Cited by 254Impact of Technology on AdolescentsDigital Communication and LanguageMedia and Digital Communication

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 57 of the 62 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 92 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Two social lives: How differences between online and offline interaction influence social outcomes

Open access
Lieberman, Alicea, Schroeder, Juliana·2020·Current Opinion in Psychology

Abstract

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans only communicated in person, but in just the past fifty years they have started also communicating online. Today, people communicate more online than offline. What does this shift mean for human social life? We identify four structural differences between online (versus offline) interaction: (1) fewer nonverbal cues, (2) greater anonymity, (3) more opportunity to form new social ties and bolster weak ties, and (4) wider dissemination of information. Each of these differences underlies systematic psychological and behavioral consequences. Online and offline lives often intersect; we thus further review how online engagement can (1) disrupt or (2) enhance offline interaction. This work provides a useful framework for studying the influence of technology on social life (119/120).

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This review proposes a framework organizing the psychological and behavioral consequences of online versus offline interaction around four structural differences: fewer nonverbal cues, greater anonymity, more opportunity to form and bolster ties, and wider dissemination of information. It further reviews how online engagement can either disrupt or enhance offline social connection.

Key findings

  • Four structural differences between online and offline interaction each carry systematic consequences: text-based communication reduces observers' accuracy in judging communicators' thoughts and feelings and makes communicators appear less thoughtful and emotional (i.e., potentially dehumanizing), while hearing a voice uniquely humanizes.
  • Anonymity licenses disinhibition and aggression, but can also inhibit connection: in a field experiment randomizing 100,000 online daters to anonymous versus non-anonymous profile viewing, anonymized users viewed more profiles but ended up with fewer matches.
  • Online media expand network size (average 338 Facebook Friends) but do not appear to change the number of significant contacts, which remains around 5 intimate friends, 15 close friends, 50 general friends, and 150 acquaintances; larger networks (>40) mean less time spent with each contact.
  • Wider dissemination cuts both ways: in an analysis of 126,000 stories from 2006–2017, false stories spread more widely and quickly than true ones, and machine learning models identified users' political affiliation (Democrat vs. Republican) with 85% accuracy.

Methods

  • Narrative review / conceptual framework paper (Current Opinion in Psychology), not an empirical study; no primary data collection or analysis is reported.
  • The authors synthesize prior findings, including cited experiments and field studies (e.g., the 100,000-dater anonymity experiment; the 126,000-story diffusion analysis; smartphone-use experiments on parental attention and navigation), to illustrate each structural difference.
  • Organization is thematic: four structural differences, then a section on how online interaction disrupts or enhances offline interaction, followed by proposed future research questions.

Limitations

  • The paper states no limitations; it declares only "Nothing declared" under Conflict.
  • Evident from the text: this is a selective narrative review rather than a systematic one, so the cited evidence is illustrative rather than exhaustive, and the four-difference framework is proposed rather than empirically tested.
  • Several claims rest on single studies or working papers (e.g., the voice/paralanguage working paper, individual field experiments), and the authors themselves flag open questions about how evolving technologies (video chat, customizable voices) may blur the online–offline distinction.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.06.022

Cites

57 of 57 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

65 Not checked yet · 22 Own interpretation · 5 No basis given

Verify all 92 references — free account
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 20
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 11
28 of 28
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Online and offline interaction can be treated as distinct structural categories for comparison.

    “To more clearly understand the consequences of these different interaction media, we propose four key structural differences between them.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The four structural differences identified are the primary drivers of the psychological and behavioral consequences of online interaction.

    “These structural differences lead to systematic psychological and behavioral consequences that are functionally changing the landscape of social life.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Findings from the cited studies are valid and generalizable to the populations discussed.

    “This paper provides a new framework for organizing the extant literature.”
3 of 3

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

1 of 1

Citations

Cites

Show all 62 references

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Epley N, Eyal T: Through a looking glass, darkly: using mechanisms of mind perception to identify accuracy, overconfidence, and underappreciated means for improvement. Adv Exp Soc Psychol [In press]. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065260119300176.
  2. Prentice-Dunn, 1983, Deindividuation in aggression, Aggress: Theor Empir Rev, 2, 155
  3. Silverman, 2016, This analysis shows how viral fake election news stories outperformed real news on Facebook, BuzzFeed News, 16

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 254

Metadata

Authors
Lieberman, A., & Schroeder, J.
Affiliations
  • University of California San Diego (US)
  • University of California, Berkeley (US)
Corresponding author
Schroeder, Juliana
Venue
Current Opinion in Psychology
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2020-02
Volume
31
Pages
16-21
ISSN
2352-250X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2955402589
Cited by
252
References
62
Citations by year
2026: 42 · 2025: 66 · 2024: 51 · 2023: 35 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 9
FWCI
3.66
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Current Opinion in Psychology (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Impact of Technology on Adolescents
  • Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Digital Communication and Language
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Media and Digital Communication
Keywords
online interaction, offline interaction, nonverbal cues, anonymity, weak ties, information dissemination, social ties, technology and social life
MeSH terms
Social Interaction, Communication, Humans, Social Behavior, Social Media

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-08, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-08 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review