People, places, and perceptions: effects of location check-in awareness on impressions of strangers

Social media platforms and mobile applications increasingly include geographic features and services. While previous research has looked into how people perceive, interpret, and act on information available about a person, the spatial self, an individual's display of mobility through space for identity performance, is underexplored, especially in encounters with strangers. Strangers themselves offer a unique potential for exploring relational contexts and how those may relate to interpreting and reacting to the spatial self. We ran a 3 (map: personal, social, and task) x 3 (relationship: date, friend, coworker) x 2 (gender of participant: female, male) laboratory experiment with a mixed model design to see if and how the spatial self affects interest in future interaction. We find that maps, relationship, and gender all affect the ways in which people interpret and act on expressing interest in an individual. We discuss theoretical and design implications of how spatial selves affect this process.

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