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Offline Norms and Online Behaviors: A Study of How Audience Perception Shapes Online Black Political Engagement

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
The study of Black American’s involvement in politics has been parsed with literature emphasizing the role historical and social contexts have had on black political behaviors—from Jim Crow segregation, to the Civil Rights movement, to the election and reelection of the first Black President. White and Laird have supplied extensive research to this discipline by using black American’s support for the Democratic Party as a proxy to answer how group unity in political choices is maintained. Yet, the perception of our online audience as a variable for enforcing racial group norms has been understudied in this discipline. The goal of this thesis is to bridge the conforming mechanisms present in our offline networks to those in our online networks, observing whether racial pressures in online spaces push for conformity around norms of black political behaviors. To do this, I design a survey experiment that tests whether black users’ engagement with anti-black or pro-black messages are contingent on whether they perceive the racial make-up of their online network to be black or white. Overall, data from the survey is consistent with the idea that the perceived race of our online network does influence black users’ engagements to group-based messages. These findings suggests that our online behaviors are motivated, in part, by our attachment to racial and social group identities.

Description

Type of resource text
Date created June 2, 2021
Date modified December 5, 2022
Publication date September 8, 2021; June 2, 2021

Creators/Contributors

Author DeFoe, Lyndon
Thesis advisor Jefferson, Hakeem

Subjects

Subject racial group norms
Subject social identity
Subject audience perception
Subject online networks
Subject black political norms
Genre Text
Genre Thesis

Bibliographic information

Related item
Preferred citation
Kamin, J. (2019). Social Media and Information Polarization: Amplifying Echoes or Extremes? Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan
Preferred citation
Brock Jr., A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. N.p.: New York University Press.
Preferred citation
White, I. K., & Laird, C. N. (2020). Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. N.p.: Princeton University Press.
Preferred citation
Sunstein, C. R. (2019). Conformity: The Power of Social Influences. N.p.: New York University Press.
Location https://purl.stanford.edu/wg608dc4783

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License
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Preferred citation

DeFoe, L. (2021). Offline Norms and Online Behaviors: A Study of How Audience Perception Shapes Online Black Political Engagement. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at http://purl.stanford.edu/wg608dc4783

Collection

Stanford University, Department of Political Science, Undergraduate Thesis Collection

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Contact information

ldefoe21@stanford.edu

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