Consistency of User’s Sexism Impacts the Likelihood of Confrontation on Social Media

Abstract: Despite the proliferation of equality-focused actions on social media, such as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, discrimination is still prevalent on these platforms. While confronting prejudice may reduce future discrimination (i.e., counter-speech), several factors limit confrontation within face-to-face interactions (i.e., social costs, perceived effectiveness, self-efficacy). Intervention is also more likely when others’ actions are driven by situational factors (i.e., external attribution) than stable features of personality (i.e., internal attributions). Yet, whether these antecedents of face-to-face confrontation parallel online confrontation is unclear. Participants ( N = 120) viewed a sexist or neutral social media profile manipulated to be consistent or inconsistent (i.e., facilitating internal and external attributions, respectively) and were asked to respond to the user’s recent post. Inconsistently sexist profiles were more likely to be confronted than consistently sexist profiles. However, participants exhibited more effort in responding (i.e., number of characters) to sexist than neutral prompts, regardless of the user’s consistency. Higher self-efficacy increased confrontation of sexist profiles, with larger effects emerging for inconsistent sexist behavior. Contrary to expectations, heightened social cost (i.e., perceived risks of confrontation) increased response effort for sexist profiles. These counterintuitive results indicate cognitive appraisals for online counter-speech might differ from face-to-face confrontation, potentially driven by partial anonymity, physical distance, and temporal delay of feedback observed in social media interactions. While results provide partial support for the role of attribution and individual differences for online confrontation, additional research is needed to understand antecedents of counter-speech on social media.