Cyber psychology 1-5

• Cyberpsychology


  The study of the operation of control and communication added to the word psychology
• Human computer interaction (HCI)


  The broader topic that cyberpsychology is related to, focusing more on how we interact with the technology itself
• Cyberpsychology


  Research field that focuses more on the impact of digital technologies on emotion, behaviour, thinking, and the social aspects of technology
• Related fields


  • Cyberpsychology
  • Media psychology
  • Internet psychology
  • Web psychology
• Technologies


  • Digital devices that may or may not be connected to the Internet
  • Internet hardware
  • Web interface
  • Software
• Labels


  • Met
  • E
  • Virtual
  • Online
  • Tele
  • Digital
  • Cyber
• Aspects of cyberpsychology


  • Social - why people adopt/use social media and how it interacts with how we interact with others
  • Cognitive - how technology influences thinking and memory
  • Health - technology and well-being, addiction
  • Exposure to online harm - online aggression, cyberbullying, cybercrime, cybersecurity
• Cyberpsychology attempts to address the effects of technology on our communication, thinking, remembering, and deception online due to anonymous feeling, the effect on well-being, living on and offline, making connections and falling in love, and whether there is such thing as digitally mediated behaviour
• ARPANET developed in response to the Cold War, as the American government considered ways to keep informed and maintain order following a nuclear war if conventional technologies/communication had been destroyed


  1960s
• The internet developed until the mid 1990s until the general public started to get 'online' through internet service providers (ISPs)
• The digital divide refers to the gap between individuals who do and do not have access to and the use of digital technologies, which may not just be about who has access or not but also bandwidth, training, and digital literacy
• Digital inclusion means no one is excluded from the benefits of the Internet and the digital technologies offer
• Digital citizenship refers to people using digital technology to engage in society
• Net neutrality means every piece of data should have the same priority
• In 2000, approximately 361 million people were using the Internet, and now approximately 5.3 billion people have Internet access, an increase from 6% to 65% of the global population
• There are approximately 4.6 billion smartphone users in the world and approximately 3 billion monthly social media users on Facebook, 2 billion on Instagram, 1.2 billion on TikTok, or 2 billion on SAP
• The digital revolution is still in its infancy, as it's hard to imagine life without being able to instantly share ideas, access information, and connect and interact with others, with on-demand media for browsing and sharing content
• Digital technology has transformed society and is argued to be the most significant revolution in human history, as technology has rapidly changed in many ways
• Evolution of the web


  • Web 1.0 - Static content, passive connection
  • Web 2.0 - Dynamic & interactive, two-way connection
  • Web 3.0 - Autonomous, intelligent, decentralised
• The decline of some offline behaviours, such as the impact of television on social and family life, is also a concern for the internet (digital displacement), as well as the struggle for companies to maintain a physical presence on the high street as more shopping is done online
• Language is changing, with new terms like Google, selfie, hashtag, meme, spam, troll, catfish constantly being added to the common technical/logical lexicon
• Social effects of the internet

  • Anonymity
  • Invisibility
  • Minimise cues for authority and status of others
  • Online disinhibition (benign and toxic)
  • Solipsistic introjection
  • Dissociative imagination
  • Time-synchronicity
• The metaverse raises questions about what is real (simulation perspective) and the impact on psychology, focus, and social networks
• Motivations for social media live streaming, the uses and gratifications perspective, and the technology acceptance model (TAM) provide frameworks for understanding technology use and adoption
• Screen time affects debates relate to psychological and social functioning, with a focus on well-being like depression, anxiety and loneliness, psychological distress and suicide ideations
• Online harms include content and engagement that can be triggering, distressing, radicalising, illegal, traumatic or abusive, such as pro-anorexia, self-harm or suicide content
• Cybercrime refers to any criminal activity carried out using a computer or computer networks, and hacking initially referred to the term pushing the limits of a computer or device to achieve more or be used for a positive a legal goal
• The mind and memory has changed as we probably don't retain as much as we used to because information is easily accessible, which is different to the information in our own heads, and there is something called the "Google effect"
• The easy available and always on access to information online is most likely the cause for the "Google effect", where people are primed to search for information on a computer rather than relying on their own memory
• Saving enhanced memory effect shows that saving previous information before engaging with new information improves memory for the new information, but this benefit is reduced when the saving process is unreliable or the first list is very short
• Cognitive offloading, where people consciously or unconsciously rely on external storage of information, can lead to directed forgetting and context change, which can reduce confusion between different information
• The photo-taking impairment effect shows that taking photos can lead to poorer recall of objects and details, likely due to a disengagement of attention during encoding, though taking "mental" photos or zooming in can mitigate this effect
• Digital multitasking, such as juggling emails, instant messages and watching TV (double screening), is common
• Misattribution of internal knowledge due to heightened accessibility or fluency (Fisher et al. 2015)
• Being part of a network can help people solve analytic problems
• Participants copy the output NOT the process of their peer's reasoning
• Analytic reasoning style does not pass along the network
• When participants make incorrect conclusions but can see analytic output of their peers

  1. They recognize and adopt this correct output

  2. But they don't use the same successful analytical reasoning in similar later tasks
• Participants show Output contagion not Process Contagion
• Digital multitasking


  Juggling with several emails, instant messages, watching television (double screening), jumping from one app to another while doing some other digital activity