Effect of Affective Priming on Prosocial Orientation through Mobile Application: Differences between Digital Immigrants and Natives

Abstract

Digital revolution has drastically changed people’s lives in the last three decades inspiring scholars to deepen the role of technologies in thinking and information processing (Baranyi et al., 2015). Prensky (2001) has developed the notion of digital generation, differentiating between natives and immigrants. Digital natives are characterised by their highly automatic and quick response in hyper-textual environment. Digital immigrants are characterised by their main focus on textual elements and a greater proneness to reflection. The main goal of the present research is to investigate the effect of affective priming on prosocial orientation in natives and immigrants by using a mobile application. A quasi-experimental study has been conducted to test whether and how the manipulation of the priming, through positively and negatively connoted images, influences prosocial orientation. The results attested that negative affective priming elicited by app influences negatively prosocial orientation, while positive affective priming influences it positively prosocial orientation. However, this effect is true mainly for digital natives. Overall, findings underline the relevance of taking into account the effects of affective priming in technological environment, especially in the case of digital natives.