The Effects Of Internet Using On Collectivism And Individualism

Since the Internet being widely used, people spend a plenty of time on the Internet which affect the user’s cognition, emotion, the strategies of problem and so on. Different from the characteristics of real world, internet has some features, such as anonymous, instantaneous, crossing the barriers of reality, that can meet people’s various needs. Two most major Internet use motivations are social-affective motivation and information-acquisition motivation, driven by different network use caused different effects, for instence, enhancement of competitive consciousness, higher in-group loyalty. Obviously, Internet use may have some influence on the social cultural personality-individualism and collectivism.However, currently there is rarely research on the Internet influence of individualism and collectivism, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. The influence is a long-term adaptation of human to the information society. The present study provides a variety of evidence, support Internet used to the users of the influence of individualism and collectivism. Therefore, this study through two research to explore the relationship between the Internet use and individualism and collectivism. The first one adopt questionnaire survey method is used to ascertain the correlativity, and the second from the perspective of cognitive to explore the Internet use motives influence on individualism and collectivism.Study one, using correlation and regression to explore the correlativity of Internet use, motivation and individualism and collectivism. The questionnaire is contain individualism-collectivism scale, Internet use motivation scale, demographic scale and the self report to declare the duration of Interner daily use. The results showed that:(1) after controlling demographic variables, the duration of Internet use could significantly predict level of individualism. (2) the information-acquisition motive can moderate the prediction of Internet use time on individualism.Study 2, through the experimental method to explore whether the information acquisition motive can cause the individualism and collectivism’s cognitive processing tendency. Using the implicit association paradigm,2 (high, low level of information acquisition motivation)* 2 (compatible task, incompatible task) mix design. Variance analysis results indicate that primed by high and low motivation task, the subjects are more likely to cognize the network word as the individualism, and this cognitive bias moderated by different levels of motivation.Generally speaking, the duration of Internet use can predict the individualism and moderated by the information-acquisition motive. Access to the network behavior Information-acquisition motive can cause cognitive bias of individualism.