Wirtz, Tucker, Briggs, and Schoemann (2021) on Happiness and Social Media

Derrick Wirtz, Amanda Tucker, Chloe Briggs, and Alexander M. Schoemann, “How and Why Social Media Affect Subjective Well-Being: Multi Site Use and Social Comparison as Predictors of Change Across Time.” Journal of Happiness Studies 22:1673–1691, 2021.

• "Social" media hold the potential to increase social interaction, which tends to raise subjective well-being. But the environment in which interactions take place on social media is quite different from face-to-face encounters.

• Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram use are tracked over ten days by an experience sampling (five times per day, contacted via e-mail) method; n=77 semi-captive (college-course-taking) subjects, with 6 to 48 responses per subject. 

• The main measures: positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction (“I am satisfied with my life,” strongly agree through strongly disagree); loneliness is also assessed.

• More use of social media increases negative affect (that is, there's more bad feelings), but does not influence positive affect. The suggestion, then, is that social media use decreases subjective wellbeing, not by undermining positive feelings, but by increasing negative feelings. Instagram use hints (but not in a statistically significant way) at some increase in positive affect, too, and “overall” affect.

• Social comparison on social media (seeing all your friends' best moments on Facebook) also correlates with higher negative affect, while also reducing positive affect. It might be social comparison, and not social media use per se, that drives diminished subjective well-being. For instance, Facebook use is no longer significant (in altering happiness) when controlling for social comparison.

• Social media use increases loneliness, and loneliness seems to drive some social media use.

• Direct (face-to-face) interactions remain good for affect, even within this sample.

• Life satisfaction (as opposed to affect) is measured at the beginning and the end of the experiment (that is, there is no experience sampling); there are no significant effects of social media use on life satisfaction changes over the two-ish weeks.

• Facebook use (working through social comparisons) seems to lower self esteem; “passive” use of Facebook (scrolling, not posting or messaging) seems particularly problematic.