Social media, social responsibility and psychology Flashcards
Why do we need to study social media?
Reasons why?
● Technology is advancing at a rapid rate
● Social media has become a ubiquitous feature of our daily lives
● 82% of internet users in the UK have a social media profile (Ofcom, 2021)
● 4.2 billion people worldwide used social media sites daily in 2021
● Predicted to rise to 6 billion in 2027 (Dixon, 2023)
○ Global population will be 8.3 billion
● Scott et al. (2019) estimates that 20% of UK adolescents may use social media for at least five hours every day
Impact on our democracies and who has our data : Social media and society
● Social media has changed the way we socialise
● Presented opportunities to instantly share social information with large numbers of people
● Activities are elementary to the basic human need for feeling social belonging and relatedness, and avoiding loneliness and isolation (Clark et al., 2018)
Why do psychologists have a “social responsibility” to study the effects of social media use?
● Whether the growing use of social media, and screens, among children is healthy or harmful?
● Whether social media use relates to wellbeing and in what way?
● Whether the evidence underpinning any claims is robust and reliable?
● Whether any new measures or controls on social media use may be required?
How has psychological research approached social media use?
● Often approached from an ideological position of concern
○ Whether excessive use should be considered a distinct form of behavioural addiction and clinically treated as such (Kuss & Griffiths, 2017)
Mirrors concerns that have existed around every new form of communication: technology a threat to more ‘meaningful’ methods of interaction (Katz et al., 2001)
How has psychological research approached social media use?
- Social media addiction is not currently recognised in either the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) or the International Classification of Diseases (Zendle & Bowden-Jones, 2019)
- Primack et al. (2017): participants (n = 1787) who used more social media platforms reported higher depression and anxiety symptoms
- Twenge et al. (2017): adolescents social media use associated with mental health issues, such as depression (n = 500,000)
Social media addiction?
● People do report experiences that mirror widely used criteria for establishing addiction, for example:
○ the inability to reduce their use of social media despite wanting to
○ or the experience of withdrawal symptoms when they are unable to access social media (Griffiths et al, 2014)
● Data from a cross-section of the U.S. population (“Monitoring the Future”)
● Running since 1976
Looked at correlations between measures of in-person social interaction with peers; loneliness
Critiques of social media addiction
● Correlation and causation
○ Correlation ≠ causation
● Heavy reliance on self-report measures
● Self-reports that are retrospective
● Lack of consideration of other potential variables
○ They claim the uptick in lack of social interactions occurs in 2011
● Publication bias means that significant findings are more likely to be published, whilst weaker effects remain unpublished
Does this mean we abandon this line of thinking?
● Accept that the ‘problems’ of social media use have been overstated?
○ Other studies report that social media usage is associated with increased social connectedness and reduced loneliness (große et al., 2013)
● This might be ignoring the phenomena
Critiques of abandoning this line of thinking?
“more research is needed”.
New ways of thinking
● Shaw et al. (2022) furthered this approach:
“meaningful interactions are suggested to foster positive feelings, the passive consumption of others’ feeds is proposed to have negative effects on users’ well-being”
● Created a mock social media site
● Also measured: self-reported social media usage
Shaw et al. (2022)
Identified three dissociable usage styles:
- passive use (consuming content posted by others)
- reactive use (reacting to others’ content)
- interactive use (interacting with others through content sharing)
- Psychosocial variables differed, but can be accounted for by the number of friends that participants reported having on Facebook and the amount of time they spent on the platform
- Great example of a behavioural experiment that aims to understand how we use social media
Ideas for the future
● The ‘slow speed’ of (good) research vs. the rapid changes and trend of social media/technology
● We see this in the literature, a tendency to equate “social media” with Facebook
● Different sites promote different ways of engaging
Tiktok- move towards video consumption
Instagram- image based which is more intimate (Pittman & Reich, 2016)
Twitter- operates on text and emotional reactions
