I wanna share this, but...: explicating invested costs and
privacy concerns of social grooming behaviors in
Facebook and users’ well-being and social capital

I wanna share this, but...: explicating invested costs and
privacy concerns of social grooming behaviors in
Facebook and users’ well-being and social capital

social grooming model, social grooming, invested cost, privacy, social capital, well-being, image awareness.

The social grooming model (SGM), which theorizes social media users’ social grooming behaviors based on invested costs, is robust, reflecting
various and nuanced social grooming styles. However, its core assumptions have not been validated. Using a nationally representative sample of

1,001 Taiwanese social media users, we explored costs and privacy for each social grooming behavior via a survey. Our results supported the hy-
potheses of the SGM. Users reported greater costs and reputational concerns for private topics than public topics, and higher costs for emotional

and controversial topics than for informational and trending topics. With the new five styles identified in this study, social butterflies and meform-
ers reported significantly greater social capital and well-being than lurkers; however, social butterflies reported greater invested costs in social

grooming than meformers, indicating that being strategic is most efficient when it comes to social grooming, considering invested costs and the
social benefits. SGM is robust and can reflect rich social grooming patterns.

Jih-Hsuan (Tammy) Lin 1,2,*, Christine Linda Cook 3

, Ji-Wei Yang1

https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad038

5 September 2023

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