In addition to noting with evolutionary biologist
George C. Williams in the development of
evolutionary medicine that most
chronic medical conditions are the consequence of
evolutionary mismatches between a
stateless environment of
nomadic
hunter-gatherer life in
bands and contemporary human life in
sedentary technologically modern state societies (e.g.
WEIRD societies), psychiatrist
Randolph M. Nesse has argued that evolutionary mismatch is an important factor in the development of certain mental disorders. In 1948, 50 percent of U.S. households owned at least one
automobile. In 2000, a majority of U.S. households had at least one personal computer and
internet access the following year. In 2002, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having a mobile phone. In September 2007, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having
broadband internet at home. In January 2013, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported owning a
smartphone.
Facebook addiction The "World Unplugged" study, which was conducted in 2011, claims that for some users quitting social networking sites is comparable to quitting smoking or giving up alcohol. Another study conducted in 2012 by researchers from the
University of Chicago Booth School of Business in the United States found that drugs like alcohol and tobacco could not keep up with social networking sites regarding their level of addictiveness. A 2013 study in the journal
CyberPsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking found that some users decided to quit social networking sites because they felt they were addicted. In 2014, the site went down for about 30 minutes, prompting several users to call emergency services. In April 2015, the
Pew Research Center published a survey of 1,060 U.S. teenagers ages 13 to 17 who reported that nearly three-quarters of them either owned or had access to a
smartphone, 92 percent went online daily with 24 percent saying they went online "almost constantly". In March 2016,
Frontiers in Psychology published a survey of 457
post-secondary student Facebook users (following a
face validity pilot of another 47 post-secondary student Facebook users) at a large university in North America showing that the severity of ADHD symptoms had a
statistically significant positive correlation with
Facebook usage while driving a motor vehicle and that impulses to use Facebook while driving were more potent among male users than female users. In June 2018,
Children and Youth Services Review published a
regression analysis of 283 adolescent Facebook users in the
Piedmont and
Lombardy regions of
Northern Italy (that replicated previous findings among adult users) showing that adolescents reporting higher ADHD symptoms positively predicted
Facebook addiction, persistent negative
attitudes about the
past and that the
future is predetermined and not influenced by present
actions, and orientation against
achieving future goals, with ADHD symptoms additionally increasing the manifestation of the proposed category of psychological dependence known as "
problematic social media use". In October 2023, court documents in the US alleged Meta of designing its platforms deliberately to develop addiction in children using them. The company knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, violating the
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. According to whistleblower
Frances Haugen, the company intentionally targets children below the age of 18.
Self-harm and suicide In January 2019, both the Health Secretary of the United Kingdom, and the Children's Commissioner for England, urged Facebook and other social media companies to take responsibility for the risk to children posed by content on their platforms related to self-harm and suicide. state that this kind of envy has profound effects on other aspects of life and can lead to severe depression,
self-loathing,
rage and hatred,
resentment, feelings of inferiority and insecurity,
pessimism, suicidal tendencies and desires,
social isolation, and other issues that can prove very serious. This condition has often been called "Facebook Envy" or "Facebook Depression" by the media. In 2010,
Social Science Computer Review published research by economists Ralf Caers and Vanessa Castelyns who sent an online questionnaire to 398 and 353 LinkedIn and Facebook users respectively in
Belgium and found that both sites had become tools for
recruiting job applicants for professional occupations as well as additional information about applicants, and that it was being used by recruiters to decide which applicants would receive interviews. In 2017, sociologist Ofer Sharone conducted interviews with unemployed workers to research the effects of LinkedIn and Facebook as labor market intermediaries and found that
social networking services (SNS) have had a filtration effect that has little to do with evaluations of merit, and that the SNS filtration effect has exerted new pressures on workers to manage their careers to conform to the logic of the SNS filtration effect. A joint study conducted by two German universities demonstrated Facebook envy and found that as many as one out of three people actually feel worse and less satisfied with their lives after visiting the site. Vacation photos were found to be the most common source of feelings of resentment and jealousy. After that, social interaction was the second biggest cause of envy, as Facebook users compare the number of birthday greetings, likes, and comments to those of their friends. Visitors who contributed the least tended to feel the worst. "According to our findings, passive following triggers invidious emotions, with users mainly envying happiness of others, the way others spend their vacations; and socialize", the study states. A 2013 study by researchers at the
University of Michigan found that the more people used Facebook, the worse they felt afterwards.
Divorce Social networks, like Facebook, can have a detrimental effect on marriages, with users becoming worried about their spouse's contacts and relations with other people online, leading to marital breakdown and divorce. According to a 2009 survey in the UK, around 20 percent of divorce petitions included references to Facebook. Researchers proposed that high levels of Facebook use could result in Facebook-related conflict and breakup/divorce. Previous studies have shown that romantic relationships can be damaged by excessive Internet use, Facebook jealousy, partner surveillance, ambiguous information, and online portrayal of intimate relationships. Excessive Internet users reported having greater conflict in their relationships. Their partners feel neglected and there's lower commitment and lower feelings of passion and intimacy in the relationship. According to the article, researchers suspect that Facebook may contribute to an increase in divorce and infidelity rates in the near future due to the amount and ease of accessibility to connect with past partners. Many people who started using Facebook for positive purposes or with positive expectations have found that the website has negatively impacted their lives. Next to that, the increasing number of messages and social relationships embedded in SNS also increases the amount of social information demanding a reaction from SNS users. Consequently SNS users perceive they are giving too much social support to other SNS friends. This dark side of SNS usage is called 'social overload'. It is caused by the extent of usage, number of friends, subjective social support norms, and type of relationship (online-only vs offline friends) while age has only an indirect effect. The psychological and behavioral consequences of social overload include perceptions of SNS exhaustion, low user satisfaction, and high intentions to reduce or stop using SNS.
Narcissism In July 2018, a
meta-analysis published in
Psychology of Popular Media found that
grandiose narcissism positively correlated with time spent on social media, frequency of
status updates, number of friends or followers, and frequency of posting
self-portrait digital photographs, while a meta-analysis published in the
Journal of Personality in April 2018 found that the positive correlation between grandiose narcissism and
social networking service usage was replicated across platforms (including Facebook). In March 2020, the
Journal of Adult Development published a
regression discontinuity analysis of 254
Millennial Facebook users investigating differences in narcissism and Facebook usage between the age
cohorts born from 1977 to 1990 and from 1991 to 2000 and found that the later born Millennials scored
significantly higher on both. In June 2020,
Addictive Behaviors published a
systematic review finding a consistent, positive, and significant correlation between grandiose narcissism and the proposed category of
psychological dependence called "
problematic social media use". Also in 2018, social psychologist
Jonathan Haidt and
FIRE President
Greg Lukianoff noted in
The Coddling of the American Mind that former Facebook president
Sean Parker stated in a 2017 interview that the
Like button was consciously designed to
prime users receiving likes to feel a
dopamine rush as part of a "
social-validation feedback loop".
Non-informing, knowledge-eroding medium Facebook is a Big Tech company with over 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020 and therefore has a meaningful impact on the masses that use it.
Big data algorithms are used in personalized content creation and automatization; however, this method can be used to manipulate users in various ways. The problem of misinformation is exacerbated by the educational bubble, users' critical thinking ability and news culture. Based on a 2015 study, 62.5% of the Facebook users are oblivious to any curation of their
News Feed. Furthermore, scientists have started to investigate algorithms with unexpected outcomes that may lead to antisocial political, economic, geographic, racial, or other discrimination. Facebook has remained scarce in transparency of the inner workings of the algorithms used for News Feed correlation. Algorithms use the past activities as a reference point for predicting users' taste to keep them engaged. However, this leads to the formation of a
filter bubble that starts to refrain users from diverse information. Users are left with a skewed worldview derived from their own preferences and biases. In 2015, researchers from Facebook published a study indicating that the Facebook algorithm perpetuates an echo chamber amongst users by occasionally hiding content from individual feeds that users potentially would disagree with: for example the algorithm removed one in every 13 diverse content from news sources for self-identified liberals. In general, the results from the study indicated that the Facebook algorithm ranking system caused approximately 15% less diverse material in users' content feeds, and a 70% reduction in the click-through-rate of the diverse material. In 2018, social psychologist
Jonathan Haidt and
FIRE President
Greg Lukianoff argued in
The Coddling of the American Mind that the filter bubbles created by the
News Feed algorithm of Facebook and other platforms are one of the principal factors amplifying
political polarization in the United States since 2000 (when a majority of U.S. households first had at least one personal computer and then internet access the following year). In 2019, Jonathan Haidt argued that there is a "very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy." Following the
2021 United States Capitol attack, in February 2021, Facebook announced that it would reduce the amount of political content in users News Feeds.
Other psychological effects It has been admitted by many students that they have experienced
bullying on the site, which leads to psychological harm. High school students face a possibility of bullying and other adverse behaviors over Facebook every day. Many studies have attempted to discover whether Facebook has a positive or negative effect on children's and teenagers' social lives, and many of them have come to the conclusion that there are distinct social problems that arise with Facebook usage. British neuroscientist
Susan Greenfield stuck up for the issues that children encounter on social media sites, stating that these sites can rewire the brain, which caused some hysteria regarding the safety of social media usage. She did not back up her claims with research, but did cause quite a few studies to be done on the subject. When an individual's self-image is broken down by others as a result of badmouthing, criticism, harassment, criminalization or vilification, intimidation, demonization, demoralization, belittlement, or attacking someone over the site, it can cause much of the envy, anger, or depression users report feeling after prolonged Facebook usage.
Sherry Turkle, in her book
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, argues that social media brings people closer and further apart at the same time. One of the main points she makes is that there is a high risk in treating persons online with dispatch like objects. Although people are networked on Facebook, their expectations of each other tend to be lessened. According to Turkle, this could cause a feeling of loneliness in spite of being together. Between 2016 and 2018, the number of 12- to 15-year-olds who reported being bullied over social media rose from 6% to 11%, in the region covered by
Ofcom. Much more controversially, a 2014 study of "Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks" manipulated the balance of positive and negative messages seen by 689,000 Facebook users. The researchers concluded that they had found "some of the first experimental evidence to support the controversial claims that emotions can spread throughout a network, [though] the effect sizes from the manipulations are small." Unlike the "I voted" study, which had presumptively beneficial ends and raised few concerns, this study was criticized for both its ethics and methods/claims. As controversy about the study grew, Adam Kramer, a lead author of both studies and member of the Facebook data team, defended the work in a Facebook update. A few days later, Sheryl Sandburg, Facebook's COO, made a statement while traveling abroad. While at an Indian Chambers of Commerce event in New Delhi she stated that "This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was. It was poorly communicated and for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you." Shortly thereafter, on July 3, 2014,
USA Today reported that the privacy watchdog group
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) had filed a formal complaint with the
Federal Trade Commission claiming that Facebook had broken the law when it conducted the study on the emotions of its users without their knowledge or consent. In its complaint, EPIC alleged that Facebook had deceived users by secretly conducting a psychological experiment on their emotions: "At the time of the experiment, Facebook did not state in the Data Use Policy that user data would be used for research purposes. Facebook also failed to inform users that their personal information would be shared with researchers." Beyond the ethical concerns, other scholars criticized the methods and reporting of the study's findings. John Grohol, writing for
Psych Central, argued that despite its title and claims of "
emotional contagion", this study did not look at emotions at all. Instead, its authors used an application (called "Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count" or LIWC 2007) that simply counted positive and negative words to infer users' sentiments. He wrote that a shortcoming of the LIWC tool is that it does not understand negations. Hence, the tweet "I am not happy" would be scored as positive: "Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers." Grohol concluded that given these subtleties, the
effect size of the findings are little more than a "statistical blip". The consequences of the controversy are pending (be it FTC or court proceedings) but it did prompt an "Editorial Expression of Concern" from its publisher, the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as a blog posting from
OkCupid titled "We experiment on human beings!" In September 2014, law professor James Grimmelmann argued that the actions of both companies were "illegal, immoral, and mood-altering" and filed notices with the Maryland Attorney General and Cornell Institutional Review Board. In the UK, the study was also criticized by the
British Psychological Society which said, in a letter to
The Guardian, "There has undoubtedly been some degree of harm caused, with many individuals affected by increased levels of
negative emotion, with consequent potential economic costs, increase in possible mental health problems and burden on health services. The so-called 'positive' manipulation is also potentially harmful."
Internal research A lawsuit alleged that the company "shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health". == Tax avoidance ==