“Your Life Sucks,” but I think “You Deserved It”: Social approval and disapproval of messages on FMyLife.com

This study used Social Judgment Theory (SJT) (Sherif & Hovland, 1961; Sherif, Sherif, & Nebergall, 1965) as a lens to understand how dominant societal standards for social support manifest in raters' judgments of postings on a pop-culture website. The pop-culture website, FMyLife.com (FML) was analyzed to see if there were major themes within the community's norms consistent with those of society. A total of 25,220 posts were analyzed for major themes on how raters rate posts from those looking to commiserate about their situation online. Since generic standards of conduct and norms apply in groups and at the individual level via computer-mediated communication, (Marques, Abrams, & Serodio, 2001; Wang, Walther, & Hancock, 2009), examples of common themes that relate to universal norms and ideologies are discussed pertaining to the two options of the FML website - “your life sucks” and “you deserved it.” Ten percent of posts for each option were then chosen at random to secure a frequency count for posts found within the themes. Results exhibit how elements of SJT play a role in the rating process of posts, and directions for future research are suggested.