(Thinkstock)
Studies suggest that browsing Facebook can make you unhappy, says
Justin Mullins. Why might that be? This article originally published in
February 2014 explains.
Not so long ago a new form of communication swept the world,
transforming life in ways unimagined just a few years before. One
commentator heralded it as “the greatest means of communication ever
developed by the mind of man” while others pointed to its potential to
revolutionise news, entertainment and education. But the poet and
playwright TS Eliot had a different take. “It is a medium of
entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same
joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome,” he wrote.
Eliot
and the others were writing about television in the early 1960s. But
fast forward 50 years and you could be forgiven for thinking that their
comments apply equally well to the internet, and online social networks.
Chief
among these is Facebook. Its statistics are astounding. In just one
decade, it has signed up some 1.3 billion people, half of whom log in on
any given day and spend an average of 18 minutes per visit. Facebook
connects families across continents, friends across the years and people
around the world.
And yet Facebook’s effects on its users may not
be entirely benign. Some researchers suggest that the ability to
connect does not necessarily make people any happier, and it could in
fact reduce the satisfaction they feel about their life. Can it really
be possible that Facebook makes you sad?
Until recently, few had
studied this question and the little evidence that did exist actually
hinted that the social network has a beneficial effect. In 2009,
Sebastian Valenzuela and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin
measured how life satisfaction varied among over 2,500 students who
used Facebook,
and they found a small positive correlation.
Yet last summer, a team of psychologists from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the University of Leuven in Belgium
decided to drill a bit deeper
by evaluating how life satisfaction changes over time with Facebook
use. Ethan Kross and colleagues questioned a group of people five times a
day over two weeks about their emotional state. They asked questions
such as “how do you feel right now?”, “how lonely do you feel right
now?”, “how much have you used Facebook since we last asked?” and so on.
This gave them a snapshot of each individual’s well-being and Facebook
usage throughout the day.
The team found that Facebook use
correlated with a low sense of well-being. “The more people used
Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels
declined over time,” they said. “Rather than enhancing well-being… these
findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.”
Popularity contest
There
are several possible explanations for the finding. It could be that
people feeling down were more likely to visit Facebook, but the team
were able to rule this out because their data would have revealed if
people felt low before visiting the site.
As Kross and colleagues
pointed out, Facebook is an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic
human need for social contact. But they suspect that the kind of
contact Facebook provides does not make people feel better over time.
The opposite was true of face-to-face contact, according to their data.
Perhaps there is something different about digital social interactions,
they suggest.
One possibility might be simple jealousy. After all,
it can be deflating to see cousins and former school-friends routinely
boasting about their career successes, holidays or new children. Some
researchers have referred to this effect as “friendly world syndrome”,
where it seems like everybody is having a better time than you. The
syndrome comes from an effect identified by sociologists in the 1970s
called “mean world syndrome”, where people who watched a lot of violent
TV thought the world was more violent than it actually is. Your friends
on Facebook may be more likely to trumpet their successes than failures,
which can give a skewed picture of what life is really like.
Another
similar phenomenon that has emerged in recent years might also explain
this dissatisfaction – your friends are, on average, more popular than
you. Back in 1991, the sociologist Scott Feld uncovered a surprise while
studying the nature of social networks in the pre-internet age. The
data came from asking children at several schools who their friends
were, whether these friendships were reciprocated and then drawing up
the resulting network by hand.
Feld counted the number of friends
each individual had, and compared that to the number of friends the
friends had. To everyone’s great surprise, he discovered that a child’s
friends almost always had more friends than they did, on average.
Who's better, who's best
Since
then, other researchers have discovered that this “friendship paradox”
is a general feature of social networks and applies to other properties
too. Not only will your friends have more friends than you do, they
probably have more sexual partners too.
Although highly
counterintuitive, there is a straightforward mathematical reason for
this. People with lots of friends are more likely to number among your
friends in the first place. And when they do, they significantly raise
the average number of friends that your friends have. People have more
friends than you do simply because the average is skewed.
The rise
of online social networks has confirmed all of this, not least because
researchers suddenly have access to a level of detail that was unheard
of before the internet era. According to Nathan Hodas and colleagues at
the University of Southern California, the friendship paradox holds true
for
more than 98% of Twitter users too.
Why
might that make you feel glum? Unlike physical world friendships, on
Facebook you can see exactly how popular your more popular friends are.
What’s
more, last month Young-Ho Eom at the University of Toulouse in France
and Hang-Hyun Jo at Aalto University in Finland found that
wealth and happiness can show the same paradoxical behaviour
– though it’s not clear why. So even if many of your friends are like
you, the research suggests that there’s a good chance that there’s at
least one significantly wealthier or happier person in your social
network.
This could all make for a quite the downer. And that’s not really so different from the way television seemed to TS Eliot.
Remove these ads by
