People who are prone to comparing themselves with others, both offline and online, spend more time on Facebook.
To see what effect the time spent on social media has on social comparison and self-perception, Moira Burke and her colleagues at Facebook from 18 countries, and matched their responses to a log of their activity on Facebook from the previous four weeks.
The logs, which were anonymised and aggregated, included data such as the number of posts a user looked at and the time spent looking at profiles of demographically similar people. The researchers weren’t able to view any individual-level data.
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The team found that people who reported more frequent social comparison spent and had more Facebook friends. These people also saw more social content – posts produced by friends, friends-of-friends or other people they followed – relative to posts from news organisations and other businesses.
People with a higher propensity for social comparison also spent proportionally more time viewing others’ profiles and saw more likes and comments on the posts of other people.
The researchers suggest that the link may go both ways: people more prone to comparing themselves with others might choose to spend more , and the content they see on platforms like Facebook may result in more frequent social comparisons.
The team also asked the participants about interactions on Facebook that had made them feel worse as a result of social comparison. One in five people recalled seeing a recent post that made them . Half reported wishing they hadn’t seen the post, while a third said they felt happy for the friend who shared the content.
“It makes sense that any activity that focuses on social observation would trigger more awareness of social comparison,” says Pamela Rutledge at the Media Psychology Research Center in California, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Social comparison is a necessary skill for navigating our social environments, she says, and only becomes problematic when someone focuses on an aspect of another person that is unattainable.
The researchers suggest that certain Facebook design changes could help reduce social comparison, such as “hiding Like counts and reminding people that others’ lives are not as ideal as they may seem, both online and offline”, they write. Facebook could also increase the prominence of tools that can selectively filter out certain people, such as the “snooze option” that temporarily unfollows someone for 30 days, they suggest.
“It’s not clear that hiding likes will alleviate the tendency of people to compare themselves and experience negative emotions,” says Rutledge. “We have the ability to filter already – by blocking and exercising self-control over our social media use.” It may be more helpful, she adds, to teach people media literacy skills, so that they can make more positive choices.
The research was due to be presented at the cancelled CHI conference in April. Burke declined to comment on the work and Facebook didn’t provide a response before publication.
