In 2017, Benjamin Johnson and I began our investigation into the impact that online sharing has on people’s brand attitudes. Based on identity shift theory, we have designed several research projects that investigate the effects that sharing in various modalities have on attitudes. Our first paper was presented at the 2018 ICA conference in Prague, Czech Republic, and a follow-up study was presented at the 2019 ICA conference in Washington, DC. These studies found that the impact of sharing on brand attitude differed depending on the social media platform on which the sharing took place (Facebook versus Twitter) and that personality traits such as extraversion as well as perceptions of social media moderated the impact that sharing had on brand attitudes. The article that came out of these two studies, “Sharing brands on social media: The roles of behavioral commitment and modality in identity shift” was published in the International Journal of Consumer Studies.
A follow-up study has been completed and is currently being written up.
In 2021, I also collaborated with a team of researchers, headed up by Caleb T. Carr and including Benjamin Johnson, Amy Gonzales, and Jeffrey Hancock on a theoretical piece in the identity shift theory. This article, published in the Journal of Media Psychology, introduces the central tenets, processes, conditions, and effects of Identity Shift Theory as well as proposing directions for future research.