The Impacts of Social Identity on Digitally-Mediated Social Interactions

Biases in online platforms pose a threat to social inclusion. I examine the influence of social biases on online platforms. In my dissertation, I conduct empirical studies on online crowdfunding platforms (prosocial lending and educational crowdfunding) to investigate the influence of funders' or recipients' social backgrounds on the funding dynamics. In the first study, I examine the influence of a novel source of bias in online philanthropic lending, namely that associated with religious differences. I further propose a set of contextual moderators that characterize individuals’ offline (local) and online social contexts, which I argue combine to determine the influence of religion distance on lending activity. In the second study, I theoretically and empirically explore the role of value homophily in shifting lending priorities in online pro-social platforms. Considering the full spectrum of cultural influences, I develop the concept of “culturalist choice homophily,” where value-based similarities emerge based on the culturally-motivated behaviors and “historicist choice homophily,” where value-based similarities emerge based on similarities in historical-cultural barriers. Further, I introduce a novel content-context value congruence perspective for crisis fundraising, where the synergy between a borrowers’ request reasoning and the optimal crisis outcome determines the volume of lending received by crisis victims. I utilize the Arab Spring crisis in a Difference-in-Difference (DID) setting to test my hypotheses. Finally, in the third study, I add to the recent literature on the impact of the design of educational crowdfunding in alleviating inequality for public schools' fundraising. I particularly explore the effects of the platform intervention in terms of signaling students’ need to alleviate biases toward racially and economically disadvantaged students. Utilizing data from DonorsChoose.org, I first show that the online platform cannot automatically make up for all biases, especially toward classrooms with students with a higher level of poverty or racially marginalized communities. Further, I show that labeling projects as equity-focus can alleviate biases. However, the results are heterogeneous across different sources of identity. In particular, I discuss that equity-focus labeling has a greater impact on improving inequality toward hard-to-observe identities, e.g., economically disadvantaged students, than easy-to-observe identities such as racially underprivileged communities.