Could posting consumption on social media gain respect and liking as expected? The moderating role of consumption type

With the rapid development of social media, posting consumption on social media has become a popular self-presentation strategy. Posters want to gain respect and liking from others. Based on the self-biased tendency of people’s perspective-taking, the current study explored whether posters would overestimate how much others respect and like them. In addition, this study explored whether the extent of overestimation depends on the type of consumption, i.e., material vs. experiential consumption, posters choose to display. The current study conducted three experiments (n = 204 for Study 1, n = 251 for Study 2, and n = 220 for Study 3) in which the type of consumption was manipulated in three different ways. In each experiment, both posters’ expected evaluations and readers’ actual evaluations were collected. The results of three experiments and two internal meta-analyses confirmed that posters generally overestimate how much readers respect and like them when posting consumption on social media. Compared with material consumption posters, experiential consumption posters demonstrate smaller or no overestimation. Overall, compared with posting material consumption, posting experiential consumption is a more reliable self-presentation strategy on social media because the likelihood of receiving lower than expected evaluations is smaller.