Should You Post That? A Social Mindfulness Approach to Sharing Information About Others Online

People commonly post content that is about others, for example, when they upload photographs of friends or tag family members in written posts. This article reviews the antecedents and outcomes of posting about others and proposes social mindfulness as a means of decision making that might enable people to avoid negative outcomes from online sharing (e.g., friends feeling betrayed). Social mindfulness entails being thoughtful of others and is enabled by attention and perspective taking. In the context of online postings, social mindfulness involves directing attention to content, taking the perspectives of the others involved, and making decisions that are thought to align with others’ preferences. Two preregistered studies supplemented this conceptual work. One established the prevalence of the phenomenon, showing that nearly half of people’s posts contain information about others. The second demonstrated that being socially mindful predicted being less likely to post content that others might object to sharing.