How cognitive elaboration fosters knowledge acquisition on social media - a field experiment

Abstract

Social media technologies have been criticized as ineffective sources of information because users seem to increase their subjective but not their objective knowledge. While different factors such as multitasking have been brought up as explanations, direct and fair comparisons of learning outcomes between social and traditional news media are missing. This two-wave field experiment (N1 = 902, N2 = 663) shows that whereas participants receiving information on social media did learn less than participants receiving the same information through an email newsletter, this difference disappeared when cognitive elaboration on social media was triggered through elaboration questions. Correlational analyses further suggest that multitasking is one factor which hinders successful knowledge acquisition on social media. Our findings suggest that learning through social media is possible if social media contents invite cognitively elaborate processing.