Problematic Attachment to Social Media: the Psychological States vs Usage Styles

Abstract

Many people worldwide rely on social media to satisfy their social needs for relatedness, learning and enhancing selfesteem. However, over-reliance on social media often results in problematic attachment, which risks personal, social and financial wellbeing. From a design perspective, we argue that social media can be improved with tools to manage such problematic attachment and help users reform their interaction style, social expectations and online identity to restore a healthy reliance. Designing such behaviour change tools can be challenging due to the characteristics of people with problematic behaviours, e.g. denial, relapse and cognitive dissonance. This paper explores the role of social media in such attachment and reveals associated psychological states. Our method provides an ecologically valid exploration through employing diary studies as a data collection method, aiming to introduce countermeasures for problematic attachment in future social media design.

Problematic Attachment to Social Media: Five Behavioural Archetypes

“…See Appendix A for more details on the studies and the analysis results carried out in the first phase. Part of the result is published in [73,74].…”

“…The findings resulting from previous phases and our earlier studies of behaviours associated with problematic attachment to social media [73,74] enabled the researchers to assess, validate, and refine the five main behavioural archetypes, i.e., the Secure user, the Intimate user, the Escapist, the Narcissist, and the Discrepancy user based on the analysis of data from a sample of 51 participants, as explained below. This process could lead to a final version of such behavioural archetypes being developed based on qualitative analyses of the responses made by the participants, which were supported by quantitative analysis, to reflect the reality in mathematical terms and provide a detailed description of these archetypes.…”

“…The components of this section of the behavioural archetype were based on our previous research results in [73] on the relation between usage experiences and emotional states for people with problematic attachment to social media.Psychological states and examples: common user experiences and examples of associated psychological states. The components of this section of the behavioural archetype were based on our previous research results in [74] on the relation between usage experiences and psychological states for people with problematic attachment to social media.…”

“…Psychological states and examples: common user experiences and examples of associated psychological states. The components of this section of the behavioural archetype were based on our previous research results in [74] on the relation between usage experiences and psychological states for people with problematic attachment to social media.…”

When People are Problematically Attached to Social Media: How Would the Design Matter?

“…The number of active Facebook users stood at 500 million in 2010 but had increased to 2 billion by 2018 [3]. This rapid expansion has prompted academics to examine its impact on the population with recent studies [4][5][6] advocating that social media can have both positive and negative impacts on users.…”