If you've long thought that Snapchat's winking ghost logo is up to something—perhaps even "no good"—your suspicions have been confirmed. Snapchat is something of a smartphone singles bar, and to the significant other, it seems like each push notification could be a potential paramour.A study just published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking found that people are more jealous when their partner is Snapchatted than when they're Facebooked.
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Drawing from previous surveys of adult American Snapchatters—somewhere around 12 percent of smartphone users—and their own survey work in the UK, the researchers explained that "private information was seen as more secretive and suspicious, leading to jealousy within a relationship, and "recent research further demonstrates that private communication elicits stronger negative emotions, and that more exclusive messages are seen as threatening to the relationship." The principle of "if you've got nothing to hide, why are you hiding," applies, it seems.Snapchat, in addition to being more ephemeral, is also seen as more secretive than Facebook, but the same idea applies in Zuckerland too. "Regardless of gender, individuals felt jealous if they discovered that their partner had been tagged in a photo with an unknown person and that this photo was set to be private."
But there may be something else in play here. What I found interesting was what people use each service for. "Findings show that the main difference in motives were that Snapchat was used more for flirting and finding new love interests, whereas Facebook was still the main social networking site used for keeping in touch with friends."
You might think this means that Snapchat is, as the parents of America fear, mostly a dick-pic conduit, but on the contrary, the research indicates that mostly people are goofing off, showing what they're doing, and, as parents of America fear slightly less, sending a lot of selfies. Sexting, as it turns out, is one of the rarer activities, even if 1.3 percent of American Snapchat users admitted to using it "primarily for sexting," and slightly more than 14 percent used it for sexting occasionally. Really it's the sexters of America who should be worried, because more people are parodying sexting than actually doing it.
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But there may be something else in play here. What I found interesting was what people use each service for. "Findings show that the main difference in motives were that Snapchat was used more for flirting and finding new love interests, whereas Facebook was still the main social networking site used for keeping in touch with friends."
You might think this means that Snapchat is, as the parents of America fear, mostly a dick-pic conduit, but on the contrary, the research indicates that mostly people are goofing off, showing what they're doing, and, as parents of America fear slightly less, sending a lot of selfies. Sexting, as it turns out, is one of the rarer activities, even if 1.3 percent of American Snapchat users admitted to using it "primarily for sexting," and slightly more than 14 percent used it for sexting occasionally. Really it's the sexters of America who should be worried, because more people are parodying sexting than actually doing it.