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What's Really Going on in the Psychology of Pinterest

Are you hooked on Pinterest? Here's how psychology explains it

Social media sites serve many purposes, but only one truly gets you engaged in the wide DIY ("Do it Yourself") world. This is Pinterest, which describes itself as “The visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas.” Users can sign in with their Facebook accounts, allowing them to connect instantly to their friends. Instead of posting their own status updates, though, Pinterest users create “boards” (like bulletin boards) to which they then save “Pins” (like the recipe clipping you might pin to your kitchen cork board). Each pin, typically, has some useful information attached to it, and many are DIY projects. You can, additionally, find news sites, including Psychology Today, by typing the name of the site into the search bar.

Once you’ve got a pin, you can click on the “Visit site” link which then takes you to the actual website where you can read the recipe, instructions, new story, or blog posting. All pins need to have a picture associated with them, because that’s how users see the story topic or what the finished product looks like.

If you’ve never used Pinterest, this brief set of instructions should get you started. However, beware! Although you can use Pinterest to track news stories, the majority of users, consistent with the site’s purpose, are looking for creative ideas. Once you enter the world of Pinterest, you may find yourself spending a surprisingly inordinate amount of time drifting from one set of creations to another, pinning away your plans for the future, whether it’s wedding ideas, smoothie recipes, or handmade gifts. You can easily spend the time you intended to spend on a project instead looking for more projects. Although browsing is free, that time and energy you’ve put into it is not.

The social aspect of Pinterest follows from the user’s ability to find the pins posted by others, either in your social circle or just out in the Pinterest world in general. You may find yourself followed by your Facebook friends, or else by people with similar DIY interests as yours. Similar to Facebook, and where it gets psychologically interesting, people can “like” your pins, but unlike Facebook, people don’t have to follow you to find your pins.

To summarize, the main point of Pinterest is to share ideas with like-minded people, ideas that typically involve some sort of creative expression. You may also find practical help and tips to help you solve common everyday problems.

You might think that Pinterest is a completely altruistic, help-oriented site with no commercial connections, just people helping people. However, once you click on the “visit site” link, you may be taken to an ad that supports that particular site. Marketers also use Pinterest to promote their products directly. Additionally, some people post creations that link to a site where you can only get the pattern, product, or recipe by paying for them.

The risks of Pinterest, then, are similar to the risks associated with other online activities that can drain your time and money. Pinterest can also reinforce plenty of narcissistic tendencies, as users try to gather likes and followers. You can become as obsessed with Pinterest as with Facebook in showing off through your pins, especially if they link to your own personal creations on your own website.

The psychology of Pinterest is only recently drawing the attention of social networking researchers. One of the first studies on the motivational aspects of the site was carried out in 2014 by Central Michigan’s Ian Mull and Seung-Eun Lee. Interested in both the social networking aspect of Pinterest, as well as its potential as a marketing tool, Mull and Lee examined Pinterest from the “Uses and Gratification” (U&G) framework. According to this theory, “a consumer’s motivation to fulfill a specific goal influences the type of mass media the consumer seeks to use, which is based on the assumption that the user will interact with the medium to satisfy their needs” (p. 193).

According to Moll and Lee, U&G can explain a wide range of online users' motivations, including television, telephones, cell phones, SMS texting, and of course Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and online games. Sifting through all of these media, Moll and Lee note that there are 4 main motivations proposed by U&G theory: entertainment, information, personal identity, and social integration or connections with other users.

As is typical of pioneering studies, Moll and Lee began to approach the issue of measuring Pinterest motivation through an open-ended survey. They asked 11 undergraduates to answer 4 very basic questions about their Pinterest use, including what they enjoy about it, why they use it, and what is the first thing that comes to mind when you consider your Pinterest use. From these responses, they were able to develop a 54-item questionnaire on Pinterest motivation that they then administered to an online sample of 243 undergraduates.

The dimensions of Pinterest motivation coincided only in part with those identified in other studies of social media motivation. The 5 basic motivations of Pinterest use fell into these categories: fashion, creative projects, virtual exploration, organization, and- like other social media types- entertainment. Only one of these, entertainment, links precisely to U&G theory but the rest are unique to Pitnerest.

That creative ideas emerged as one of the main motivations for Pinterest use makes sense. The mission of Pinterest is to provide a space for users to share creative ideas, and this mission seems to be accomplished. Participants rated their interest in Pinterest as high in the subareas of crafts, DIY, projects, and creative expression.

Virtual exploration also proved to be important in Pinterest use. Again, unlike other social media, Pinterest uniquely gives users a chance to explore new ideas and, in the process, learn new things. You may not have gone onto Pinterest to learn a new technique for crochet, but lo and behold, the site you've visited provides a fresh look at a craft you thought you understood until now.

The category of organization is also unique to Pinterest. Appealing to the same instincts, perhaps, as scrapbooking, Pinterest allows users to have easy access to the areas that interest them. Unlike scrapbooking, however, Pinterest’s virtual nature allows users to create essentially an infinite set of ideas that they can readily access.

Missing from the survey was the whole category of narcissism as a motivation for Pinterest. In fact, of the few studies now emerging in the literature, narcissism and Pinterest are not linked at all, nor is exhibitionism or other narcissistic types of behaviors. However, as shown by Chinese researcher Zhiguo Zhu and colleagues (2015), there are some very influential Pinterest posters, some of whom have over 1 million followers. If you hit it big, you can have tremendous reach, a potential that might be highly motivating to people who want to bolster their online self-esteem.

To sum up, Pinterest seems to be tapping into our desires to learn and be express ourselves in our own projects and interests. It’s hard to say what the great minds of history would have done with Pinterest, but for the rest of us, it may be giving us an opportunity to fulfill our own, fundamental, needs to be creative.

Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging. Feel free to join my Facebook group, "Fulfillment at Any Age," to discuss today's blog, or to ask further questions about this posting.

Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2015

References

Mull, I. R., & Lee, S. (2014). 'PIN' pointing the motivational dimensions behind pinterest. Computers In Human Behavior, 33192-200. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.011

Zhu, Z., Su, J., & Kong, L. (2015). Measuring influence in online social network based on the user-content bipartite graph. Computers In Human Behavior, 52184-189. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.04.072

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