Social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat offer adolescents many opportunities to control how other users see and perceive them. By observing their peers’ self-presentations and receiving feedback on their own self-presentations from them, adolescents learn what is typical (descriptive norms) and appropriate (injunctive norms) on different social media platforms. Based on computer-assisted face-to-face surveys with German Instagram and/or Snapchat users aged between 14 and 16 years ( N = 1,002), we examined the impact of descriptive and injunctive norms on adolescents’ self-presentation practices on social media. Drawing on the theory of normative social behavior and the affordances approach, we also considered the norm-moderating factors of outcome expectations, group identity, platform differences, and perceived content persistence. We provide evidence that both descriptive and injunctive peer norms influence adolescents’ staged self-presentations, authentic self-presentations, and presentations of everyday life, although none of the moderating factors reached practical significance.

中文翻译：

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社会规范对青少年在社交媒体上的自我展示行为的影响


Instagram 和 Snapchat 等社交媒体平台为青少年提供了许多机会来控制其他用户如何看待和感知他们。通过观察同龄人的自我介绍并从他们那里获得对自己自我介绍的反馈，青少年可以了解不同社交媒体平台上的典型（描述性规范）和适当的（禁令性规范）。基于对 14 至 16 岁 （N = 1,002） 的德国 Instagram 和/或 Snapchat 用户进行的计算机辅助面对面调查，我们研究了描述性和禁令性规范对青少年在社交媒体上的自我展示习惯的影响。借鉴规范社会行为理论和可供性方法，我们还考虑了结果预期、群体身份、平台差异和感知内容持久性的规范调节因素。我们提供的证据表明，描述性和禁令性同伴规范都会影响青少年阶段性的自我介绍、真实的自我介绍和日常生活的呈现，尽管没有一个调节因素达到实际意义。