The Psychological Consequences of Social Media Uses

The psychological consequences of social media use have been controversial amongresearchers, partly due to the field’s reliance on global measures and cross-sectional methods. To address that, we ran two studies. In study 1, we develop a scale to measure the different functions of social media use. We ran a factor analysis and ended up with five factors for social media use. The scale was related to personality in predictable ways. In study 2, we used experience sampling to analyze the psychological consequences of Twitter use over time. We found that Twitter use was negatively related to well-being and that most of the variance was within-subjects. With the scale developed in study 1, we found that passive Twitter use was related to decreases in well-being, but active Twitter use was not. Increases in affective polarization were predicted by Twitter use, but the results were not robust.M.A