A Desire for Social Media Is Associated With a Desire for Solitary but Not Social Activities

Abstract

While social media is an aspect of life for many, it brings to light the lack of interpersonal connection when browsing activity occurs. The displacement theory suggests that the quality of one’s offline interactions is affected by how much time an individual allots to those exchanges. Depending on the amount of time spent online, interpersonal connections may suffer and lead to negative psychological consequences. Our study aimed to explore the relationship between the desirability of social media and socialization preferences through a cue-based perceptual judgment task where participants (N = 136) rated 40 gray-scale images in terms of their desirability. The image categories included social media icons, singular scenes depicting an isolated activity, social scenes representing an interactive activity, and traffic signs as the control. We also included questionnaires to assess depressiveness and aspects of social media usage. Our findings suggest that the immediate desire for social media is potentially linked to one’s desire for social isolation as represented by the singular scene category, the intensity of participant’s reported daily usage, and the extent to which social media is perceived to impact real social life. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the initial desirability judgment of social media and its association with other factors. Further research is needed to distinguish the variability in users’ aim of using social media and if that is related to one’s perceived feelings of social connectedness and solitude.

Keywords

social media social interactions social isolation displacement theory

Introduction

Technology is ingrained into much of everyday life in contemporary American society. The invention of the internet and mobile phones has forever altered the standard approach to communication, with social media usage exponentially increasing as a result. In 2005, around 5% of Americans used a social media platform; by 2016, that number jumped to 69% of the public using some form of social media (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016). The ensuing popularity of social media has resulted in a mixed body of literature concerning the causes and effects of its usage (Fortunati, Taipale, & de Luca, 2013; Kuss & Griffiths, 2011; Lup, Trub, & Rosenthal, 2015; Nie & Hillygus, 2002; Pantic, 2014; Wilson, Fornasier, & White, 2010). The ability to interact with, learn, and share information with others at a remarkable rate is a benefit. However, the act of engaging with social media is one often done in solitude, potentially taking time away from meaningful interpersonal connections and experiences.

Dual-system models of behavior (e.g., Hofmann, Friese, & Strack, 2009) posit that people associate hedonic states with stimuli that they are continually exposed to and deem desirable. This learned state can be activated through perceptual or internal cues, like seeing the app on one’s phone or thinking about using the platform. The immediate, cue-based reinforcement is often the trigger that leads to the psychological urge to open and use social media (Van Koningsbruggen, Hartmann, Eden, & Veling, 2017), which, if not managed well, can result in emotional loneliness and increased social anxiety (Hardie & Tee, 2007). Supporting this, previous studies have found that time spent on social media was related to social loneliness and avoidance (Lemieux, Lajoie, & Trainor, 2013), increased perceived social isolation (Primack et al., 2017), and less involvement in real-life interactions (Kuss & Griffiths, 2011). Despite an intrinsic link between the spontaneous desire for social media and the psychological state of solitude, the data supporting such an association are lacking.

Furthermore, emerging evidence suggests a trend for social media to erode in-person social interactions (e.g., Kuss & Griffiths, 2011). According to the displacement theory, the quality of one’s offline interactions is affected by how much time an individual allots to those exchanges; time online is largely an asocial activity that competes with face-to-face social time (Nie & Hillygus, 2002). For example, lonely individuals are more likely to be engaged in online social interactions (Ye & Lin, 2015), which interferes with life offline (Ranaeiy, Taghavi, & Goodarzi, 2016). It is a vicious cycle—when feeling lonely, it is easy for one to go online to moderate that feeling, but the act of going online potentially infringes on interpersonal connections. This suggests that the anticipated impact of social media on real-life interactions may be related to the psychological desire for usage.

It is undeniable that for many, social media usage has become an intrusive aspect of everyday life. For those who can maintain a balance, it is generally not an issue. However, there are those who cannot regulate their behavior and reach a point where it infringes on their daily functioning. Models of addiction suggest that frequent social media users’ spontaneous hedonic reactions in response to social media may contribute to difficulty in resisting the desire to use social media (e.g., Van Koningsbruggen et al., 2017). This can be attributed to the attraction to interact with and pleasure derived from social media. The desire can be so strong that the positively reinforcing effect stimulates repeated usage. Given this, we predict that the initial desire for social media, the beginning step to psychological and emotional reward, should also be related to the frequency and/or intensity of one’s social media usage.

Therefore, in this study, we focus on participant’s immediate desire for social media, which is typically the first step in triggering psychological arousal and subsequent usage. A key question that we attempt to examine is how the initial desirability of social media relates to one’s preference for socialization as well as other metrics for usage. To this end, we designed a perceptual judgment task where participants rated gray-scale images in each of four categories in terms of their desirability. The four categories included social media icons, singular scenes depicting an individual activity, social scenes representing an interactive activity, and familiar traffic signs as the control category. We also included questionnaires to assess depressiveness and social media usage. We predict that contrary to the conception of social media as a social tool, the cue-triggered desire for social media would be associated with the desire for solitary activities, but not social activities. We also predict that as the precursor and downstream consequence of this effect, the amount of usage and the perceived impact on real-life interactions may also be associated with the initial desire for social media.

Method

Participants

We recruited 138 participants from our college campus and neighboring communities for this study. Two participants were excluded from data analysis due to failure to follow instructions, leaving 136 (39 males and 97 females, age range: 19–30, age mean/SD: 20.4/1.60). All participants are a member of at least one social networking site to which their preferred means of access is smartphone (96%) and/or laptop (78%). On average, the participants are members of five social media sites, with a history of 4.5 years of using them and spend around 3.2 hours daily on those sites. Reporting their principal reasons for online social networking use, participants’ main reasons are to pass time (90%) followed by to interact with others (76%) and then to get information (68%).

Experimental procedure

The main procedure involved a perceptual judgment task, followed by a series of surveys. For the judgment task, participants rated, one at a time, 40 icon-sized, square images (.85 inch × .85 inch each) on desirability with a 7-point Likert-type scale, with “1” indicating “extremely undesirable” and “7” indicating “extremely desirable.” Each image was presented on a piece of paper and participants were instructed to perform the rating task at their own pace. Participants were informed to rate the images based on the content or meaning of the icon, not the physical appearance. The images were obtained from a vector icon database (flaticon.com) and then post-processed to control for brightness, size, and contrast. There were four categories of images, with 10 images in each category: (1) social media—popular social media icons/logos (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), (2) singular—scenes involving single-person/solitary activities (e.g., reading a book, hiking, gardening), (3) social—scenes involving multiple people in social activities (e.g., running a race, having a conversation, holding hands), and (4) control—a category of traffic signs (e.g., stop sign, merge-left sign, speed-limit sign) to control for low-level visual features and familiarity. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of the three running orders where the order of presentation for the 40 images was randomized (and different).

Following the perceptual judgment task, there were three questionnaires presented in the same order: Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale Revised (CESD-R; Eaton, Muntaner, Smith, Tien, & Ybarra, 2004), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961), and a descriptive questionnaire adapted from the internet. The first two questionnaires were included to assess the depressive symptoms given a possible link between problematic social media use and depression (e.g., Davila et al., 2012; Shensa et al., 2017). The last questionnaire was used to provide basic information on the factors that may explain the psychological desire for social media: based on our reasoning, we were particularly interested in the participant’s response to the following questions: (1) How many social networking sites/communities/groups are you a member of? (2) How long have you been using social networking sites? (3) On average, how much time do you spend daily on social networking sites? (4) How does online networking affect your social life (i.e., face to face communication), not at all, somewhat, often, or completely? The answers to these questions corresponded to the four key variables of interest: (1) number of active social media accounts (size), (2) history of social media usage (history), (3) time spent for daily usage (usage), and (4) perceived impact of social networking on social life (impact).

Results

We first assessed the participants’ levels of desirability across the four categories of images. Given the high intraclass correlations (social media: Cronbach’s α = .73; singular: Cronbach’s α = .83; social: Cronbach’s α = .85; control: Cronbach’s α = .87), ratings from the images within the same category were averaged to yield a score of desirability for that category. A mixed analysis of variance with category as within-subject factor and (running) order as between-subject factor revealed a main effect of category, F(2.56, 340.84) = 108.55, p < .001, η²= .449, but no effect of order, F(2, 133) = 1.53, p = .221. Post hoc comparisons with Bonferroni corrections indicated progressively higher ratings from the control category (containing traffic signs) to the categories involving increasingly social implications (see Figure 1), ps < .005. This pattern of results is consistent with the general preference for social behavior in humans (e.g., Ebstein, Israel, Chew, Zhong, & Knafo, 2010; Holvoet, Scola, Arciszewski, & Picard, 2016), suggesting that our manipulation of categories was effective.

Figure 1.

The desirability ratings increase monotonically from the inanimate/control category to the categories with more social implications. Error bars represent ±1 SEM.

To better understand the internal structure of our data, we then conducted a principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax orthogonal rotation on the correlation matrix, Bartlett’s test of sphericity: χ²(45) = 353.02, p < .001. The scree plot and eigenvalues allowed us to extract three principal components that in total accounted for 56.64% of the variance (see Table 1). The first and leading component (21.60% of the variance) included three image categories (singular, social, and control), with the singular scene category loading most strongly on the component. The second component (17.91% of the variance) involved the two depression instruments (CESD-R and BDI: Pearson correlation r = .791, p < .001) and was associated with the traits of depressiveness. The last component (17.14% of the variance) comprised four items related to the addiction to social media, including usage (daily usage of social media), desire (desire for social media icon category), impact (perceived impact of social media on social life), and history (personal history of using social media). These results indicated that the social media icon category was psychologically special and loaded on a different underlying construct than did the other three image categories.

Table 1.

The principal component analysis results based on rotated loadings.

Items	First component	Second component	Third component
Singular category	.892
Social category	.808
Control category	.757
CESD-R		.923
BDI		.869
Daily usage			.632
Impact on social life			.625
Social media category			.625
History of usage			.595
Eigenvalue	2.160	1.791	1.713
Cumulative % of variance	21.60%	39.51%	56.64%

CESD-R: Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale Revised; BDI: Beck Depression Inventory.

We therefore entered all variables used in the PCA analysis into a stepwise multiple regression model in order to find the factors predicting the desire for the social media icon category. As shown in Table 2, usage (daily usage of social media, β = .228, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [.103, .609], t = 2.78, p = .006), singular (desire for singular scene category, β = .222, 95% CI = [.056, .329], t = 2.79, p = .006), and impact (perceived impact of social media on real life, β = .213, 95% CI = [.069, .505], t = 2.61, p = .01) were the only significant predictors remaining in the final model. In other words, the immediate desire for social media could be explained by the intensity of the daily usage of social media, the extent to which social media is perceived to impact real social life and importantly the immediate desire for social isolation as represented by the singular scene category. It is worth noting, however, that the desire for social media was not predicted by the desire for social interactions, as would be suggested by the “social” component in the name of social media.

Table 2.

The results of stepwise regression analysis.

Model	Predictor(s)	b	S.E.	β	t	p	95% CI
1	Usage	.454	.129	.290	3.51	.001	[.199, .710]
2	Usage	.434	.127	.278	3.42	.001	[.183, .685]
	Singular	.176	.070	.204	2.51	.013	[.037, .315]
3	Usage	.356	.128	.228	2.78	.006	[.103, .609]
	Singular	.192	.069	.222	2.79	.006	[.056, .329]
	Impact	.287	.110	.213	2.61	.01	[.069, .505]

Note. The predictors that remain significant in the final model include usage (daily usage of social media), singular (singular scene category), and impact (impact of social media on social life).

Discussion

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on the initial cue-based desirability judgment of social media and its association with other factors. Our findings suggested three predictors associated with the immediate desire for social media: (1) the immediate desire for social isolation as represented by solitary activities, (2) the intensity of daily social media usage, and (3) the extent to which social media is perceived to impact interpersonal social life. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications in considering and guiding social media usage.

The first predictor, the immediate desire for social seclusion as represented by the solitary activity icons, reveals an association between the act of using social media and social media platforms themselves. Most social media sites primarily support pre-existing social relationships (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), and users typically engage in “searching” for people with whom they have an offline connection more than they “browse” for complete strangers to meet (Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfield, 2006). Even though that is a form of socialization, there is an absence of interpersonal contact when that interaction occurs online. Our study found a positive correlation between social media icon rating and solitary icon rating, signifying that it is possible that those who prefer social media also desire activities that are more isolated in nature. This is consistent with the notion that social interactions rarely take place through social media (Hall, 2016), but in contrast with the way in which an individual’s proclivity for social media is usually interpreted, that is, looking for companionship and embracing social interactions. Further research is needed to clarify whether the observed association is related to and supported by personality traits.

Our second predictor, intensity of daily social media usage, is aligned with the dual-system models of behavior—when making a snap-association judgment, those who highly desire social media also self-report a higher level of daily usage. A similar study employing an implicit measure of spontaneous affective reactions found that frequent Facebook users exhibited more favorable reactions in response to Facebook cues compared to the control cues (Van Koningsbruggen et al., 2017). This connection seems logical: those who enjoy an aspect of social media tend to use it more frequently and associate it with positive feelings. The fact that daily usage can also predict cue-triggered desirability for social media further suggests that the intensity of engaging with social media over a long time span may influence rapid and transient decision-making regarding social media consumption.

The third predictor highlighted the extent to which social media is perceived to impact interpersonal social life. There is contradictory research to whether social media usage is detrimental or beneficial to social connections. On one hand, the internet is a largely accessible tool to connect with others in various geographical locations, but the amount of time spent online can interfere with interpersonal interactions. Zhao (2006) differentiated between two kinds of usage that participants engage in (1) solitary activities that do not involve direct contact with others, for example, web surfing and article reading and (2) social activities that involve direct contact with others, for example, emailing and online messaging. The active and passive modes of social media consumption are presumably related to one’s social connectedness: those who use the internet for interpersonal contact (e.g., messaging and email) tend to have more social connections than those who use it for solitary activities (e.g., web surfing). Another study examined the difference between types of relationships over social media: one being the social relationships based on reciprocity between the user and his/her friends and the other being the parasocial relationships that a user has with celebrities and public figures where they are aware of their lives but not vice versa. It was found that those who are dependent on parasocial relationships have higher feelings of loneliness, while those who are dependent on social relationships are negatively correlated with loneliness (Baek, Bae, & Jang, 2013). These findings are consistent with the idea that the aim of social media usage is related to one’s perceived feelings of social connectedness and solitude.

It is important to note that depressiveness was not found to be a predictor in this study. There was no meaningful correlation between depressive symptoms and social media preference, similar to the findings of Jelenchick, Eickhoff, and Moreno (2013). A meta-analysis looking at 61 studies, consisting of 67 independent samples with 19,652 participants, found a mean correlation between time spent on social networking and psychological well-being at a low r = −0.07 (Huang, 2017). Another systematic review of 30 empirical studies found that the relationship between online social networking and symptoms of depression to be complex and associated with multiple psychological, social, behavioral, and individual factors. In addition, the impact of online social networking on well-being may be both positive and negative, highlighting the need for future research (Baker & Algorta, 2016).

An area to explore next is how social media usage relates to socialization preferences and if that impacts feelings of loneliness and solitude. Depending on the user, the impact and reasoning behind daily use varies; some are more passive on the sites and simply browse and absorb information, while others are more active in nature and frequently post and interact with others on the platforms. It is imperative to differentiate the purpose of usage, because that will further uncover the reasoning behind usage and if that is related to socialization preferences. In addition, time spent online must be further explored to get to the main purpose for usage. There is most likely a difference in feelings of isolation for a person using social media for 5 hours a day messaging people than for the user who spends 5 hours a day alone watching a show. The internet has a vast array of applications, ranging from social to educational. No matter the purpose, this technology is eternally engrained into our everyday functioning, altering society’s norms for how we socialize and interact with each other. More research needs to be conducted to explore the relationship between social media usage and socialization preferences, because it will impact future generations to come.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our findings provide evidence suggesting that the initial desirability of social media relates to one’s preference for socialization. This is explained by the fact that one’s initial preference for social isolation is related to preference towards singular activities as well as the intensity of participant’s daily usage and the extent to which social media is perceived to impact real social life. This information sheds new light on the impact of social media on human interaction and communication and has important implications in guiding social media use among youth.

Footnotes

Article Notes

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