Behavioral and Motivational Patterns of Internet Users: A Logico-Categorial Analysis

Abstract

The ongoing digitalization is giving rise to new sciences, such as psychoinformatics which studies the links between digital footprint and individual psychological characteristics. According to top-level researchers, the most important problems to be solved in the nearest future are to assess the impact of the new forms of self-perception, self-reflection and self-presentation on social communication; find strategies to facilitate the flow state, i.e. full immersion in whatever someone is doing, in the increasingly fragmented reality; explore the mechanisms of the digital worlds affecting human brain development and the ways of reducing the negative impact of digital technology on human brain; coordinate the design of digital worlds with the society’s emotional and cultural heritage in order to ensure a comfortable existence; and develop social communication rules for digital environments.
Internet use behaviors can be prosocial or antisocial, depending on whether the existing social norms are accepted or rejected. Users engaging in the two types of online behavior differ in their online communication strategies and manifest specific cognitive, motivational and emotional characteristics.
The goal of this study was to review international findings in order to identify and analyze the logico-categorial characteristics of online antisocial behavior associated with specific motivational patterns of Internet users.
As a result, internal and external determinants of online antisocial behavior have been identified. Significant correlations have been found between pathologic Internet use and user’s communicative, emotional, motivational, and cognitive psychological characteristics. A promising direction for building online behavior models and designing initiatives to tackle online antisocial behavior may be to explore the links between users’ behavior on websites of different purpose and content with their personal psychological characteristics.