27. Is social media corrupting your brain?

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hi, Hello, welcome all. Here's the question we're asking ourselves this week. Let's jump right into it. Is social media rotting your brain? And all? The answer is yes, there you go. End of episode Just kidding. This week we are going to discuss the consequences of social media in our twenties and the absolute chokehold it has over so many of our lives. I think social media has just recently, in the last decade or two, become part of people's daily activities. Many of us spend hours each day on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and other popular social media sites. Hours hours of our lives detached from the real from the real world, from what is actually happening, you know, connected but not really. There's so much to discuss when we talk about these platforms. We're going to consider the issues of social comparison and presentation to addiction. We're going to talk about exogenous depression caused by excessive social media usage. How the design of social media is highly intentional and deliberate to capture of much of our attention as possible, based on an understanding of how our brains work, how our brains process social information, how these platforms are attuned to tribal networks, and the matter by which dopamine controls every single one of our actions. TikTok. We're going to talk about, TikTok, why are those short videos so hard to pull away from? And why it's probably not your fault that you find yourself in the TikTok deep dive or black hole of content so much that we're talking about today, So let's just jump right in and answer some of those questions. Humans have been evolving for thousands of years, and many, if not all, of our current anatomical features and processes, like our limbic system and our dopamine centers, they have adapted from the survival priorities of pre human and I guess human ancestors. And there are a couple of ways that this kind of evolutionary idea is so important when we consider how dominating social media is in our lives these days. In particular, our brains are hardwired towards tribal networks, as this was kind of the best method for organizing members of a group to ensure survival in the past. Humans are adapted to be highly social, and despite platforms like Instagram, like Facebook being created to help humans connect, social media deliberately exploit psychological features of our social brains andgeric systems to mean that we keep going back to receive the reward of feeling like we are part of a broader group and connected to others, even if it's perhaps not true, or even if it's just through a screen. As a result of that, I guess our social media uses has just rapidly increased in the past five years, I'd say five to ten years, and some researchers have even found reasons to believe that our brains have experienced the kind of rapid evolution that we never see. There's been these massive changes to our dopamine systems, our signapses, they of certain lobes in children and in young adults that have been noticed since the introduction of social media, changes that would normally take generations entire generations to show up. In the past. Social media it evolved. It has evolved beyond a platform that connects users, but that's not the main purpose anymore. It's now a significant distraction from daily life, and many of us prioritize scrolling our feeds or do it counterintuitively without even wanting to, and the negative impacts that have emerged from that are just endless. I'm sure you've experienced that yourself, the use of social media as a distraction, how it removes value from the moment, seeing the world through what we can post to receive attention as a way of connection, rather than seeing the world through actually kind of enjoying the moment. So to begin, we are going to examine how social media platforms like TikTok, like Instagram have been designed in a very particular and deliberate manner to consume a user. That's you, the user. Okay, So here's the basis of social media addiction, or at least attraction or attention. Evolutionary psychologists like we talked about have observed that prehuman ancestral groups who had greater social connections were more likely to survive because they had greater access to food, because they could divide labor, there was security in numbers, and they had more mating partners, successful social interactions, and the neurotransmitters that are released during these interactions can be one of the most fulfilling stimuli for humans because of the survival benefits of maintaining a large social network in the past, that instinctual drive towards maintaining expansive networks and groups has survived the evolutionary process. It's still here today. Modern day humans, you and me right now still place great value in an expanse of social network because it's hardwired into our genetic material and certain drives that create our lives, and social media naturally exploits that tribal instinct. It says it in the name social media. I don't think I'm really converting anything new with that, but it's really interesting to think about how what once emerged as something that was social, something that was meant to cater to our need for connection, has actually created perhaps more disconnection than previously. So let's do a quick a quick history, lesson fun fact trivia time. So a lot of people think that the first social media platform was MySpace. That's not correct. It was this thing called six degrees and it was created in nineteen ninety seven. So six degrees kind of relating to that idea of six degrees of separation and it essentially connected users with ends, kind of like what MySpace did after that or what Facebook did after MySpace. So the premise of social media was and it continues to be, engaging audiences and connecting people online whilst accumulating profits through methods like ad revenue, capitalism and psychology kind of mixing to create the greatest profits, I guess. And if a site captures more of your attention and you spend more time on it, the more ads they can run and the more they can receive from this income stream, so they have an incentive to capture as much of your finite attention and time as possible. So since this platform, six Degrees first launched, more platforms have obviously been created for different needs or kind of the same one though, but in different ways, and many people have become so engrossed by this virtual world that they suffer from an addiction to these platforms which hijack not only their social kind of brain, but their reward systems as well. And these digital kind of technologies as well. Like our smartphones become more integrated with everyday life, social media is becoming highly proficient at capturing our attention whilst kind of producing a global shift, a massive shift and how people gather information and connect with each other. No wonder we're seeing these huge changes in our brain formation. Social media, let's not kid ourselves. It has been specifically designed to be addictive. It exploits psychological processes to not only engage users, but to promote addictions. So in twenty and seventeen, the ex president of Facebook, Sean Parker, if you've watched The Social Network the movie, it's played by Justin Timberlake ill, but Sean Parker, Facebook president, he confirmed that the creators of Facebook deliberately tried to exploit a vulnerability in human psychology when designing Facebook, with the objective of consuming as much time and attention as possible or making the platform as addictive as possible. So one feature in particular that he kind of cites that they created to achieve this damaging objective was like the like button. Parker, this ex president man he stated, in kind of like a public announcement or a public outing against Facebook, that the like button it trains users to receive a little dopamine hit from this feature, as it brings a sense of social validation and encourages users to engage for longer. Same with the life button on Instagram. Social media, it has the ability then to both capture and scatter your attention because with a simple kind of refresh, there's not only constant new information at your fingertips, but constant possibilities for validation. And the true drivers of our attachment to social media are the hyper social environments that they offer. Very methods are used and very successful in keeping our attention because of this innate need for social validation. So when a person uses social media and posts, you know, a picture or a status, or a video or a reel, they receive a like, They receive positive social feedback and a dopamine hit from a brain from the brain. So, according to the study by Harvard University, a very big name social networking, it triggers the same region of your brain that ignites when you use addictive substances. So this rewards the behavior and perpetuates the social media habits that we see these days. The instantaneous gratification from an immediate release of dopamine that is the basis for addiction and why you can't stop scrolling, why you can't look away. So variably rewarding users with stimuli, so likes, notification comments, that's what keeps you engaged with and companies understand what causes those dopamine surges and lulls, So not just they're not just interested in what piques your dopamine, but also what reduces it, and it creates their product their platform with those hijacking techniques in mind, that will trigger compulsion loops. Follow with me here. So the like button, the social validation features. It basically causes your brain to produce dopamine and the companies can use that to create these compulsion loops. The more our brain receives dopamine from social media, the more the behavior of scrolling your feed, of visiting the site is positively reinforced, and people crave that instant rush of social affirmation from the dopamine release. The variable reinforcement we mentioned earlier is really crucial to this equation. So variable reinforcement remember that word or that phrase. So in social media marking, there is this idea called the hook model. The hook model, it goes beyond reinforcing behavior, It creates habits, and it spurs users to act on their own. We no longer need marketing to make people use the platform or to visit it. You no longer need to invest in kind of expensive external stimuli or ads or kind of motivators for people to scroll their feeds. So at the heart of the hook model is a pretty powerful cognitive quirk and it was first described by BF Skinner in the nineteen fifties. BF Skinner huge name in psychology. He's done so much for ideas of like conditioning and addiction. And it's called the variable schedule of rewards or intermittent reinforcement. So Skinner, he's most known for this kind of I don't know, like an experiment, like a yeah, like a tool. He's best known for these boxes that he kept rats in and he observed that these rats they responded most to random rewards. So basically these boxes were used by Skinner to understand how we learn how humans learned by using rats as like kind of proteotypes. And either he punished them, he removed a negative stimulus, he provided a positive stimulus, or he removed or he removed a positive stimulus. So that creates the four types of reward and punishment that we know, positive and negative reward and positive and negative punishment. So the mice or the rats, they would push or press a lever and sometimes they'd get a small treat, other times they'd get a large treat, and other times they get nothing at all. So, unlike the rats in other boxes that when they press a lever they would receive the same treat every time, the mice that we're receiving this kind of variable reward seemed to press this lever more compulsively, more excessively. They pressed it even when they weren't hungry, and they became obsessed with it. So humans, like the mice in Skinner's box, we crave predictability, and we struggle to find patterns when none exist. So variability is kind of the brain's cognitive nemesis, and our minds they want to understand the cause and effect of how things come to be, and we really can't understand those ambiguous situations. So instead of leaving it, we kind of become more obsessed with knowing the pattern of the reward, and we become more engaged in receiving the reward because we kind of have expectation. Now, So let's explain this a bit further as to how these ambiguous situations kind and kind of feed into variable rewards and addiction. So variable rewards they keep the brain occupied because we want to find out that cause and effect of when we're going to receive something, and we become obsessed with it. It removes our defenses and it removes our kind of cognitive controls. And that's how you know, either the teacher in this case, Skinner or social media platforms have the opportunity to plant these seeds of new habits and these compulsions. This is how social media gets to us. It doesn't tell us when we might receive something we particularly like, so we'll try and find that pattern ourselves, and therefore we become integrated into the very technology that we are addicted to. Because we're obsessed with it, we compulsively press the lever to use that kind of mice example. It's the same with platforms like TikTok now, but this platform has added something extra special into the mix that has already been used by other platforms, but has been especially fine tuned on TikTok in particular. So what does TikTok do well that other platforms also do but haven't quite gotten the perfect formula? For algorithms? Algorithms they are such astonishing tools for creating addictive platforms because they create a virtual world that is perfectly curated to the things that you like and the things that the platform now knows you'll want to consume and come back to. So a social media algorithm, it's a compilation of data and rules that will make decisions almost for you about what you see on a platform, the social media site. It creates unique algorithms for every single person, every single user, which means that no two people will have the exact same social media news feeds. Besides issues of privacy, there's also this issue of cognitive exploitation. By monitoring a user's online behavior and harvesting their private data, they manipulate what they can see online, and this is a form of manipulation known as surveillance capitalism. These social media algorithms, they work without any oversight, and they work twenty four seven to keep the users addicted to liking and scrolling through endless ads and content because although that variable reward is still present, your overall experience with the app is likely to be more pleasant because you're seeing the things that kind of pertain to you. So the hijacking of our rewards system that we've seen with variable reinforcement and with the addition of things like the like button, it's furthered by this neurological process called long term potentiation or LTP, so long term potentiation. It's the process in which neural pathways that are used frequently they become stronger. It's kind of the opposite of use it or lose it. As the pathways associated with social media use are exploited more frequently, they become stronger, creating the compulsion. The more we open the app, the stronger these links between our signaps is become. And if you have an iPhone, you can actually see this on your phone. You can see this compulsion that's kind of operating separate from probably your own intentions. So take a second now, grab your phone, and I want you to go to the section of your settings that tells you your screen time. I'm not worried about that. Scroll down and you'll find this section called first used after pickup. How many times after you pick up your phone has the next thing you've done been open an app like Instagram, Facebook or TikTok Okay. I'll be honest, I'm recording this early in the morning and already I have forty total pickups of my phone, and of those fifteen after Instagram, almost half. I don't even get notifications for Instagram. It has become a compulsion. The site doesn't even need to advertise to me. It doesn't even need to motivate me. I have been overtaken by the hook model, whereby they no longer have to persuade me to use the app. I do it, not truly without even consciously thinking about it. I don't even think about it anymore. And long term potentiation is responsible for those behaviors, because those kind of cause and effect behaviors I have. Okay, I see my phone, I pick it up. My first thought is social media. It's become, like I said at habit, because I've frequently checked it in the past, and I continue to do it because I'm craving that reward, but also because the more I use it, the stronger those synaptic connections that associate my phone with the dopamine I get from social media. The stronger those connections become. And this exploitation has obviously raised some pretty serious debate over whether or not social media should be regulated, or at least algorithms should be regulated. You know. The other thing that really scares me about social media, particularly Instagram for me, is that if someone asked me to remember, to recount, to recall anything I'd seen on Instagram from the past, I wouldn't be able to tell you the details of a singular post. So I spent at least probably an hour or two a day on that platform. Those hours are completely empty. I have absolutely no memory of what it was that even captured my attention or anything I saw. I'm completely blind to those hours, and that's really terrifying. Before we talk about even social comparison, I want to explain a bit more about what social media does to our neural networks. We've talked about dopamine, we've talked about long term potentiation, but of course there's more to it, so heaps of studies have been done it. It's really interesting in terms of social psychology, yes, but also biological psychology and how our brains have adapted around this new important institution of our daily lives, because that's what it is. Social media is an institution. So heavy social media uses they and that. Okay, I'm just going to say heavy social media is an hour or more I'm guessing all of us meet that criteria. So these users, they perform worse on cognitive tests, especially those that require attention and the ability to multitask. So compared to moderate or light social media users, heavy users we need to exert more effort to maintain focused or to maintain focus. Yet to remain focused or maintain focus in the face of distraction, and researchers have hypothesized that since social media is easily accessible and competes for our attention with the promise of perpetual new content, heavy social media users they actually become less able to ignore distraction in general. Not only does this lead to pour a cognitive performance, but it actually strengths the part of the brain associated with maintaining attention. So the ability of the brain to change is called neuropla plasticity neuroplasticity, and it has a big effect on your attention and cognitive function. Research it also shows that heavy social media use is linked with memory deficits, especially in your transactive memory. This kind of memory involves deciding what kind of information is important to store in your brain and what kind of information can kind of been kind of be outsourced. So social media's central feature, the sharing and storing of your experiences, may actually be altering which memories you keep and which ones you don't. So when one study the participants they were asked to record an experience using their notes or social media, and the other groups who are asked to simply experience the event without recording it, without noting anything down and at the end of the study, those who had recorded or shared the event performed worse and showed more memory deficit than those who had just experienced the event organically without recording it. So externalizing an experience putting it on social media, it worsened the participants memory because their brains, they've kind the brain has kind of received this message that they didn't need to hold onto the information anymore. It was stored elsewhere. So consequently, not only did the individuals lose some memory of their original experience, but they also experience longer term deficits in the size and functions of their brain if they use social media again and again and again, and these consequences they're like genuinely terrifying, especially when you consider young kids now who are going to grow up with social media present in their lives from day dot from day one. You know, I kind of feel grateful, at least me, you probably if you're in your twenties, if you're over the age of twenty. At least we kind of got a chance to have some years without it, back when our parents were just kind of worried about the TV and not this like evil capitalist invention at our fingertips that is individually curated to be addictive just for you. We've talked about addiction now, we've talked about the New York connections and how social media kind of changes them, how it manipulates them. But another result of trapping users in this endless, kind of scrolling loop of content is that it can lead to social comparison. It's perhaps one of the biggest things that people you know, scared about or talk about when they talk about social media. I don't know what it has been about my life recently, but I have been so weak to this, so weak to social comparison. And it's often thinks like Instagram that are the catalyst every single time. You know, people's perfectly created lives with their endless cycle of friends and gorgeous outfits and money to spend on restaurants. I'm envious. But then I'll have people turn around to me and say things like, oh, you know, you look so happy now, you're flourishing, you look like you're having so much fun. And the only thing that they have to judge that by is what I post on social media. These people they haven't seen me for months, and the impression they get is that my life is going really well. Let me just say that has not been the case. Like I had my heartbroken recently, I had someone really hurt me, like really bad, and have just been at such a low point in terms of my self esteem and sense of value. You know, in the past six months, I've lost countless friends as I've moved and evolved and shifted into this new version of myself. I spent like days alone, hours kind of crying over this person who was never going to love me back. And I've spent hours looking at other people's lives through social media thinking that they have everything going for them whilst they're thinking the same thing about me. And it's kind of a bit of a fucked game. It's a facade. We choose those best moments when we are smiling or watching a sunset, out partying with friends and the other ninety nine percent that's unaccounted for, but we judge people on the one percent, And those comments that I got from a few people actually just really made me realize that idea so deeply for the first time, even though it's common knowledge. You know, we do only share the best moments of our lives, but that becomes the source of so much social comparison, and you don't really realize it until you feel it personally, until you see it. So when presented with the curated feeds of other people, we are vulnerable to frequent and pretty extreme upwards social comparison, which can lead to a number of other negative side effects, some of which I've talked about, you know, the erosion of self esteem, a depressed mood, and decrease life satisfaction overall. So social comparison it's a form of sociological self esteem where we derive our sense of self through comparing ourselves with others. Many studies have argued that people have a tendency to make downwards social comparisons with those who are worse off or less skilled than them, and this raises your self esteem obviously at the expense of that other person, and then Conversely, we have upwards social comparisons and this reduces social that this reduces self esteem, and it's more likely with social media. That's when you kind of you see someone who is more skilled than you, doing better than you, happier than you can you kind of see where we're going with this. So there's this guy, his name's Alfred Admer, and he said to be human is to have inferiority feelings, and in the age of social media, this is potentially definitely heightened and amplified. Social comparison in the real world usually involves the self, you and a few other people, whilst in the digital universe of social media, you're kind of presented with limitless potential to compare yourself to other people limitless. There's thousands and research predating social media. It estimated that the average person you know back in the nineties, back in the nineteen hundreds had perhaps ten to twenty close relations chips and maybe one hundred and fifty people in their wider social circle. So that includes you know, like friends of your parents, colleagues, people you kind of know. Whereas now that number of wider social acquaintances because of social media, it's up to around four hundred. So whilst social connection offers people heaps of positive opportunities, the more connections, the more opportunities there is for social comparison. And that's what social media does to us. It creates that upwards social comparison that makes you feel shit about yourself. Think about this in the context of our twenties. This is such a formative period for our self esteem, for how we view ourselves, how we view others, and our identity. And we spend hours of our daily life in an online environment of comparison. And the consequences of that aren't you just felt today and tomorrow? But they're life long. And here's another related issue. This is the issue of self presentation and identity. So social media, we've said it affords you, the user, the ability to carefully curate and control how you present yourself to your audience and people you know, you and I. We generally choose to show an ideal image on social media and in social psychology, two major motives are believed to influence this positive self presentation. They are self enhancement and self verification. Self enhancement this motivates people to present an enhanced positive self image and to seek favorable self relevant information. Self verification, on the other hand, drives people to verify or to maintain stability of their pre existing self views. So that first one is about presenting this enhanced view and seeing whether people like it, and the other is maintaining how you feel about yourself now and making sure that you continue to be validated for that. Self presentation theory suggests that people they have to discretion as to how they present themselves in a variety of performances daily performances, and social media is one such performance. So the hyper personal model of behavior argues that with that self presentation, that ability to present who you want to be, even if it's not real, that is really promoted by computer mediated or social media mediated communication, and that has advantages over face to face communication and how we optimize our self presentation. Think about this a bit deeper. It's pretty obvious, but really think about it. If you see someone in your daily life, you know they're going to see your flaws. Maybe you like have a pimple. You know they're going to see the mistakes that you mean, They're going to see that you're not perfect. But you have the opportunity to screen those parts of you out on social media, you have the opportunity to show yourself being incredibly happy when that might not actually be the case. This isn't really our true selves, and we can use social media as a shield for acknowledging not only who we truly are and our true values, but it's also destruction from what's truly going on, because we can use that validation and self enhancement to make us feel better, to make us seem better to the people that we want to receive validation from, to the people that we want to win press. Essentially, you know, you're probably asking yourself, surely, this isn't very good for our mental health. What are the chances you would be correct? What gave it away? Time and time again. Social media has been shown to promote negative experiences like that feeling of inadequacy about your life and appearance is because of upwards social comparison and a study by this English author Primark found not primarch the store the person, it found a link between the use of multiple social media platforms and increase depression and anxiety symptoms in young people age nineteen to thirty two. That's probably you, that's my normal audience range. Nineteen to thirty two. And think about that again. If you use social media platforms, it's literally could potentially be making you more anxious, it could be making you more depressed. From another angle, though, online platforms may also have the potential to damage mental well being through this promotion of unreasonable expectations about what you look like and how you present social media, it's been linked to poor self esteem and self image because of the advent of image manipulation on photo sharing platforms. You know, you can download face tune and make yourself look amazing. You can make yourself look skinnier, you can smooth out your skin, you can make your skin look lowy. And it's this idea of the idealized body image that has been promoted by social media that arguably has the most dental detrimental effect to self esteem and image, especially that of young people. The twenty four seventh circulation of easibly viewable manipulated images promotes and entrenches those unrealistic expectations of how you should look and how you should behave think about all those photos you know of Kim Kardashian that people like, you know, screenshot or like repost, and then you find out that they're edited. Of course they are. No one looks like that, like have you ever seen anyone who looks like that? No? No, like, you don't. And when these expectations we have for what we should look like based on what we see on social media, when they're not met, the impact on self esteem is so damaging and it's really disturbing. You know. There was this study run by the Australian government, like the Health Department, and it found that ninety percent night out of ten young women that they interviewed, and they interviewed quite a few say they were unhappy with how they look and a big part of that was because of social media. Obviously, the rise of social media, it's incredibly multifaceted. It's you know, we can't explain it simply, but the statistics they do suggest that it's strongly correlated or at least associated with anxiety, loneliness, depression, social comparison. And I've been feeling that, you know myself, I'm sure you have as well. Whether it is you know, just a causal kind of thing based on the fact that there is other stuff shown on our feeds that could be depressing us, like war and terror and awful things. It's going to have to you know, time will kind of tell, and there is so much policy research into this and so much kind of talk around regulation with the social media industry today as well. A lot of what we've talked about, it's probably not new to you. And there are definitely some elements of social media that are really i would say beneficial and pretty incredible when you think back. For example, you know, the war in Ukraine. At the moment, we would know so much less than we do if people didn't have the ability to share their experiences on the ground with people across the world. This is the same with other wars and revolutions. Since social media kind of became a thing the Me Too movement, election mobilization social media, it's also a source of connection and information sharing that may not be accessible elsewhere or in another manner. Another thing that kind of comes to mind is how social media can be used to help educate people about movements like black Lives Matter and spread awareness around things. You know, I think about when that girl went missing in wa that was all over social media. That's definitely something to be positive about. That instantaneous communication platform, and that's what it was meant to be at its purest form, but it's really not that anymore. And although there are some good things, all of these good things are happening in a virtual environment that is deliberately creating addiction, and it's hijacking our synaptic connections and our dopamine centers to essentially make money for big organizations through ad revenue, and it's kind of running our minds and changing the very structure of our brains, like I said, and that's obviously not going to change anytime soon. Like every year, there's just more and more ways that our society kind of caters towards social media, like TikTok now is a marketing platform. I was actually thinking this the other day, Like I don't see billboards for movies anymore. I don't see like ads in the paper, like I don't see like magazine articles about it. I see it on TikTok or I see it on Instagram. And that's how I know, Like you know, the Batman came out or something like that. Those are the kind of things that I'm talking about of how it's changed how we relate to the world and communicate and how we get our knowledge. Anyways, I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I had a lot of fun researching this. I learned so much like and I think, especially with the social comparison ideas we've been talking about, it's really at least inspired me to take some time off social media, to turn off notifications, to kind of limit how much I use it, how dependent I am on it, how much I posed, how much I share. I just kind of spend more time in the present moment doing the things I love. Like when I was in Queensland recently, I would just try and make a conscious effort to leave my phone in the car when I was going to the beach, because I noticed if I brought my phone, I would literally be sitting there in front of some of the most beautiful water and clearest guys a girl can find during Lenina, and I would be on my phone and I wouldn't even remember what was going on around me. And I wouldn't remember what was going on on my phone either, And you just kind of blind to your life in that moment, aren't you, Eddie. How thank you for listening, Thank you for subscribing if you have, if not your choice, but please do it would be very lovely, and if you feel called to leave a review on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts, it's so lovely. I've been getting so many reviews and it makes me so so happy, makes me a very happy girl. So if you feel called to do it, please do it. Takes a couple of seconds, it makes my day. You'll feel good about yourself, unless you want to stop using your phone as much because of social media addiction, in which case, don't do it. Stay away, but we'll be back next week. I'm going to talk about love languages because that sounds exciting, right and a friend of my one of my friends, and I were discussing it the other day and I was like, this is really interesting. I want to see whether there is actually like research behind this, whether this is like legit. So that's what we're going to be talking about next week. Until then, we've got so many episodes on Spotify at the moment. If you want to listen back and just have a great week, enjoy your life, enjoy your enjoy yourself in the moment, and turn off Instagram. It will be good for you.