Social Media Psychology

09/11/2022

People share content on social media that they are well aware is false just to gain attention, a recent study shows.

Why care about truthfulness when you can have likes?

01/11/2022

Self-diagnosis ads and user-generated content on mental health issues such as ADHD or eating disorders exist in abundance on TikTok, prompting many young people to oversimplify or misdiagnose existing conditions.

While social media can help people feel less alone, using it to evaluate symptoms has several downsides.

25/10/2022

Psychology says those five words can push anyone's buttons! Here is what makes them a must for copywriters. 👇

1⃣ YOU
Personal pronouns are powerful because they connect us with our emotions. The second person pronoun “you” is way more persuasive than the impersonal “they”.

2⃣ NEW
Novelty boosts cognition and literally wakes up our brain: the new things we see, smell, hear, or experience can create vivid memories that last for a lifetime. Our curiosity is stirred once the word “new” appears: for marketers, that means more clicks!

3⃣ NOW
The best time to buy something is now: quick enough to catch the sales! The digital zeitgeist knows no delayed gratification.

4⃣ FREE
Ever topped up your order with something additional just to get free shipping? Yeah.💸

Psychologists are well aware of people's tendency to overvalue free stuff. It's called the zero-price effect.

One tasty experiment illustrates the phenomenon 🍫 : when people are asked to choose between more expensive but high-quality chocolates and less expensive inferior chocolates, they usually ignore the price and go for the better quality. (Dan Ariely & Kristina Shampaner, 2006)

However, when second-rate chocolates are offered for free🆓, everyone suddenly prefers them over the more delicious ones.

5⃣ BECAUSE
Give someone a reason to change their behaviour. Oftentimes, even a ridiculous reason would do.🧐

The classic Xerox experiment from 1977 proves that: Harvard professor Ellen Langer spent some days asking people queueing up in front of a xerox machine to let her cut in front of the line, starting the conversation in three different ways:
✅ Request only: “May I use the Xerox machine?”
✅ Request with a real reason: “May I use the xerox machine because I’m in a rush?”
✅ Request with a fake reason: “May I use the xerox machine because I have to make copies?”

94% of the people let the researcher skip the line when they were presented with both reasons (the real and the fake), compared to only 60% who were only politely asked but given no explanation.

06/10/2022

There is a kilobyte of truth in the movie "Her" (2013) after all. 🤖💗

Talking with a virtual human can help reduce negative emotions and offer emotional support (provided that people consider the interlocutor as "autonomous") 👩‍💻👋

The results from a new study open up an optimistic perspective for the thousands of people out there stranded to wait for therapy sessions in an overburdened mental health care system. 🎲🤯

While it is definitely not "the real deal", AI-powered therapy may serve as the first stage of help for many patients. 👇

There is a common idea that technology can replace humans in regard to workplace labor, but could they take over the task of emotional support? A study published in Computers in Human Behavior suggests that people felt support and closeness after speaking to a virtual human. ...

05/10/2022

Colours affect human perception, emotions, and behaviour. 🌈 They impact us even physiologically.

Red 🟥, for example, is known to speed up blood circulation, while blue 💙 has a relaxing effect on the nervous system. Too much yellow is bad for the eyes. 👀

People often make colour-based purchases: for example, driving a red car may signal that the owner views the vehicle as a status symbol.

Here are some tips on using colours in marketing from HubSpot.

A powerful marketing tool, color psychology can influence purchasing decisions and help build personal brands.

04/10/2022

The biggest psychological operation of all times is currently being fought on social media in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine. 🧠💣

Russia is using the tactic of gish gallop, or rapid-fire lying 📣💥💥💥, to attack its enemies with versatile incoherent narratives, hoping at least some of it would stick to distort public opinions.

Here is what the world's leading disinformation researchers 🎓📑 have to say about the current state of psychological warfare.👇

Social media disinformation and manipulation are causing confusion, fueling hostilities, and amplifying atrocities around the world

03/10/2022

What’s happened to our ability to think critically? 🤔

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker reflects on the role of rationality and the pitfalls of disinformation in today's "post-truth" world on KCRW's Life Examined podcast. 🎧

Science, data, and logic serve as powerful tools in formulating ideas and solving problems. But our capacity for rational thought has not always gone hand in hand with a universal ability to think and behave sensibly.

01/10/2022

Memes have been used for decades as psychological warfare: coined in 1976, the term refers to all types of transmittable/transmutable cultural content (and not just internet animations 🐶🐸).

While in the past memes were part of the propaganda palette spread by traditional media gatekeepers, we are now seeing memetic content blaze like wildfire 🔥 through social media platforms, influencing people's political opinions on a subconscious level.

Huge viral potential coupled with fuzzy multi-layer meanings and often a hidden agenda makes it very hard to estimate the exact psychological effects of memes. Read more 👇

A seemingly endless supply of memes designed to sow discord and blur the lines between fact and fiction flourish unabated online.

12/09/2022

Are you working AND listening to music? Research says you may not be very productive, because background music affects our performance. 🎧🎷

Listening to music while doing other activities (such as driving, to mention one risky example) prompts us to take faster and less accurate decisions, a recent study showed.

A research team from the University of Buenos Aires analysed how people performed various perceptual and linguistic tasks while listening to music in different tempo and compared the results with work done in silence. The collected data includes over 100,000 individual decisions: all pointing to the fact that silence is better.

The reason for that is simple: processing background music takes up extra brain power needed to complete any decision-making process.🎵🧠

05/09/2022

Men, older individuals, and people with lower educational achievement are significantly more likely to engage with misleading content on social media.

The propensity to share misinformation also correlates with dark personality traits such as narcissism and psychopathy.

Check out this new study summarising the psychological factors which make people promote misleading narratives.

We need to understand how lies spread in order to secure the truth.

30/08/2022

Whether someone would believe in reptilians, chemtrails or 5G-induced pandemics has a lot to do with their personality. 🦎🛫🛸 Psychologists have been researching conspiratorial thinking for decades now, 🧠🔍 trying to make sense of why some people would fall for the strangest theories.

Two personality traits appear to be somewhat (yet inconclusively) related to our propensity for far-fetched narratives: 1⃣ low agreeableness 😠 (simply put, hostility with a tinge of suspicion) and 2⃣ high openness to experience 🧐 (this trait involves general curiosity, a creative and out-of-the-box cognitive style).

People low in agreeableness are more likely to view the world (and others) as a malicious, unfriendly place.

People high in openness to experience generally possess an alert and agile mind which, however, may at times lead them to an offbeat pool of knowledge.

Our locus of control 🔱 – or the perception about the underlying causes of events in our life – also plays a role.

People with external locus of control are more likely to see external factors (fate, karma, energies, the deep state, the world elites, reptilians 👩‍⚖🎭) as the driving force behind their life. Magical thinking 🧙 as a subset of this general viewpoint also shapes our perceptions.

There are quite a few other factors: mistrust against authorities, emotional or intuitive rather than critical thinking, belonging to marginal groups (religious, political), schizotypal personality, proneness to paranoia, narcissism, lower level of education… the list goes on.

To an extent, all of us are conspiracy theorists holding firm to some weird beliefs on the spectrum between somewhat plausible and extremely improbable.

With the growing political importance of online conspiracies across the world and the emergence of new marginal social media platforms to share them in, dedicating resources to conspiracy-related research becomes crucial.

29/08/2022

How are Twitter users different than Facebook-only users? What is their motivation for being on the platform?

Two studies published in APA Databases APA’s magazine “Psychology of Popular Media” in 2020 📑 came up with some pretty interesting results about the psychology of Twitterers. 🧠

Personality tests revealed that the microblogging platform is home to some very specific demographics.

✔ Twitter users score higher in openness to experience than other social media users: people who possess more of this personality trait exhibit more curiosity, inventiveness, and are prone to intellectual pursuits.

✔ On the negative side, however, Twitterers also have stronger Machiavellian features, or the personality trait linked with manipulativeness, cunningness and a general desire to gain power over others.

Both openness to experience and Machiavellianism correlated with the motivation of users to excel in their career through Twitter and use the platform for informational purposes rather than social connection purposes.

✔ Narcissism is also strongly correlated with Twitter usage. Compared to platforms such as Facebook that promote connections with strong ties (friends) over information seeking behaviour, Twitter was primarily developed as a platform allowing people to share their thoughts with the world and – potentially – receive recognition from ANYONE (the narcissistic dream) 🌍💗

Narcissists tend to enjoy the asynchronous nature of follower/followee relationships on Twitter, where a higher number of followers signals a higher social status.

In other words, Twitter allows for self-centered, nonreciprocal updates to a much greater extent that platforms operating around social connection such as Facebook, in this sense feeding the narcissistic ego of some of its users.

Could these specifics of the platform (at least partly) explain the fact that Twitter continues to be a niche actor despite being one of the oldest social media apps out there?

The platform currently counts 435 million users. This is very low, compared to bigger platforms of a similar age such as Facebook (2.8 billion) or YouTube (2.2 billion), but also compared to newer platforms such as TikTok (1 billion) or Instagram (1.3 billion) who came into existence years after Twitter was first launched (2006).

Check out the paper 👉 https://bit.ly/TwitterPsychologyStudy_APA2020

02/05/2022

Do you think Russia's supporters are stupid 🤡 or evil 👹?

A study on perceptions towards political opponents in the US shows that people across the continuum were more likely to ascribe ignorance as the main cause behind their opponents' beliefs.

The reason is simple: we humans prefer to retain some hope about the world. While immorality is irreparable, stupidity can be remedied.

For example, by changing your media diet. In a recent experiment, Fox News viewers were paid to watch CNN for 30 days. This intervention led to palpable changes in their partisan opinions, allowing them to reverse false beliefs, and realise that important information was kept hidden from them by their preferred media outlet.

One more proof for the importance of diversifying media consumption.

New research probes how Republicans and Democrats interpret the others' motives.

23/04/2022

Happy : here is why you should ditch digital devices for good old-fashioned paper. 👀📖

✔ We read (at least) 10% slower on screens. (Research by UX research leader Nielsen Norman Group, 2010)

✔ We understand and remember less when we read texts on screens than on paper: psychologists call this the screen inferiority effect. 📱📉

✔ Although we may grasp the gist while reading on both mediums, more details are missed when reading in digital formats. This is true especially for longer and more complex texts (Singer & Alexander, 2016).

✔ Scrolling down 👆 instead of turning pages affects our ability to construct a cognitive map of the text: which makes us less able to locate a piece of information in the book and less motivated to look for it if needed. (Hou, Rashid & Lee, 2017)

✔ Print provides sensory & tactile information that enhances cognitive processing: seeing the words, feeling the pages, even smelling the paper 👃 are sensory cues that help us understand texts faster.

In one study, two groups of people were presented with a story on a Kindle e-reader and in a book and were asked to locate events in the text and reconstruct the plot of the story. Results showed those who had read in the book were better in defining the chronology and temporality in the story. (Mangen, 2019)

Learn more 🧠👉 https://bit.ly/ReadingAcrossMediums

19/04/2022

Stop hiding behind apps: conversations are better than emails or chats. 👩‍💻💬 The reason: creating effective text-based communication requires serious cognitive effort which leaves us with less energy to get the actual work done.

New research from the Florida International University College of Business shows that you may want to consider holding off exclusively depending upon technologies.

08/02/2022

Can we boost our focus if we simply drop social media? How long does it take? One person's voyage through a digital detox.

Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can

27/10/2021

Global lockdowns have led to growing engagement with toxic online content ranging from terrorist issues to conspiracy theories.

The mental health implications of lockdowns may have contributed to this increased involvement in extremist content, studies suggest.

Terror content just one of ‘cocktail of harms’ that are subject to growing online engagement, report finds

19/10/2021

You may not follow QAnon Facebook groups, but does that make you immune to all weird facts our there? Conspiracy theories exist on a spectrum, from plausible to unpopular. In fact, we are all conspiracists to an extent: where is your demarcation line? 🗿👽🛸🐍😷

In each of our minds, we draw a demarcation line between beliefs that are reasonable and those that are nonsense. Where do you draw your line?

15/10/2021

You probably know that social media apps skyrocket our dopamine levels, turning us into notification addicts.

Count the number of times you check your smartphone every hour to get an idea.

A digital fast would help: and that's a darned hard thing to do.

Rising rates of depression and anxiety in wealthy countries like the U.S. may be a result of our brains getting hooked on the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.

06/10/2021

Never before in the history of mankind have humans lived with such inflated ideas about their own knowledge of the world.

1⃣ Social media echo chambers reinforce our restricted beliefs. 2⃣ Publicly committing to an opinion in a post makes us less willing to change our mind later. 3⃣ We click only on what we like.

How to keep an agile mind? By following Socrates' advice for epistemic humility 🧠🙏

"One way the internet distorts our picture of ourselves is by feeding the human tendency to overestimate our knowledge of how the world works," writes philosophy professor Michael Patrick Lynch.