Social media's growing impact on our lives
Media psychology researchers are beginning to tease apart the ways in which time spent on
social media is, and is not, impacting our day-to-day lives.
Social media use has skyrocketed over the past decade and a half. Whereas only five percent of
adults in the United States reported using a social media platform in 2005, that number is now
around 70 percent.
Growth in the number of people who use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat and other
social media platforms — and the time spent on them—has garnered interest and concern
among policymakers, teachers, parents, and clinicians about social media's impacts on our lives
and psychological well-being.
While the research is still in its early years — Facebook itself only celebrated its 15th birthday
this year — media psychology researchers are beginning to tease apart the ways in which time
spent on these platforms is, and is not, impacting our day-to-day lives.
Social media and relationships
One particularly pernicious concern is whether time spent on social media sites is eating away
at face-to-face time, a phenomenon known as social displacement .
Fears about social displacement are longstanding, as old as the telephone and probably older.
“This issue of displacement has gone on for more than 100 years,” says Jeffrey Hall, PhD,
director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas. “No matter what
the technology is,” says Hall, there is always a “cultural belief that it's replacing face-to-face
time with our close friends and family.”
Hall's research interrogates that cultural belief. In one study, participants kept a daily log of
time spent doing 19 different activities during weeks when they were and were not asked to
abstain from using social media. In the weeks when people abstained from social media, they
spent more time browsing the internet, working, cleaning, and doing household chores.
However, during these same abstention periods, there was no difference in people's time spent
socializing with their strongest social ties.
The upshot? “I tend to believe, given my own work and then reading the work of others, that
there's very little evidence that social media directly displaces meaningful interaction with
close relational partners,” says Hall. One possible reason for this is because we tend to interact
with our close loved ones through several different modalities—such as texts, emails, phone
calls, and in-person time.
What about teens?
When it comes to teens, a recent study by Jean Twenge, PhD, professor of psychology at San
Diego State University, and colleagues found that, as a cohort, high school seniors heading to
college in 2016 spent an “ hour less a day engaging in in-person social interaction” — such as
going to parties, movies, or riding in cars together — compared with high school seniors in the
late 1980s. As a group, this decline was associated with increased digital media use. However,
at the individual level, more social media use was positively associated with more in-person
social interaction. The study also found that adolescents who spent the most time on social
media and the least time in face-to-face social interactions reported the most loneliness.
While Twenge and colleagues posit that overall face-to-face interactions among teens may be
down due to increased time spent on digital media, Hall says there's a possibility that the
relationship goes the other way.
Hall cites the work of danah boyd, PhD, principal researcher at Microsoft Research and the
founder of Data & Society. “She [boyd] says that it's not the case that teens are displacing their
social face-to-face time through social media. Instead, she argues we got the causality
reversed,” says Hall. “We are increasingly restricting teens' ability to spend time with their
peers . . . and they're turning to social media to augment it.”
According to Hall, both phenomena could be happening in tandem — restrictive parenting
could drive social media use and social media use could reduce the time teens spend together
in person — but focusing on the latter places the culpability more on teens while ignoring the
societal forces that are also at play.
The evidence is clear about one thing: Social media is popular among teens. A 2018 Common
Sense Media report found that 81 percent of teens use social media, and more than a third report
using social media sites multiple times an hour. These statistics have risen dramatically over
the past six years, likely driven by increased access to mobile devices. Rising along with these
stats is a growing interest in the impact that social media is having on teen cognitive
development and psychological well-being.
“What we have found, in general, is that social media presents both risks and opportunities for
adolescents,” says Kaveri Subrahmanyam, PhD, a developmental psychologist, professor at
Cal State LA, and associate director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.
Risks of expanding social networks
Social media benefits teens by expanding their social networks and keeping them in touch with
their peers and far-away friends and family. It is also a creativity outlet. In the Common Sense
Media report, more than a quarter of teens said that “social media is ‘extremely' or ‘very'
important for them for expressing themselves creatively.”
But there are also risks. The Common Sense Media survey found that 13 percent of teens
reported being cyberbullied at least once. And social media can be a conduit for accessing
inappropriate content like violent images or pornography. Nearly two-thirds of teens who use
social media said they “'often' or ‘sometimes' come across racist, sexist, homophobic, or
religious-based hate content in social media.”
With all of these benefits and risks, how is social media affecting cognitive development?
“What we have found at the Children's Digital Media Center is that a lot of digital
communication use and, in particular, social media use seems to be connected to offline
developmental concerns,” says Subrahmanyam. “If you look at the adolescent developmental
literature, the core issues facing youth are sexuality, identity, and intimacy,” says
Subrahmanyam.
Her research suggests that different types of digital communication may involve different
developmental issues. For example, she has found that teens frequently talked about sex in chat
rooms, whereas their use of blogs and social media appears to be more concerned with self-
presentation and identity construction.
In particular, exploring one's identity appears to be a crucial use of visually focused social
media sites for adolescents. “Whether it's Facebook, whether it's Instagram, there's a lot of
strategic self presentation, and it does seem to be in the service of identity,” says
Subrahmanyam. “I think where it gets gray is that we don't know if this is necessarily beneficial
or if it harms.”
Remaining questions
“It's important to develop a coherent identity,” she says. “But within the context of social media
— when it's not clear that people are necessarily engaging in real self presentation and there's
a lot of ideal-self or false-self presentation — is that good?”
There are also more questions than answers when it comes to how social media affects the
development of intimate relationships during adolescence. Does having a wide network of
contacts — as is common in social media—lead to more superficial interactions and hinder
intimacy? Or, perhaps more important, “Is the support that you get online as effective as the
support that you get offline?” ponders Subrahmanyam. “We don't know that necessarily.”
Based on her own research comparing text messages and face-to-face interactions, she says:
“My hypothesis is that maybe digital interactions may be a little more ephemeral, they're a little
more fleeting, and you feel good, but that the feeling is lost quickly versus face-to-face
interaction.”
However, she notes that today's teens — being tech natives — may get less hung up on the
online/offline dichotomy. “ We tend to think about online and offline as disconnected, but we
have to recognize that for youth . . . there's so much more fluidity and connectedness between
the real and the physical and the offline and the online,” she says.
In fact, growing up with digital technology may be changing teen brain development in ways
we don't yet know — and these changes may, in turn, change how teens relate to technology.
“Because the exposure to technology is happening so early, we have to be mindful of the
possibility that perhaps there are changes happening at a neural level with early exposure,” says
Subrahmanyam. “How youths interact with technology could just be qualitatively different
from how we do it.”
Social media’s growing impact on our lives
The question as to how social media affects psychological well-being—both for teens and
adults—is a common one. While some studies have found associations between social media
use and loneliness, depression, and poor life satisfaction, these associations don't necessarily
mean that social media is to blame.
"This is a very, very hot topic," says Jeffrey Hall, PhD, director of the Relationships and
Technology Lab at the University of Kansas. "Overwhelmingly, the literature says that if there
is an effect, the effect is extremely small, and is likely not in the direction we expect." This
means "that it's more likely that people who are depressed, lonely, and have poor quality of life
are more likely to turn to social media to resolve those pre-existing lacks in their social world,
than it is the case that people who use social media are causally becoming more unsatisfied
with their life."
Asked how social media affects well-being, Nicole Ellison, PhD, professor of information at
the University of Michigan says, "It's such a complicated beast." The question is complicated
in part because there are so many different variables at play, including individual characteristics
such as whether a person has high or low self-esteem and whether they are prone to depression,
the strength of their offline social support networks, and how they engage with social media.
With teens and young adults, too, while some studies have found connections between social
media usage and negative psychological outcomes such as anxiety, depression and loneliness,
the effects of social media may not be generic or generalizable.
"I think they really depend upon who the user is, how they use it, and their particular
demographics," says Kaveri Subrahmanyam, PhD, a developmental psychologist, professor at
Cal State LA, and associate director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles. For
example, she conducted a short-term longitudinal study that looked at the relationships
between negative interactions on Facebook, depression and life satisfaction. This study found
that there was a marginal relationship between adolescents having been victimized by peers on
Facebook at the beginning of the study and reporting lower life satisfaction at the end of the
study. However, the stronger effect was that adolescents who were more depressed at the
beginning of the study were more likely to be victimized later.
She notes that while we tend to think that we all experience the same social media effects, "they
seem to really depend on how somebody uses them [social media sites], as well as their own
constellation of strengths and challenges."
One individual factor that may link social media use and psychological effects — especially
for teens and young adults — is the extent to which someone is sensitive to different forms of
digital stress. A new paper by Hall and colleagues proposes four components of digital stress:
fear of missing out (FOMO), communication overload (too many notifications), availability
stress (feeling like you can't take a break), and approval anxiety (monitoring signs of approval
such as comments and likes). By focusing on the type of distress and the ways in which a client
uses social media, clinicians may be able to offer more targeted and nuanced recommendations.
However, more research is sorely needed in this arena: "the literature limits the number and
strength of the clinical recommendations that we can realistically provide," they write.
Healthier social media habits
While researchers are likely to continue to tease apart the relationships between social media
use and well-being, early research suggests that there may be certain ways of using social media
that are likely to amplify its benefits and decrease its harms.
One emerging theme is that so-called "active use (PDF, 181KB)" of social media — posting
content and engaging with other people's posts — may be healthier than simply scrolling and
passively reading others' posts. "I think that evidence is building," says Hall. But he and Ellison
both note that it can sometimes be difficult to make clear distinctions between active and
passive use.
Hall also suggests that being deliberate about the time spent on social media may also be a
good habit. "You're saying, 'Okay, I'm reserving this time for it, I'm using it, then I'm walking
away from it,'" he says. "That's not the practice that many, many teens and young adults use,
but I think it's probably a healthier practice, given the research evidence." Indeed, the Common
Sense Media survey found that 16 percent of teens report using social media "almost
constantly."
Controlling the amount of information disclosed over social media is important, especially
when it comes to children and teens. However, reaching an appropriate balance can be very
tricky for adolescents. "Self-disclosure, we know, is a key element of peer-to-peer relationships
during adolescence. It's important for identity exploration," says Subrahmanyam. "However,
too much self-disclosure is a problem when it occurs online, because, for one, the digital record
never vanishes."
Besides encouraging children and teens to be selective in their privacy settings and what they
share online, Subrahmanyam says there's another critical element to consider when it comes to
the time adolescents spend on social media and digital devices in general: disrupted sleep. She
notes that not getting enough sleep is "not optimal for development" and is associated with
decreased well-being, depression, truancy, substance use, car accidents, and poor academic
performance.
"One of the recommendations that I give to parents is to have your children charge their phones
outside their bedroom," says Subrahmanyam.
However, according to Subrahmanyam, it is time to move beyond the question of whether
social media use is good or bad for us. "The genie is out of the bottle, right? We're not going
to go back to a pre-social media world," she says. "I think it's here to stay. So to me, the more
compelling question is: what are the circumstances?"
Nicole Ellison, PhD, professor of information at the University of Michigan agrees: "I think
that there's a lot of potential for social media to make meaningful, positive changes in people's
lives and we just need to better understand how that happens."
Why do we ‘like’ social media?
When I first considered writing an article like this some years ago, I imagined that Facebook
would become supplanted by some other website, in the same way that it had displaced
MySpace. Yet Facebook is now more globally dominant than ever, and, as if to underline my
hubris, MySpace is resurgent. Often written off as passing fads for teenagers, these websites
now have billions of users – not only with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube,
Instagram and MySpace in the West, but with hugely popular sites like Tencent Weibo,
Vkontakt and Orkut in the rest of the world. Social media marches on. But, from the point of
view of peer-reviewed psychological research, what do we know about what makes these
websites popular?
Behavioural and cognitive
Almost a truism at this stage, the human preference for novelty first described by Lord Kames
(Home, 1823) plays into the attractiveness of social media. Web designers fret over not
delivering enough ‘fresh content’ to users, because we prefer sources of new and stimulating
information. Consequently, even beyond the updates posted by our connections, social media
sites generally update their design every couple of months, simply to keep our attention.
In terms of behaviour per se, the main labour of social media users is adding new connections.
However, in building the network, I cannot connect with everyone equally. For example, if I
click ‘add as friend’ on Facebook, that person must accept my request for me to be able to see
their updates (generally speaking). On Twitter, clicking ‘follow’ means I will see their updates
straightaway (usually), though at the same time they may or may not ‘follow’ me in return. In
both cases, the user can choose to positively reinforce my behaviour with their reward of their
personal information – though it is by no means certain that they will do so. So my behaviour
of making a connection request follows a variable schedule reinforcement (Ferster & Skinner,
1957) paradigm: sometimes it is rewarded, and sometimes it is not, meaning that I am very
likely to continue to engage in it.
Cleverly, many social media websites have concentrated this reinforcement paradigm across
several activities into a single signal: the notification icon. By creating a bright, and usually
red, ‘+1’ for every time we have received a new piece of information – whether it is a friend
request accepted, a new message, new photo ‘liked’ or ‘favorite’ – social media websites
encourage us to keep checking them. These icons are not constant features of social media
websites (unless we engage with other users incessantly, in which case, job well done by the
site’s engineers) – they are unpredictable. Because we can never be certain how many
notifications we will have before we log back into these sites, they reinforce our behaviour
with all the power of a Skinner box, randomly delivering food pellets in response to a rat’s
lever presses.
Interestingly, biological research has shown that Facebook usage may be associated with a
specific psychophysiological pattern (Mauri et al., 2011). This research suggests that there is a
core flow state present when browsing Facebook that is significantly different from stress and
relaxation on a number of indices of somatic activity. Being on a social media site is a positive
experience – it feels good – and this is why we enjoy using it. Strikingly, a controversial study
from last year found that there is some evidence for emotional contagion (Kramer et al., 2014:
see box) – when we see expressions of either positive or negative emotions on Facebook, we
are more likely to express emotions of that valence in our updates too.
It is to be expected that new users of social media will first connect with other users they already
know, who should be most likely to accept their invitations. Subsequently, there will inevitably
be diminishing returns on behaviour in the user’s early days on a site, in that the same amount
of effort will produce decreasing reward. Social media engineers can rely on negative
automaintenance (Williams & Williams, 1969) for a time – we will continue to engage in the
same way even we are not being rewarded at all. For example, after we have run out of people
we know, we will move on to people we only slightly know, who are less likely to reciprocate
when we ‘add as friend’ or ‘follow’ them.
Consequently, web developers can expect a decline in user activity after their first few weeks,
which inevitably plays into what might be the dominant cognitive state of our era: media
multitasking. Instead of spending extended periods of time on them, we dip into and out of
these sites all day long, checking for updates from friends and family, as well as news and
information. Research has shown, unsurprisingly, that Facebook is the most common activity
that university students switch to when studying. Worryingly, it has also found that those who
most engage in this type of internet browsing tend to have lower levels of educational
achievement (Rosen et al., 2013). Interestingly, while multitasking on the whole has cognitive
costs, it provides emotional gratifications that its users do not actively seek (Wang & Tchernev,
2012).
In addition, research has also shown that there are personality differences in the social media
sites preferred by users, with those who preferred Twitter displaying higher need for cognition,
and those who preferred Facebook displaying higher sociability, extraversion and neuroticism
(Hughes et al., 2012).
Social
Paradoxically, given the extent of social media’s popularity, at least a certain amount of the
growth of these sites is their exclusivity. Early in Facebook’s history, it was only available to
students at élite North American universities. This was gradually extended to global
universities, then all adults, and eventually high school pupils, but its growth relied initially on
a variation on the scarcity heuristic (Cialdini, 2001). While not many other sites have used this
particular gradation mechanism, nearly all new services begin life with ‘invite only’ or ‘waiting
list’ messages. While their marketing departments try to stir up publicity, the fact that the public
can’t yet access the new cool website only serves to increase its attractiveness.
The flipside of this effect is known as Metcalfe’s law, or the network effect (Gilder, 1993).
While technically defined as ‘the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the
square of the number of connected users of the system’, it basically means that there is little
point in joining a service unless your friends are on it. Again this shows why Facebook
originally concentrated on specific universities as these provided readymade populations of
interconnected individuals. Several other services – the dating app Tinder, for example – have
used the same strategy in concentrating market targeting on college students. Once a whole
class join a service, it is extremely useful to them – but if only one or two join, it’s relatively
useless.
Beyond that point, social media became popular from the very basic principle of conformity
(Asch, 1951). If everyone we know is on a particular site, it is very hard to avoid such normative
social influence (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). Again, this has a corollary in what has become
known as ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) – removing oneself from such a website has
psychological side-effects. Interestingly, there has been empirical research that shows that
FOMO has significant motivational, emotional and behavioural correlates (Przybylski et al.,
2013).
However, why we stay members of social media is to do with social capital: the tangible
benefits we receive from being members of a group. One of the earliest research teams to look
seriously at Facebook found that while using the site didn’t seem to have much effect on
bonding social capital – advantages gained from close friends and family, the sort of people
who would do anything for you (Ellison et al., 2007) – users did seem to benefit from greater
bridging social capital – low-level information, news and advice. For example, you may be
friends on Facebook with someone you only met once, which may seem a little pointless – but
if they post a status update about a job vacancy that you might be interested in, you could be
glad you hadn’t unfriended them!
Continuing with this line of research, the same research team has explored how certain
‘Facebook Relationship Maintenance Behaviours’, such as responding to a friend’s good news,
requests for help or advice and so on, underlie bridging social capital (Ellison et al., 2014). The
researchers conclude that Facebook users take advantage of the site’s design features (e.g.
birthday reminders) to strengthen the weak ties that underlie bridging social capital. In other
words, the site’s affordances allow you to tell someone you don’t know very well that you are
still paying attention to them.
Interestingly, on Israeli social media site Shox, Schwarz (2010) describes how teenagers use
self-portraits (selfies, though that term was not common at the time) as a form of corporeal
social capital. As these young people are not yet part of ‘grown-up’ society, they do not have
access to the established methods of social influence that adults do, so they use self-portraits
as a means of presenting themselves, comparing themselves to each other and thereby building
social relationships, both online and offline. There is, Schwarz notes, a certain amount of
liberation in the social capital of self-imagery, but it does come at a price – not everyone can
play this game, and not everyone succeeds, much like the celebrity culture that it mimics.
Furthermore, and what is critical for psychological research to recognise in these contexts –
such as funeral research on Instagram (Gibbs et al., 2014) – is that each particular social media
site has its own platform vernacular. In other words, to appreciate any social media site fully,
researchers need to understand its language practices, which are often unique to it.
That said, it does seem like we associate with other people on social media at least in part
because of the how good they make us look, and social comparison research remains intriguing.
There is long-standing research demonstrating that if our Facebook friends are good-looking,
we too will be perceived as better looking (Walther et al., 2008). Additionally, it has also been
shown that users of social media sites compare themselves to each other in an effort to manage
their mood (Johnson & Knobloch-Westerwick, 2014) – that when we are in a negative mood
we prefer to make more downward social comparisons, against those we view as less successful
or attractive as ourselves.
Interestingly, it has been shown that even anonymous websites have complex community
structures. On 4chan, even though it is impossible to distinguish the author of one post from
the next in such an environment, and posts disappear if no one interacts with them, Bernstein
et al. (2011) have shown that there is still a distinct social hierarchy at work. By using
distinctive identity signs, such as difficult-to-reproduce Unicode character displays or time-
stamped photographs, 4chan has a distinctive community culture and hierarchy of participation.
This gives rise to the most exquisite aspect of both internet and teenage culture: the in-joke.
Fundamentally, social media allows its users to socialise with similarly-minded individuals.
Self and identity
Additionally, there is ample cultural work that is useful in understanding the psychology of
social media sites’ popularity. Foucault (1993) speaks of technologies of the self – techniques
by which people manipulate their bodies, minds and behaviour in order to reach some ideal of
psychological perfection. While he wrote largely about ancient practices like mediation and
diary-keeping, it is clear that there are many such technologies present today. These websites
are how many of us now choose to refine and manage our identities.
A Foucauldian analysis of social media would necessarily have to incorporate notions of power
and governance: social media as an outlet for comparative self-development. LinkedIn, for
example, as a professional and business-oriented social media site is extensively used for
marking personal progress and improvement. Research has shown that on Xing, a similar
professional social network, there is a high degree of authenticity, rather than idealism, present
in users profiles (Sievers et al., 2015).
But the major use of social media in this regard has been by teenagers and young adults, and
has been repeatedly demonstrated by danah boyd (e.g. boyd, 2007). The ethnographic work of
boyd demonstrates that within such mediated environments – networked publics – young users
of MySpace engage in a considerable amount of time editing and managing their profiles in a
process of impression management with regard to their imagined audiences. Critically, boyd
was one of the first to underline how teenagers turned to the (appropriately named) MySpace
as their physical spaces were restricted by their parents. These days, with geolocation services
present on the likes of Instagram and Foursquare, we are now seeing research on the spatial
self (Schwartz & Halegoua, 2014). Users of such services portray their social identities
according to the places they have been: we like to show our friends that we are getting out.
On the whole, self-presentation affordances are a critical aspect of social media’s popularity.
On Facebook, Strano (2008) found that female adult users were more likely to change their
profile photographs more often, and to emphasise friendships in those photographs. Continuing
that vein of investigation, more recent research has also shown that the language we use on
social media has a critical effect on how we are perceived by others. Fullwood et al. (2015)
found that people whose profiles used textspeak (including emoticons) were deemed to be less
conscientious and less open but more emotionally stable. Interestingly, the amount of textspeak
used was not important – even small amounts were enough to shift perceptions.
These processes hark back very much to the work of Erving Goffman, namely the idea of the
presentation of self, which Hogan (2010) has interpreted in the social media context as
involving both performances (synchronous, real-time, co-present) and exhibitions
(asynchronous, not necessarily co-present). The tricky thing about social media in this regard,
Hogan notes, is that while users may choose to present or hide certain aspects of their digital
selves, some of this process is taken over by the code of the particular site, which decides which
content rises to the top of newsfeeds. What Bucher (2012) calls the threat of invisibility to these
algorithms is an under-appreciated factor in the attraction of these social media sites:
once we engage with them, we are at their mercy. The trouble is, as Bucher notes, the
algorithms that decide which content is highlighted and which is obscured, are proprietary and
secret. I have no way of knowing if Facebook will push my post to the top of my friends’
newsfeeds. Again, though in a much subtler way, this harks back to the variable schedule
reinforcement conditioning mentioned above.
The thing is, while these opaque algorithms do have a certain amount of control over our social
media, we tend to change our minds about our identities quite a lot. As has been argued in
philosophy since the early modern period (e.g. Locke, 1700), while there is a continuity to our
consciousness, who we are as individuals evolves and changes over time. Temporality,
therefore, is an important aspect of the appeal of social media – it allows us to edit our identities
in a coherent narrative fashion, of where we come from, where we currently are and where we
hope to go.
The problem though is that we are not very good at knowing our place in that chronology. A
very interesting study by Bauer et al. (2013) asked participants about the privacy settings on
their Facebook posts – asking them both longitudinally and retrospectively about whether or
not they would like their content to remain public or private. The study’s participants’
predictions about how their visibility preferences would change did not correlate well with
their actual changes in preferences over time.
This appears to be the appeal of newer picture social messaging applications like Snapchat,
which offers a sense of ephemerality to its content, by claiming that pictures sent via its service
will automatically be deleted once viewed by their recipients. Naturally, this appeals greatly to
younger users, especially those within what Marcia (1966) would term the identity crisis – the
developmental stage when young people attempt to decide who they are by trying out new
ways of presenting themselves (which they may not want to keep permanently). While there is
very little academic psychological research on Snapchat to date, it seems clear that it appeals
very much to a generation who have grown up with perils of permanent internet content
hanging over them.
Conclusions
The major factors driving the popularity of social media usage are fundamentally
cyberpsychological. We can simply do things and experience things on social media that we
cannot do anywhere else. While sitting alone at home, we can make our most private and
personal thoughts instantly and globally public – a historically unprecedented psychological
experience. In this way we are experiencing what has been described as online disinhibition
(Suler, 2004) – the phenomenon whereby we do and say things on the internet that we probably
would not do in a face-to-face environment. This is unnerving, as in certain circumstances of
anonymity and perceived privacy we are more likely to engage in self-disclosure of personal
information online that we would not do otherwise (Joinson, 2001).
Another cyberpsychology concept encourages our participation in social media – that of
hyperpersonal communication (Walther, 2007). Because much of online communication online
is textual, time-stamped and can be edited, its emotional impact is augmented: we know how
long our interlocutors were composing their replies, we can spellcheck our messages, and much
more besides. We have yet to get used to this, and this is why social media will continue to be
highly fascinating for some time to come.
In a holistic sense, the popularity of social media has been driven by how user-friendly and
interactive it has made modern cyberspace. In the traditional sociological distinction of home,
work and ‘third space’, we now have an online environment – a ‘fourth space’ (Soukup, 2006).
In effect, social media has created a much more massive online space where all kinds of
interesting activities are very easy to engage in. Many of these have long-standing foundations
in psychology – the behavioural, cognitive, social and self/identity factors above. However, the
newer cyberpsychological factors are essential to understanding the appeal of this environment,
yet remain far less well studied – a new research frontier for psychology.
It cannot be denied however, that the discipline faces a number of challenges in this space. We
need to get over our ‘digital dualism’: what happens in cyberspace is ‘real’. It is not easy
keeping up with the pace of technological developments, but psychologists must not shirk our
normative responsibilities. In particular, we need greater interrogation of the affordances of
social media sites and apps. Sociology, communication studies and other disciplines have
joined the social media party, and psychology must ensure it is not excluded, particularly with
the advent of ‘big data’ – who needs a psychologist if you have petabytes of social media data
being analysed by the second?
Finally, it is sad to say, but online environments provide refutation of the equalisation
hypothesis. The hope that ICT would level out differences like gender stereotypes has not been
supported (Postmes & Spears, 2002), even more so in intersectional studies (Gray, 2012). This
is the toxic online disinhibition Suler (2004) described over a decade ago, yet society is a long
way from acknowledging it, or its consequences. As the idea of the internet as an aggressive
playground dominates public discourse, the insinuation that we must be ‘resilient’ to online
abuse is disturbingly common. In the past, at times of cultural unease, ground-breaking
psychological research had profound and vital societal impact. Is such a time upon us again?
Potentials and pitfalls
Last July controversy erupted with what became known as the ‘Facebook Emotion Study’
(Kramer et al., 2014). The study demonstrated a small ‘emotional contagion’ effect: users who
saw more emotional content were more likely to post similar content themselves. Debate
centred on its methodology, as the newsfeeds of 689,003 Facebook users were altered without
their being informed: experimental participation without consent. While websites often
restructure, that seldom is described as ‘research’, nor is it for the explicit purpose of trying to
make visitors feel better or worse. Consequently, the study began a conversation about research
ethics in cyberspace (Aiken & Mc Mahon, 2014).
On the one hand, traditional methods are common with social media. An experiment with
Facebook users found that when asked to edit their profiles they experienced a relative increase
in self-esteem (Gonzales & Hancock, 2011). A cross-sectional survey of Twitter users found
correlations between levels of suicidal ideation and whether or not they had posted tweets as
such (Sueki, 2014). Content analysis of Facebook profile photographs found no significant
difference across genders (Hum et al., 2011). The attraction of social media for teenagers has
been explored using ethnographic methods (boyd, 2007). A focus group of London
undergraduates revealed many interesting findings (Lewis & West, 2009), such as possibly the
first academic description of ‘Facebook stalking’!
On the other hand, newer methods are increasingly common. Network analysis has revealed
how information flows through adolescents’ groups of friends (Van Cleemput, 2010) and data-
mining has illustrated the dynamics of cyberbullying on Twitter (Blanco et al., 2013). These
present a challenge for research: fascinating insights, but ethical conundrums. In Kramer et al.
(2014), the data had already been gathered by Facebook, passed to the researchers after having
been anonymised, with institutional review not deemed necessary, because there didn’t seem
to be any human participation.
In smaller studies, it is easy to remember that data represent people – this may be more difficult
in larger studies. Yet another controversial Facebook study has been published which, while
without experimental manipulation, utilised anonymised data from 10.1 million users (Bakshy
et al., 2015). Cyberpsychology speaks of online disinhibition (Suler, 2004) – but perhaps
researchers should also think about N-line disinhibition: becoming overawed by huge amounts
of data. Dignity of participants, long a hallmark of psychological research, may be an mounting
issue in cyberpsychological research: are we our social media data?
- Ciarán Mc Mahon is in the CyberPsychology Research Centre, Royal College of Surgeons in
Ireland ciaranmcmahon@rcsi.ie
