Scientific article

Reciprocity as a basic phenomenon of social interaction

Reciprocity can be conceptualized and investigated at different levels and along different dimensions in the study of online social interaction.
There are two levels of reciprocity enacted in online social interaction: 1) presence of communicative response at the lower level, and 2) matching of message length and quality at the upper level. At the lower level of reciprocity, one can be considered reciprocal when they simply reply after receiving a message.
Another property of reciprocity at the upper level is politeness, or the degree to which the sender attends to the receiver's face needs or concerns.
A third property is amount of information, an indicator of how resourceful a message is. From the social exchange perspective, people will expect receiving equivalent amount of resource as they provided.
Traditional measures of reciprocity through self-report do not differentiate between the lower and upper levels. This is partly because the measures focused on how people reciprocate favors in general instead of on how people produce reciprocal messages.