is necessary to expand to a wider range of groups such as the post-00s and post-60s, such as the new and elderly, and improve the law between the five factors of personality traits of more and more categories of groups and their deep influence mechanism on people's behavior choices.
Secondly, this study reveals that the scoring trends of five types of personality traits have basic conclusions for the results of weChat users' use of profile images. In general, the proportion of low-group groups in the five dimensions of personality traits among WeChat users is greater than that of high-group groups, and the influence of low scores on the use of weChat users' profile images is more prominent, and they are more reluctant to present images containing their own appearance elements to the outside world, and the proportion of this group is much higher than that of low-scoring groups in other personality trait dimensions. Neurotic trait groups are related to keywords such as anxiety and depression, emotional instability, etc., tend to choose images containing their own appearance, and the high-scoring group of the big five personality is mostly neurotic personality, and the high-scoring people are more active in self-disclosure on social media.
In addition, this study presents the result that "personality traits do not have a significant impact on the use of WeChat users' profile images", which further illustrates that there are more influencing factors that need to be considered in the self-presentation behavior of WeChat users' profile image selection. Personality traits as the most basic psychological category of people cannot directly affect the choice of WeChat profile images, and the inconsistencies between people's psychological state in the Internet world and their real psychological personality in the real world reveal an "unreal online and offline living state". This has to prompt people to think about a series of related questions about the identity construction of WeChat users in the virtual world and the existence of "Internet personality".
Finally, a sample survey based on domestic digital natives showed that in 2017, WeChat users tended to use images that did not contain their own, most of which were celebrities and anime avatars, which was different from the results of the Facebook-based study. Taiwanese scholars Wu, Chang, and Yuan came to a key conclusion in a 2015 study of 1,635 Facebook users in Taiwan, noting that "after evaluating their Facebook friends, nearly half of the respondents said they would also use images of their appearance that are more intuitive, such as faces posed alone or facing the camera." Based on this result, we tentatively suspect that there are some differences in the thinking and strategies of Chinese and Western groups in social media self-presentation. As a social platform with privacy constraints, when strangers add themselves as friends, some of the personal data containing image data is the information first presented to others. For the sake of protecting personal privacy, the younger group of WeChat users tends to use images that do not contain their own images as avatars that are logical. As WeChat gradually becomes the main platform for information exchange and life services of various groups, the discussion of the internal logic of "personality disclosure and individual conscious self-presentation in unconscious behavior patterns" needs to be extended to a wider group to further verify. In the design of future research, more influencing factors such as sociodemography, lifestyle, and psychological characteristics need to be considered, and the key influencing factors and mechanisms of WeChat users' profile image use other than personality traits need to be explored more deeply.
This article is a shorthand version, the references are omitted, and the original article was published in International Press, No. 1, 2021.
The cover image comes from the web
Editor/Melissa
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