The study of attribution theory in regards to Facebook status updates.

Abstract

The phenomenon of updating one’s life events on social networking sites has led to the development of this present study. This paper aimed to study attribution and the likelihood of people posting their events on their status updates online. It was hypothesized that for negative events, the lower the perceived internality and controllability of the events, the higher the likelihood that they would be posted. For positive events, perceived internality and perceived controllability should be independent of the likelihood of them being posted. Participants were asked to recall positive and negative events and to answer questions relating to them. In this study, the hypothesis for positive events was supported. However, hypotheses for negative events were not supported.