Large-scale study of the impact of social networks: virtual relationships make people unhappy

According to data provided by the company last year, the average Facebook user spends almost an hour of his life daily on this social network. A survey of the consulting company Deloitte showed that for many users checking applications on social networks is the first thing they do in the morning, even before they get out of bed. Of course, social interaction is a healthy and necessary part of human existence. Thousands of researchers have already made findings that most people feel better when they have a strong and positive relationships with other people.

The problem is that most of the scientific work on social interaction was carried out within the framework of real "social networks" - face-to-face interactions of people, and not in online relationships, which are becoming more common.

We know that interaction with people in real life has a beneficial effect on a person. What about relationships that are built directly through the screen of a smartphone or computer? What impact do social networks have on a person?

Previous studies in this area have shown that the use of social networks can reduce real interaction with people, increase the length of time spent by a person in a sitting position, lead to Internet addiction andundermine self-esteem as a result of social comparison.

Self-esteem has a strong influence on people's behavior, and since all users tend to show only positive aspects of their life on social networks, a person can believe that his own life is not as good as the life of another.

However, some skeptics ask themselves: are people with lower well-being likely to use social networks more often than social networks to cause lower well-being? Some studies have found that social networks have a positive effect on well-being, because they expand social support and strengthen relationships in the real world.

Researchers Holly Shakya fromUniversity of California and Nicholas Christakis from Yale decided to get a clearer picture of the relationship between well-being and social media use. For three years, scientists studied the data of 5 thousand people. They collected information on Facebook usage and health data to see how wealth is changing over time due to the use of the social network.

Well-being was assessed based on information about life satisfaction, self-esteem, psychological and physical health, and body mass index. In each wave of the survey, researchers asked respondents to name up to four friends with whom they discuss important issues, and the same number of people with whom they spend their free time to evaluate interaction in the real world.

Researchers name three advantages that distinguish their scientific work from others. First, they studied three waves of data from respondents over three years. This allowed them to track how changes in the use of social networks have changed their well-being. Secondly, they had objective indicators of the use of social networks, taken directly from their accounts, and not self-reports of respondents. And thirdly, in addition to Facebook data, they had information about real interactions with people around them, which made it possible to compare the impact of full-time and virtual interactions on the respondent.

Meanwhile, the researchers themselves point out some reservations. For example, many users did not provide access to their data on Facebook, most of those who refused were young people. Thus, the results can be skewed towards the experience of using social networks by older respondents (the researchers took into account their age and gender).

The average age of those subjects who submitted Facebook data was 48 years old - people of this age lived a large half of their lives without the widespread influence of the Internet. Plus, in studies based on data from respondents, there may be some margin of error.

The result will seem to someone to be expected: using Facebook has made people less happy. Using a social network for one year showed a decrease in psychological health in the following. A key indicator confirming the hypothesis is that each increase in the number of “likes”, clicks on links and status updates by 1% reduces psychological health indicators by 5-8%.

Researchers measured three types of activity: “likes,” posting and clicking on links, and their impact on the user. And although they expected that content from other people with “likes” was more likely to lead to critical introspection and, consequently, to a decrease in wealth, updating their own status and clicking on links led to a similar effect.

However, not everything is as bad as it might seem. Researchers also note that people often turn to Facebook when they are already sad, because they do not want to come into direct contact with people in this state.

In general, the results suggest that a decrease in overall mood depends not only on the quality of Facebook use, but also on the quantity (i.e. frequency and time spent). And while staying in front of the screen for too long is a long-standing problem, the trick of social networks is that while people use them, they have the impression that they are engaged in significant social interaction. Scientists have confirmed that the nature and quality of these kinds of connections cannot replace the interactions with the real world that are necessary for a healthy life.

Fully exploring the impact of social networks is, of course, difficult. The impact of carefully selected photographs and other content on the lives of others leads to a decrease in self-esteem, and constant interaction with people on social networks can distract from more significant real life events. And it is clear that virtual social interactions cannot replace real ones.

doi: 10.1093 / aje / kww189