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Abstract The use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, provides ample opportunities for the pursuit of interpersonal connection but may also bring to mind one's social isolation. The present research examined the effects of interpersonal neglect (i.e., low number of responding Facebook friends) on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs. Two studies revealed that receiving few responses from one's Facebook friends threatens the needs for belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. These effects were observable over and above the impact of general social connection to others (i.e., total number of Facebook friends) and tone of responses. Notes 1Number of Facebook friends included one outlier that was more than 3 standard deviations above the mean. Excluding this participant did not change the pattern of findings. There were nine outliers for number of participant's Facebook friends who had sent greetings on the participant's last birthday, but excluding these participants also did not change the pattern of findings. Moreover, in addition to the Pearson product–moment correlation coefficients reported in the tables, we calculated Spearman's rank-order correlations that can be used when the assumptions of the Pearson correlation are violated. However, Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients were very similar. The same applies to Study 2. 2Note that reliability of perceived control was low. The same applies to Study 2. In contrast, Aydin and colleagues (Citation2010) reported adequate reliability (α = .71). We used the exact same item wordings as Aydin et al. so it is unclear why the reliability coefficients were so much lower than those reported by Aydin et al. In any case, future work examining the link between interpersonal neglect via Facebook and the satisfaction of psychological needs should employ a different scale to assess perceived control. Note. |r| > .10, p .17, p .22, p .05, p .07, p .09, p < .001.
Greitemeyer et al. (Thu,) studied this question.