Yes, social media poses many challenges. They are designed to keep us hooked and release dopamine, making us spend much more time on them than we planned. Additionally, especially for young female teens, image-based platforms can significantly impact self-image and self-esteem. However, social media can also lead to digital well-being, inspiration, feelings of loving connection, and social support.
Do these positive effects outweigh all the negative ones? Probably not. Nevertheless, approaching the issues from a solution-oriented, positive framework can expand the ways we think about solving such problems. That is, in addition to advocating for phone-free schools and policies to limit social media use to 16 years old, as suggested in Jonathan Haidt's recent book "The Restless Age," we can think about what healthy and nurturing technology looks like that fosters well-being, resilience, and character strengths in young adults. We need to understand what "healthy" tech use truly looks like to encourage it.
My research is based on the framework of positive psychology, which explores ways we can live our best lives, rather than just lives without illness. Over the past few years, I have studied ways in which media in general, as well as new media such as social media and computer-mediated communication, can lead to happiness and fulfillment for us as well as prosociality and greater connectedness to others.
Three Key Insights from Positive Media Psychology:
1. Young Americans do thrive digitally. In a sample representative of the American population, my recent research revealed that younger individuals (18-34) perceive themselves to thrive digitally more than older individuals, even when controlling for the amount of time spent communicating online overall. Young adults specifically reported feeling more connected when communicating digitally and engaged in positive social comparison more so than older adults. This finding challenges much of the prior research, and media coverage, that highlights the disadvantages of online social comparison for well-being. However, if we look closely, recent evidence shows positive well-being effects from social comparison processes online.
2. Comparing yourself to others online can boost motivation and improve mental health. A recent review on the role of social comparison on social media from a colleague at the University of Nuremberg shows that social comparison can lead to well-being for specific people under certain conditions. For example, one of my studies showed that when college students share inspiring content on Facebook with others, over time, they feel more love and compassion toward others. In another study, we found that inspiring social media and online video use, but not overall time spent on social media, was positively associated with everyday experiences of gratitude, awe, vitality, and prosocial motivations and behaviors. Similarly, research from Sheffield University in the U.K. further shows that social comparison on Instagram is more likely to lead to inspiration when teens compare themselves to similar others rather than unattainable influencers. Therefore, one of the conditions for whether social comparison may lead to positive or negative effects also comes from the content we consume and the people we follow. So, let's remember: social comparison isn't always bad and young adults do experience inspiration online that is often overlooked.
3. Social media strengthens teens' friendships more than it harms them. We are living in a digitized world. While older generations might have used home phones to talk to friends for hours in their rooms, today teens do this on their smartphones. A 2022 Pew Research survey examined the opinions of U.S. residents. teens aged 13-17, 80% of teens said that social media makes them more connected to what's happening in their friends' lives, 71% said they have a place where they can show their creative side, and 67% said they like having people on social media who can support them through tough times. Moreover, a teen's mindset matters. The Pew study also revealed that those who believe social media positively affects their friends also experience more positive personal experiences than those who believe social media negatively affects their friends. Such a positive view of technology can be influenced by many factors, but specifically for young teens, parents play an active role in their children's digital lives. In fact, parental involvement can be the determining factor in whether a teen thrives digitally. In a study I co-authored, published in April 2024 in the Journal of Child Development, we tracked teens' (11-21 years old, average age 15) digital thriving for a year and found that for half of the sample their digital thriving score was high to begin with and remained relatively stable over time (with slight increases in positive social comparison). For the other half of the group, digital well-being started lower and self-regulation declined over time. What distinguished the two groups was that the first, highly thriving group, had parents with high digital skills and a keen interest in their teen's tech lives.
Don't get me wrong. I'm no denier of the issues that social media brings and I'm all for new COPPA2.0 regulations and other initiatives put forth by excellent organizations such as The Center for Humane Technology and the Digital Wellness Institute. By using positive psychology, we can discover strengths in consumer and tech platforms that help prevent harm and encourage growth.