Psychology and the Internet: Building an Integrative Social Cognitive Research Agenda

There are wonderful opportunities for psychological research of social phenomena on the internet.In such research, one challenge would be to study information/communication and individual/group in conjunction with one another.In contrast to the stimulus-response paradigms that have so far dominated much research on internet (including our own), we believe that the particular nature of internet is best captured through research that is multilevel, dynamic and situated.In this paper we review some classic psychological approaches to the internet.Internet continues to challenge received understandings of the social psychological processes that would underpin social behavior ranging from romance to collective action: It is a research field ripe for conceptual and methodological progress.Sparrow and Chatman's target article for Psychological Inquiry examines the question of whether the Internet changes social cognition.It opens with a reflection on the state of psychological research on the Internet, which ends with the conclusion that "no integrated psychological approaches exist that systematically include the internet as a new presence in our informational environment" (p.274).The stated goal of the authors was to "provide avenues for future investigation" (p.273).Extending this metaphor of city planning, we wrote this commentary partly because Sparrow and Chatman, perhaps unintentionally, imply that these avenues would be built on remote and uninhabited land.In response we point to possible tribes who might already have built some settlements on this terrain.To facilitate the building of new avenues, we aim to sketch some of the geography and geology of the land.The following comments are thus intended to provide some background to the Sparrow and Chatman article, partly by pointing to psychological research directly relevant to the claims they make, partly by reflecting on their argument.We suggest that their analysis of how the Internet changes social cognition may be strong on the cognition but is short on the social.