Talking about psychology and cognition in online social networks

As we known in the recent two lectures, social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. All the contents showed in the lecture concluding many definitions and illustrations, and there is no doubt that the whole study about social psychology is quite complicated. So why we spent so much time on this aspect? I can't figure out the answer at the beginning till I thought a lot after the lectures and searched related information online. Finally I was pretty sure that if someone really wanted to go into social networking, he must further study social psychology.

About Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we know it is a famous theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation". Maslow use the terms Physiological, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, and Self-Actualization needs to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through.

In the picture, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid, with the largest and most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom, and the need for self-actualization at the top. Social networking involves the Love/belonging level, Esteem level and Self-actualization level. Almost every social website helps people for their psychological need on those three levels. Those social websites live and develop stronger because they make their user more convenient. For example, through Facebook, now we may see new friends and find old friends at home with clicking only. Just a week ago, I was aware of the original derivation about Youtube in another class. The creators of Youtube firstly provided the website for single men and women to see each other as the potential mate via short videos. Nowadays not only the single but all people take videos and upload to the internet to show themselves and get satisfied by high click rates. Such steps of the development exactly follow the level's step. And it's not a coincidence.

Social psychology is so important and mysterious. Metacognition is defined as cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing. Epistemic cognition has 5 key components as followed: epistemic aims , structure of knowledge, certainty, sources, and justification of knowledge, epistemic virtue and responsibility, reliably and processes. If you want to further study about social psychological cognition more than these basic definitions, there is a series of courses by professor Kihlstrom in UC Berkeley highly recommended.

http://v.163.com/special/sp/socialcognition.html

How can technology enhance user experience and cognitive processing in a social network environment? With so many definitions, it seems hard to find a certain answer. But deep inside, every one wants to be a star and has his own needs. To enhance user experience, the website must satisfy the needs and facilitate metacognition and epistemic cognition. The Facebook timeline is a good example. Inspired from that example for a person how about the group timeline for more friends or couples, how about auto-party recommendation between similar hobby groups or the groups of some same core members like auto-friend recommendation?

Afterall, in the future, there will be more and more topics like Cooperation vs. Collaboration. Groups will often cooperate and collaborate in their social networks, including those on the online social networks. What we need to pay attention to is the collaboration is easier but the competition is more intense.