This study examined the relationship between language use and persuasion success in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending environment where unaffiliated individuals borrow money directly from each other using a textual description to justify the loan. Over 200,000 loan requests were analyzed with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. The use of extended narratives, concrete descriptions and quantitative words that are likely related to one's financial situation had positive associations with funding success which was considered to be an indicator of trust. Humanizing personal details or justifications for one's current financial situation were negatively associated with funding success. These results offer insights into how individuals can optimize their persuasiveness by monitoring their language use in online environments.

This study proposes and tests a novel theoretical mechanism to explain increased self-disclosure intimacy in text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) versus face-to-face (FtF) interactions. On the basis of joint effects of perception intensification processes in CMC and the disclosure reciprocity norm, the authors predict a perception-behavior intensification effect, according to which people perceive partners’ initial disclosures as more intimate in CMC than FtF and, consequently, reciprocate with more intimate disclosures of their own. An experiment compares disclosure reciprocity in text-based CMC and FtF conversations, in which participants interacted with a confederate who made either intimate or nonintimate disclosures across the two communication media. The utterances generated by the participants are coded for disclosure frequency and intimacy. Consistent with the proposed perception-behavior intensification effect, CMC participants perceive the confederate’s disclosures as more intimate, and, importantly, reciprocate with more intimate disclosures than FtF participants do.

Self-disclosure in social media and psychological well-being have been theorized to mutually influence each other. The vibrant research on this issue, however, presents mixed results, calling for a synthesis of the empirical evidence. To this end, we conducted a meta-analysis with 38 empirical studies to systematically examine the nature of the relationship between social media self-disclosure and psychological well-being. We adopted a multidimensional perspective of self-disclosure to scrutinize how the quantity (amount and depth) and quality (intent, valence, and honesty) dimensions of self-disclosure were associated with psychological well-being. The results indicated that valence and honesty of self-disclosure were moderately and positively associated with psychological well-being, but the quantity of self-disclosure was not significantly associated with psychological well-being. Participants’ gender, age, and cultural context of the studies significantly moderated the associations between some dimensions of self-disclosure and psychological well-being. Based on the meta-analysis results, we reassessed theoretical claims on self-disclosure in social media and suggested directions for future research.