The article focuses on processes of group identification and how individuals adapt in an online forum. The authors analyze texts that have been generated by users in the Swedish online forum Flashback. The focus of the analysis was how users express themselves when participating in discussions online. The authors followed individual users over time and found that individuals adapt to the language of other users in the forum. In addition, individuals use language that signal that a collective identity is formed, for example, through a decreased use of “I” and an increased use of “we”.
Read the article on jspp.psychopen.eu
How do individuals adapt to groups online?
Hanna Bäck has, together with Emma Bäck, Marie Gustafsson Sendén and Sverker Sikström, co-authored the article ”From I to We: Group Formation and Linguistic Adaption in an Online Xenophobic Forum”, which was recently published in Journal of Social and Political Psychology.