To like or Not to Like in the World of Instagram: An Eye-Tracking Investigation of Instagram Users’ Evaluation Process for Liking an Image

For image-based social media (e.g., Instagram or Snapchat), understanding people’s decision behind their liking of photos is critical to researchers and practitioners. The liking decision toward an image, however seemingly simple and effortless for browsers, involves an interplay among evaluation dimension (hedonic vs. utilitarian), social influence (pre-existing number of likes), user characteristics, and underlying cognitive activities (effort and attention). The preliminary results from our eye-tracking studies show that the utilitarian evaluation of an image is negatively associated with its liking probability, effort (pupil dilation), and attention (fixation time). Social influence is shown to affect long-term social media users by increasing their hedonic rating and liking intention. The results suggest that using eye movements to predict the liking intention in social media requires the understanding of products’ prominent evaluation dimension and users’ characteristics. Discussions and future work are also presented.