Hakkyun Kim, Kyoungmi Lee, Kiwan Park
Will individuals’ social networking influence their judgments and related psychological processes on tasks in remote, unrelated domains? This research examines downstream spillover effects that social networking experiences may have on individuals’ risk-related judgment and behavior. Building on the feelings-as-information paradigm, we propose that individuals who engage in initiating new ties or contacts will subsequently behave in a more risk-averse manner than those who engage in cementing existing relationships. Initiating new ties generates more intense feelings that individuals have taken a risk, compared to cementing existing ties. Consequently, initiating new ties produces the tendency to balance out feelings of risk across unrelated domains. In four studies, we confirm the effect of social networking on subsequent risk judgment and the role of feelings of risk as its underlying process