In a recent psychological study published in Media Psychology, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that browsing through one's online social media profile, such as Facebook, can negatively impact someones self-esteem and cause them to perform more poorly, The Atlantic reports.
Researchers had 159 undergraduate students spend five minutes or less clicking through either their own Facebook profiles or a stranger's, and then gave them an exercise to complete designed to measure their self-esteem, which included a list of positive and negative words they could associate themselves with in something known as the Implicit Association Test, according to CBS Sacramento.
In a release by the school's website, the Implicit Association Test "measures how quickly participants associate positive or negative adjectives with words such as me, my, I and myself."
"If you have high self-esteem, then you can very quickly associate words related to yourself with positive evaluations but have a difficult time associating words related to yourself with negative evaluations," communication arts assistant professor Catalina Toma was quoted as saying in the release. "But if you have low self-esteem, the opposite is true."
Immediately afterwards, the participants were given a cognitive ability test in which they counted down from 1,978 by intervals of seven as quickly as possible for two minutes.
The results were telling: those who looked at their own Facebook profiles gained a self-esteem boost, yet performed about 15 percent more slowly on their peers on the cognitive ability test, though they were just as likely to provide the correct answers. The study implies that we trick ourselves into thinking we look good to others and ourselves, causing us to boost our own egos.
The authors argued that not only did the participants who looked at their own profiles get an ego-boost, they became more complacent as well. They interpreted the findings as a "backfire," as it may discourage people from thinking it's necessary to prove themselves in other ways, such as trying to do well on a difficult math test.
"This study shows that exposure to your own Facebook profile reduces motivation to perform well in a simple, hypothetical task," Toma said. "It does not show that Facebook use negatively affects college students' grades, for example. Future work is necessary to investigate the psychological effects of other Facebook activities, such as examining others' profiles or reading the news feed."
Alternatively, the students may have been distracted by their own social worlds so much that they had trouble concentrating in the present moment.
