Psychology of Social Media — Why We Feel the Need to Share
In an age where social media is part of our daily lives in almost every capacity, one must wonder the effects it has on our minds, both the unconscious and conscious parts. We know the research on the negative impact of social media and see this occur in the news daily, with many of us having experienced this firsthand as well.
Why are we so focused on social media? Why is there a need to post online, knowing all the reasons why it is so negative? What makes us feel the need to document our lives and post these things on social media? Why do we post the good things and not the bad? Our online behavior directly relates to our sense of worth offline. It also relates to psychological states, for example whether we have low self-esteem, narcissism, anxiety or depression can equate to the need for admiration, external validation or other traits leading us to post online.
Wilcox and Stephen (2012) found that social media sites increase self-esteem as people present themselves as socially desirable with a positive self-view to others when online. This, in turn, gives individuals a self-esteem boost, but decreases self-control. One must keep up appearances and paint a positive picture of what our lives look like, which may cover up our true personas. Obtaining our self-esteem and self-worth from social media is not sustainable. These superficial ways of receiving positive feedback do more harm than good and makes us more malleable to the comments we get and the number of likes we get, which can also lead to psychological addiction to social media usage. There is even research to back this up, psychological addiction can lead to degrading white matter in the brain and resembles the impact drug addiction has on an individual.
Social media should not be what one turns to, to boost self-esteem as one relies on external validation to achieve a sense of self-worth, rather than looking internally for validation. By gaining a positive view of ourselves on social media, we perpetuate a negative cycle where we take short-term satisfaction as the same as long-term, meaningful work we should be doing on our own to improve our own self-esteem. Again, when we post something online, we hide the negative parts of our life, thus leaving behind the shame we have of those negatives. We lose the ability to develop a healthy sense of self-worth through personal growth and moving forward from fears related to failure and other negative thoughts.
The key here is that our sense of self-worth is not and should not originate from social media. We must be cognizant of the reality that it is not possible to fully improve our self-esteem through posting online and receiving positive feedback. Rather, looking inward to ourselves is a sustainable and healthy way to develop positive emotional and cognitive self-appraisals that build up self-esteem and self-worth.