With an average user having 130 friends in her profile, SNSs offer a fertile ground
for episodic envy feelings to proliferate. These feelings can be triggered as users encounter
positive information of others and engage in social comparison while browsing
the News Feed [9]. Presence of friends with similar background is likely to magnify
these effects, since demographic similarity is often used to identify a suitable
reference group one attempts to match with [11]. Moreover, proliferation of narcissistic
self-presentation, well documented by past research [12], makes activation of invidious
emotions hard to avoid. In fact, both men and women find themselves under
high pressure to communicate their best sides to their peers, even though in different
areas. For example, male users have been shown to post more self-promotional content
in “About Me” and “Notes” sections on FB, as they attempt to communicate their
accomplishments and establish social standing [12]. Women, on the other hand, stress
their physical attractiveness and sociability [33]. Overall, however, shared content
does not have to be “explicitly boastful” for envy feelings to emerge. In fact, a lonely
user might envy numerous birthday wishes his more sociable peer receives on his FB
Wall [4]. Equally, a friend’s change in the relationship status from “single” to “in a
relationship” might cause emotional havoc for someone undergoing a painful breakup.
Against this background, we hypothesize that: Intensity of passive following on
FB is positively associated with Envy on FB (H2).