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The Anti-Social Network

By helping other people look happy, Facebook is making us sad.

By  Libby Copeland

Is Facebook making us miserable?

There are countless ways to make yourself feel lousy. Here's one more, according to research out of Stanford: Assume you're alone in your unhappiness.

"Misery Has More Company Than People Think," a paper in the  January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , draws on a series of studies examining how college students evaluate moods, both their own and those of their peers. Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford's psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends' reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others' attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. "They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life," he told me.

The human habit of overestimating other people's happiness is nothing new, of course. Jordan points to a quote by Montesquieu: "If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are." But social networking may be making this tendency worse. Jordan's research doesn't look at Facebook explicitly, but if his conclusions are correct, it follows that the site would have a special power to make us sadder and lonelier. By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people's lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles' heel of human nature. And women—an especially unhappy bunch of late—may be especially vulnerable to keeping up with what they imagine is the happiness of the Joneses.

In one of the Stanford studies, Jordan and his fellow researchers asked 80 freshmen to report whether they or their peers had recently experienced various negative and positive emotional events. Time and again, the subjects underestimated how many negative experiences ("had a distressing fight," "felt sad because they missed people") their peers were having. They also overestimated how much fun ("going out with friends," "attending parties") these same peers were having. In another study, the researchers found a sample of 140 Stanford students unable to accurately gauge others' happiness even when they were evaluating the moods of people they were close to—friends, roommates and people they were dating. And in a third  study, the researchers found that the more students underestimated others' negative emotions, the more they tended to report feeling lonely and brooding over their own miseries. This is correlation, not causation, mind you; it could be that those subjects who started out feeling worse imagined that everyone else was getting along just fine, not the other way around. But the notion that feeling alone in your day-to-day suffering might increase that suffering certainly makes intuitive sense.

As does the idea that Facebook might aggravate this tendency. Facebook is, after all, characterized by the very public curation of one's assets in the form of friends, photos, biographical data, accomplishments, pithy observations, even the books we say we like. Look, we have baked beautiful cookies. We are playing with a new puppy. We are smiling in pictures (or, if we are moody, we are artfully moody.) Blandness will not do, and with  some exceptions , sad stuff doesn't make the cut, either. The site's very design—the  presence of a "Like" button, without a corresponding "Hate" button—reinforces a kind of upbeat spin doctoring. (No one will "Like" your update that the new puppy died, but they may "Like" your report that the little guy was brave up until the end.)

Any parent who has posted photos and videos of her child on Facebook is keenly aware of the resulting disconnect from reality, the way chronicling parenthood this way creates a story line of delightfully misspoken words, adorably worn hats, dancing, blown kisses. Tearful falls and tantrums are rarely recorded, nor are the stretches of pure, mind-blowing tedium. We protect ourselves, and our kids, this way; happiness is impersonal in a way that pain is not. But in the process, we wind up contributing to the illusion that kids are all joy, no effort. 

Facebook is "like being in a play. You make a character," one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology,  Alone Together . Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this "presentation anxiety," and suggests that the site's element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves. (The book's broader theory is that technology, despite its promises of social connectivity, actually makes us lonelier by preventing true intimacy.)

Facebook oneupsmanship may have particular implications for women. As Meghan O'Rourke has  noted here in  Slate , women's happiness has been at an all-time low in recent years.  O'Rourke  and  two University of Pennsylvania economists  who have studied the male-female happiness gap argue that women's collective discontent may be due to too much choice and second-guessing–unforeseen fallout, they speculate, of the way our roles have evolved over the last half-century. As the economists put it, "The increased opportunity to succeed in many dimensions may have led to an increased likelihood in believing that one's life is not measuring up."

If you're already inclined to compare your own decisions to those of other women and to find yours wanting, believing that others are happier with their choices than they actually are is likely to increase your own sense of inadequacy. And women may be particularly susceptible to the Facebook illusion. For one thing, the site is inhabited by more women than men, and women users tend to be more active on the site,  as Forbes has reported . According to  a recent study out of the University of Texas at Austin, while men are more likely to use the site to share items related to the news or current events, women tend to use it to engage in personal communication (posting photos, sharing content "related to friends and family"). This may make it especially hard for women to avoid comparisons that make them miserable. (Last fall, for example, the Washington Post ran a piece  about the difficulties of infertile women  in shielding themselves from the Facebook crowings of pregnant friends.)

Jordan, who is now a postdoctoral fellow studying social psychology at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, suggests we might do well to consider Facebook profiles as something akin to the airbrushed photos on the covers of women's magazine. No, you will never have those thighs, because nobody has those thighs. You will never be as consistently happy as your Facebook friends, because nobody is that happy. So remember Montesquieu, and, if you're feeling particularly down, use Facebook for its most exalted purpose: finding fat exes.

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Is Facebook Making You Depressed?

New research suggests who’s at risk for depression from too much Facebook use

Posted Oct 14, 2017

That experience of “FOMO,” or  Fear  of Missing Out, is one that psychologists identified several years ago as a potent risk of  Facebook  use. You’re alone on a Saturday night, decide to check in to see what your Facebook  friends  are doing, and see that they’re at a party and you’re not. Longing to be out and about, you start to wonder why no one invited you, even though you thought you were popular with that segment of your crowd. Is there something these people actually don’t like about you? How many other social occasions have you missed out on because your supposed friends didn’t want you around? You find yourself becoming preoccupied and can almost see your  self-esteem  slipping further and further downhill as you continue to seek reasons for the snubbing.

The feeling of being left out was always a potential contributor to feelings of  depression  and low self-esteem from time immemorial but only with social  media  has it now become possible to quantify the number of times you’re left off the invite list. With such risks in mind, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a warning that Facebook could trigger depression in children and adolescents, populations that are particularly sensitive to social rejection. The legitimacy of this claim, according to Hong Kong Shue Yan University’s Tak Sang Chow and Hau Yin Wan (2017), can be questioned. “Facebook Depression” may not exist at all, they believe, or the relationship may even go in the opposite direction in which more Facebook usage is related to higher, not lower, life satisfaction. 

As the authors point out, it seems quite likely that the Facebook-depression relationship would be a complicated one. Adding to the mixed  nature  of the literature's findings is the possibility that  personality  might also play a critical role. Based on your personality, you may interpret the posts of your friends in a way that differs from the way in which someone else thinks about them. Rather than feeling insulted or rejected when you see that party posting, you may be happy that your friends are having a good time, even though you’re not there to share that particular event with them. If you’re not as secure about how much you’re liked by others, you’ll regard that posting in a less favorable light and see it as a clear-cut case of ostracism.

The one personality trait that the Hong Kong authors believe would play a key role is  neuroticism , or the chronic tendency to worry excessively, feel anxious, and experience a pervasive sense of insecurity. A number of prior studies investigated neuroticism’s role in causing Facebook users high in this trait to try to present themselves in an unusually favorable light, including portrayals of their physical selves. The highly neurotic are also more likely to follow the Facebook feeds of others rather than to post their own status. Two other Facebook-related psychological qualities are envyand social comparison, both relevant to the negative experiences people can have on Facebook. In addition to neuroticism, Chow and Wan sought to investigate the effect of these two psychological qualities on the Facebook-depression relationship.

The online sample of participants recruited from around the world consisted of 282 adults, ranging from ages 18 to 73 (average age of 33), two-thirds male, and representing a mix of  race /ethnicities (51% Caucasian). They completed standard measures of personality traits and depression. Asked to estimate their Facebook use and number of friends, participants also reported on the extent to which they engage in Facebook social comparison and how much they experience envy. To measure Facebook social comparison, participants answered questions such as “I think I often compare myself with others on Facebook when I am reading news feeds or checking out others’ photos” and “I’ve felt pressure from the people I see on Facebook who have perfect appearance.” The envy questionnaire included items such as “It somehow doesn’t seem fair that some people seem to have all the fun.”

This was indeed a set of heavy Facebook users, with a range of reported minutes on the site of from 0 to 600, with a mean of 100 minutes per day. Very few, though, spent more than two hours per day scrolling through the posts and photos of their friends. The sample members reported having a large number of friends, with an average of 316; a large group (about two-thirds) of participants had over 1,000. The largest number of friends reported was 10,001, but some participants had none at all. Their scores on the measures of neuroticism, social comparison, envy, and depression were in the mid-range of each of the scales.

The key question would be whether Facebook use and depression would be positively related. Would those two-hour plus users of this brand of social media be more depressed than the infrequent browsers of the activities of their friends? The answer was, in the words of the authors, a definitive “no;" as they concluded: “At this stage, it is premature for researchers or practitioners to conclude that spending time on Facebook would have detrimental mental  health  consequences” (p. 280).

That said, however, there is a mental health risk for people high in neuroticism. People who worry excessively, feel chronically insecure, and are generally anxious, do experience a heightened chance of showing depressive symptoms. As this was a one-time only study, the authors rightly noted that it’s possible that the highly neurotic who are already high in depression, become the Facebook-obsessed. The old correlation does not equal causation issue couldn't be settled by this particular investigation.

Even so, from the vantage point of the authors, there’s no reason for society as a whole to feel “ moral   panic ” about Facebook use. What they see as over-reaction to media reports of all online activity (including videogames) comes out of a tendency to err in the direction of false positives. When it’s a foregone conclusion that any online activity is bad, the results of scientific studies become stretched in the direction to fit that set of beliefs. As with videogames, such biased interpretations not only limit scientific inquiry, but fail to take into account the possible mental health benefits that people’s online behavior can promote.

The next time you find yourself experiencing FOMO, the Hong Kong study suggests that you examine why you’re feeling so left out. Take a break, look back on the photos from past social events that you’ve enjoyed with your friends before, and enjoy reflecting on those happy  memories .

References

Chow, T. S., & Wan, H. Y. (2017). Is there any ‘Facebook Depression’? Exploring the moderating roles of neuroticism, Facebook social comparison and envy. Personality and Individual Differences, 119277-282. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2017.07.032