Balancing out feelings of risk by playing it safe: The effect of social networking on subsequent risk judgment

• Social networking experiences have downstream influences on unrelated judgments.
• Social networking has two types: initiating new ties and cementing existing ties.
• People perceive the former to entail greater risk than the latter.
• These feelings of risk are used as information for unrelated risk judgments.
• People avoid risk in unrelated domains after performing the former vs. the latter.

Will individuals’ social networking influence their judgments and related psychological processes on tasks in remote, unrelated domains? This research examines downstream spillover effects that social networking experiences may have on individuals’ risk-related judgment and behavior. Building on the feelings-as-information paradigm, we propose that individuals who engage in initiating new ties or contacts will subsequently behave in a more risk-averse manner than those who engage in cementing existing relationships. Initiating new ties generates more intense feelings that individuals have taken a risk, compared to cementing existing ties. Consequently, initiating new ties produces the tendency to balance out feelings of risk across unrelated domains. In four studies, we confirm the effect of social networking on subsequent risk judgment and the role of feelings of risk as its underlying process.