The playfulness of Facebook - Shaped by underlying psychological drivers and gender differences

Abstract

Despite perceived playfulness being at the core of Facebookers' experiences, research has yet to address this psychological phenomenon and its underlying drivers. Drawing theoretical insights from transportation theory, imagery literature, the arousal-as-information approach, and accounts of information processing and gender, this paper aims to fill the gap and examine the impact of imagery and arousal on perceived playfulness, and the moderating effect of gender. We develop a psychological model of playfulness formation and we test it empirically with a sample of 416 active users of Facebook. We validate the survey instrument and use a partial least squares (PLS) approach to examine the direct, mediating and moderating effects on perceived playfulness. The results provide support for the proposed model, which relates imagery to perceived playfulness, directly and through the path of transportation; considers the distinct roles of imagery elaboration and imagery representations; and includes the moderating influence of arousal. In addition, the results report that gender has a moderating effect on playfulness formation. The findings offer implications for marketing practitioners and information systems (IS) specialists alike.