Social Media and Well-Being: Pitfalls, Progress, and Next Steps

Abstract

Within a relatively short time span, social media have transformed the way humans interact, leading many to wonder what, if any, implications this interactive revolution has had for people's emotional lives. Over the past 15 years, an explosion of research has examined this issue, generating countless studies and heated debate. Although early research generated inconclusive findings, several experiments have revealed small negative effects of social media use on well-being. These results mask, however, a deeper set of complexities. Accumulating evidence indicates that social media can enhance or diminish well-being depending on how people use them. Future research is needed to model these complexities using stronger methods to advance knowledge in this domain. The Puzzle: Does Social Media Impact Well-Being? Humanity had flirted with the idea of building a machine capable of spreading ideas quickly throughout the world for over 2000 years before all of the pieces necessary to do so finally came together for Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-1400s, while he was working on the shores of the Ill River in Strasburg [1]. It rested largely on Gutenberg's invention of a technique for pressing movable type (think of a scrabble set made of metal) against paper and ink to create a printed page [1] (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Gutenberg). Prior to Gutenberg's invention, it would take up to 2 months to produce a single copy of a book. Now printers could produce 8000 copies during the same time [1]. Highlights Social media has revolutionized how humans interact, providing them with unprecedented opportunities to satisfy their social needs. An explosion of research has examined whether social media impacts wellbeing. First-and second-generation studies examining this issue yielded inconsistent results. An emerging set of third-generation experiments has begun to reveal small but significant negative effects of overall social media use on well-being. The results of these experiments mask the complexities characterizing the relationship between social media and wellbeing. Whether it enhances or diminishes well-being depends on how and why people use it, as well as who uses it. People use social media for different reasons (e.g., to manage impressions, to share emotions), which influence how it impacts their own and other people's well-being.

On the Psychology of TikTok Use: A First Glimpse From Empirical Findings

“…Social media usage and its association with psychological/behavioral variables such as well-being, online-time, and so on can be best understood by investigating these variables in one model, at best also investigating potential interactions of variables. These ideas have also been described in parts in Montag and Hegelich (22), Kross et al (50), and Montag et al (55). The figure does not exclusively mention TikTok because we are convinced that the presented details are true for all research agendas aiming at a better understanding of the relationship between social media use and well-being.…”

Social Media Browsing and Adolescent Well-Being: Challenging the “Passive Social Media Use Hypothesis”

“…The results of Beyens et al (2020b) and of the current study demonstrate that the time is ripe to move beyond the active and passive dichotomy in social media research (cf. Burnell, George, & Underwood, 2020;Kross et al, 2020), by acknowledging that (a) passive use is not the right term to describe the diversity of active intra-individual processes that may occur during browsing, and (b) both active and passive SM use may lead to positive, negative, or no effects among adolescents, depending on a variety of dispositional, developmental, social, and situational antecedents or moderators (Valkenburg et al, 2016).…”

Context, Development, and Digital Media: Implications for Very Young Adolescents in LMICs

“…Given that social media is the predominant digital media use for youth in these settings, understanding its relationship with adolescent wellbeing is paramount. Future studies should leverage the important recent advancements in research practices (Kross et al, 2020) which include moving away from coarse and subjective measures of screen-time. Studies should incorporate objective measures of media use, focus on longitudinal and experimental designs that are suited to assess causality, and align with principles of transparent and reproducible data analysis (Odgers and Jensen, 2020;Orben, 2020).…”

“…The heterogeneous effects of social media on well-being relate to the different psychological processes at play as users navigate this emerging social ecosystem (Kross et al, 2020). For example, positive online experiences reduce loneliness for early adolescents in Peru, with opposite effects for negative interactions (Magis-Weinberg et al, 2021).…”