Two hundred children and teenagers, aged 10 to 14, answered a short online survey every evening for 14 days. Each night they were asked how much they had used social media that day, how often they had compared themselves with others, and how they felt. The results, from the DIPF Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, were published in the journal Communications Psychology in 2023.
The finding is plain. The more social media a young person used, the lower their self-worth. And the link ran through comparison.
What the researchers measured
Each participant had one parent in the study. The children reported on their use of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and they rated their well-being on 5-point scales in two parts: self-worth and mood. The team ran two kinds of analysis. One compared children with each other. The other followed each child alone from day to day.
Across the group, heavier users reported lower self-worth and a more negative mood. Within an individual child, days with more social media than usual brought lower self-worth, though not a generally worse mood.
Upward social comparisons were the connecting piece. Social media use went along with them, and they in turn were tied to lower self-worth and a more negative mood, both across the group and in daily observations. According to the DIPF team, those comparisons carried the link between general social media use and well-being. For mood, that held only in the comparison between children.
“We have seen that through the use of social media, children and adolescents are constantly exposed to comparisons with people they consider to be socially better off,” said Dr. Andrea Irmer, the researcher in charge of the study. Those people may look prettier, or seem wealthier, more popular and happier. “So the more they were confronted with the alleged better lives of others on social media, the worse they felt,” Irmer said.
The theory underneath
The idea of comparing upward has a long pedigree. Psychologist Leon Festinger introduced social comparison theory in 1954, first publishing it in The Journal of Human Relations, according to EBSCO’s research overview. His starting point was that people judge their own abilities and opinions by looking at others, especially when no objective test is available.
The direction of the comparison matters. Looking at someone doing worse, a downward comparison, tends to make a person feel better. Looking at someone doing better, an upward comparison, can motivate, as when a student studies how a top classmate keeps track of assignments.
Children start comparing early. EBSCO notes that young people often measure their worth against peers and the media, and that unrealistic beauty ideals in magazines and on social media can feed body dissatisfaction and a higher risk of eating disorders.
Worth noting: the DIPF study measured self-worth and mood, not clinical anxiety. It also covered only 200 children over 14 days.
Sources
- Social comparison theory (EBSCO Research Starters)
- Social media: how upward comparisons and well-being are related in children and adolescents (DIPF)
