2 weeks Ago By Mari Otsu
It’s common to see a group of teens together, focusing on their phones rather than engaging with each other, or a solitary teen sitting amid a crowd, hunched over and scrolling. Simon’s observance echoes the ancient Chinese adage, “An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but an inch of gold cannot buy an inch of time.” For example, a teenage girl might spend hours putting on makeup, getting dressed, and taking and editing photos of herself, then anxiously wait for peers’ responses after posting them, interpreting a lack of likes and comments as rejection.
At the same time, she might lurk for hours on other women’s profiles, comparing her looks to others’ carefully edited photos, which may lead to low self-esteem. According to Nancy Yang, an evolutionary biologist at SFU and lead author of the study, such online interaction is an “evolutionary anomaly.” She told The Epoch Times that, unlike face-to-face interactions—how humans have related for most of history—social media disrupts our ability to socially regulate and calibrate our sense of self through social feedback from others.
Yang said that virtual spaces produce environments where you are not only physically separated from others, but “you can even be decoupled from yourself ...
an isolated ‘node’ in the network, tethered only by the strains of [your] own imagination.” Crespi, who holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and is the second author of the BMC Psychiatry study, said that humans are “intensely social animals,” commonly thinking about other people while cooperating and competing. They have evolved to be very sensitive to social opportunities and threats.
Those with an underdeveloped sense of self are most vulnerable to the pitfalls of the online world, he said. These vulnerable people, who often lack fulfilling real-life social interactions, turn to the internet to create, bolster, and sustain a sense of self in ways that are quite artificial. “There’s no question that it’s affecting the developing mind,” Crespi said.
“Using social media for social fulfillment can be like eating popcorn to satisfy hunger—it may be ‘food,’ but it will not provide the same sustenance as having a proper meal,” Yang said. Additionally, when participants posted images on a simulated Instagram-like platform, teens’ moods were more strongly affected by a decrease in likes than adults’. This suggests that adolescent social media engagement is more emotionally driven.
Disappointment was significantly linked to more arguments between friends six months later. Feeling obligated to always respond to friends didn’t cause the same level of conflict. And that’s without the visualness factor—the study found that photos and videos represent higher-stake “investments” that demand proportional returns, which made the effect of disappointment even stronger.
When teens share a carefully curated image, they’re essentially making a larger emotional deposit and expect a matching return of validation. Although social media may be a useful tool, Yang recommended using it in moderation. “Go outside and touch grass,” she said, playfully underscoring the necessity of face-to-face conversations in cultivating meaningful relationships.
According to Yang, “Social skills are really like learning to dance—you can watch as many dance videos as you want, but it will not be the same as dancing. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”.
