7 ms·

Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects

95 points by ca98am79 12y ago

bronbron 12y ago
Hm, I don't think the title quite follows from the article. There might be an association, but even supposing there is causation the independent/dependent variables aren't necessarily known here: people with low social trust (for other reasons) could be more likely to engage in online social networks as opposed to meatspace social networks.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Endogenous factors are addressed in the paper. Nothing personal, but I'm getting so tired of people on HN saying 'well, maybe they made an elementary statistical mistake...' They're professional statisticans working with a large and robust dataset,a nd they devoted 6-7 pages of the paper to discussing how they controlled for such factors. And they brought up your exact point in the very first paragraph of that discussion: [...] In particular, while the effect on well-being has been largely explored in the case of face-to-face interactions, we do not have conclusive evidence about the endogenous relationship between online interactions and well-being. This weakness suggests caution about the generality of the results provided by previous literature. Individual effects such as personal characteristics may be correlated with both participation in SNSs and well-being. Happier people may also be more outgoing and open-minded, and may have a higher propensity for various kinds of social interaction. [...] It's fine to be skeptical, but couldn't you at least do the authors the courtesy of looking at their methods and pointing out where you think they fall short?
  - QuantumChaos 12y ago
    I agree that we should always at least read the linked article (and sometimes the original paper) before bringing out "correlation does not equal causation". However, you are overstating the case for the author's having dealt with reverse causality. From the conclusion: When we addressed causality in IV estimates, the significance of the correlation between participation in social networking sites and subjective well-being disappeared. See my top level comment for my own take on the article.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      I'm not trying to make any comment on the significance of the result; the authors discuss those factors in detail in the body of the paper (around page 20) as well as mentioning the limitations in the abstract and conclusion. My gripe is with reflexive and unjustified statistical one-upmanship in HN discussions.
notastartup 12y ago
I signed up on facebook because my friends went on a trip and I wanted to see the photos of the foreign country they are visiting. When you add people you barely know, I think it would be a different feel when they upload how beautiful their life is.
- fein 12y ago
  That's just it though: No one has much of an interest of presenting anything less than a "beautiful" life on FB. What you're watching in that news feed isn't reality, it's a carefully curated set of ideal content to make that person look better/happier/richer than they actually are. Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers.
  - thinkmassive 12y ago
    I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the point being made by notastartup though. Given that people are going to try to make their selves look good regardless, it's wise to be selective in who you let into your newsfeed. Someone who connects with a lot of people they barely know will be worse off than someone who only accepts (and requests) connections to people with whom they have a close enough relationship that the happiness will always be mutual.
    - fein 12y ago
      My point was to remind people that they simply shouldn't care. It's like getting mad at yourself because you don't look like that perfectly cut (and photoshopped) Abercrombie model. It's not an accurate representation of reality. I don't use facebook outside of what is required for API usage on whatever random dev project I get thrown into this week. The people that are truly in your circle of acquaintances probably don't need FB to stay in touch.
  - frostmatthew 12y ago
    > Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers. The only people who would think nobody bitches/whines/complains on FB are those that have never used it.
kreutz 12y ago
Relevant: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-defining-decade/201203/just-say-no-facebook-social-comparisons http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-defining-decade/2012...
- nextweek2 12y ago
  This is the reason I don't use social networks. So many people are comparing each other and only seeing highlights. Where is the balance and objectivity? Where is the truth in our relationships when viewed through a filter?
lostmsu 12y ago
Bad title. Article only says about correlation.
QuantumChaos 12y ago
This is my summary based on skimming the article: The authors find that social network usage has a negative correlation with happiness. To control for unhappy people turning to social networks (reverse causality), the use instrumental variables (IV). This involves finding an instrument, that is something that causes people to use social networks more/less in a quasi-random way. Their instrument is availability of DSL. I'm not sure how they deal with DSL availability also affecting happiness through other mechanisms (e.g. general internet usage). In any case, the correlation between social network usage and happiness is not significant once they use the IV strategy. They then use a method I'm not familiar with (structural equation modelling, SEM) to obtain some other results which are discussed in the abstract. I believe that the abstract (and the popular article discussing it) should have mentioned the insignificance of the correlation when using the IV strategy, since I doubt many casual readers would by able to critically evaluate the SEM strategy (which yielded the results that the abstract and journalistic article discussed).
xux 12y ago
The title is misleading. Spending time on social networks doesn't cause unhapiness, in fact it's the opposite. It gives you a jolt of brief happiness. This can explain the correlation. It's not hard to see why people who are unhappy with their lives would spend more time on Facebook. Facebook is an alternative place where you can get a brief sense of "social" feeling. If you're perpetually unhappy and lonely, you crave it more. And the more you time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life, causing you to crave it even more. Vicious cycle.
- goldfeld 12y ago
  A jolt of brief happiness, not unlike that produced by a sugar spike, may not be all healthy. It's addictive and conditions you to procure instant rewards more, at the expense of delaying gratification which is essential for having some control over your life over the long haul (habits, hobbies, relationships, projects all take concerted effort with non-imediate payoffs.) In other words, the easy availability of these jolts of brief happiness (and ones not associated with getting fat or spending money) may well set the user up for long-term unhappiness. I'm disheartened to see many of my friends who were never gamers (hence mostly women) now fall prey to addictive social games like Candy Crush and that Kim Kardashian shit, which are things tightly coupled with Facebook usage. I happily find myself immune to their draw--my teens were spent getting on and off addiction to all sorts of games, including even dating sims, though most having far more depth and intellectual stimulation.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  > Spending time on social networks doesn't cause unhapiness > And the more you time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life These two statements directly contradict each other. If something gives you a brief jolt of happiness and "the more time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life", it's only superficially true that it gives you happiness, and it's much much more correct to say that it causes unhappiness. I'm literally only using the propositions from your own comment here.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    They don't contradict each other. It's "correlation does not imply causation" framed differently.
Havoc 12y ago
Online social networks are fine on a conceptual level...beautiful even. Its the commercial interpretation that is completely screwed. Profit driven, privacy invading, dark pattern driven kind of bullsht. Today my phone wanted me to install this (additional) facebook app to read my friend's 2 line message to me. i.e. Blocking the 2nd half of the message and giving me two options - link to useless help article and an install their app button (hiding the fact that the existing app can read the message - which btw strangely didn't trigger the usual alert). So...Dear Facebook...go * yourself. And yes FB employees reading this - I really do feel like that.
- dwaltrip 12y ago
  The faults you are identifying are not related to the article. The implication of the article is broader. It would seem to imply that the statement Online social networks are fine on a conceptual level...beautiful even. may not be true. Of course, this topic needs further study.
  - nardi 12y ago
    I agree. This comment seems off-topic. Not sure why it's the top comment.
    - Havoc 12y ago
      Off-topic indeed & for that I apologize - was just mighty annoyed at the time & the semi related headline trigger a reaction. >Not sure why it's the top comment. The new FB app is universally hated - see app store ratings. I wasn't specifically aiming at that but looking back it makes sense that my angry comment resonated widely despite off-topic. Anyway - sorry for the derail.
  - toufka 12y ago
    It's entirely likely that the dark patterns mentioned above are part of the driver in the context of the article. Knowing and avoiding those dark patterns likely tip the sociological balance of the network towards a less fulfilling place.
chrismai 12y ago
The online to offline social networks can solve the faceless social networking; however, you can lead the horses to the water, but you cannot make them drink the water. "They found for example that face-to-face interactions and the trust people place in one another are strongly correlated with well-being in a positive way. In other words, if you tend to trust people and have lots of face-to-face interactions, you will probably assess your well-being more highly."
marcosscriven 12y ago
Whenever I read about the downsides of social media, for some reason I clearly remember a line from the film To Die For (meant as satire): "Because what's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching? And if people are watching, it makes you a better person." I feel much the same way about it myself. It seems so many are crazily self obsessed.
istjohn 12y ago
I am unconvinced that social networks are the cause of the correlation here. The proposed mechanism, that social network use engenders a loss of trust, just doesn't make sense to me. Exactly what is it about social networks that would cause trust to erode? More plausible is that people who lack strong social ties with mutual trust use social networks more instead of interacting face to face.
walru 12y ago
When all you do is view everyone's best moments from that day it's no wonder it leads to a certain kind of depression. I saw it in spades in my ex-gf who is a lawyer working 10-12hrs/day. She would get so depressed looking at 'everyone playing outside' while she was stuck inside working that she would inevitably take it out on me. Facebook is the Billy Mays of interacting with your friends. The sooner one steps away from the herd they realize the toxicity of the life that's being sold. Disclaimer: I 'deactivated' my account a month ago and feel fantastic!
tim333 12y ago
Reading the paper the article is based on (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3550v1.pdf)- http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3550v1.pdf)- the evidence seems pretty weak: "Subjective well-being is observed through the answers to the question “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?”. Answers range on a scale from 0 (extremely dissatisfied) to 10 (extremely satisfied)" The average results are about 7 ( between 7.25 and 7.76 in the North, 7.02 and 7.21 in the Center and 6.85 and 7.26 in the South) And for social networking sites "the total net effect is negative and amounts to about -0.15%." So that's a change of like 7.25 down to 7.24 approx Which seems a pretty marginal result to me. I know they've tried to correct for spurious correlations and the like but it's an inexact science. I mean the change is 1/40 of that of moving from north Italy to the south for example.
arjn 12y ago
I've long suspected this and have been off social networks since 2007/08. Have taken a lot of grief from friends about it though.

95 points by ca98am79 12y ago

Hm, I don't think the title quite follows from the article. There might be an association, but even supposing there is causation the independent/dependent variables aren't necessarily known here: people with low social trust (for other reasons) could be more likely to engage in online social networks as opposed to meatspace social networks.

anigbrowl 12y ago
Endogenous factors are addressed in the paper. Nothing personal, but I'm getting so tired of people on HN saying 'well, maybe they made an elementary statistical mistake...' They're professional statisticans working with a large and robust dataset,a nd they devoted 6-7 pages of the paper to discussing how they controlled for such factors. And they brought up your exact point in the very first paragraph of that discussion: [...] In particular, while the effect on well-being has been largely explored in the case of face-to-face interactions, we do not have conclusive evidence about the endogenous relationship between online interactions and well-being. This weakness suggests caution about the generality of the results provided by previous literature. Individual effects such as personal characteristics may be correlated with both participation in SNSs and well-being. Happier people may also be more outgoing and open-minded, and may have a higher propensity for various kinds of social interaction. [...] It's fine to be skeptical, but couldn't you at least do the authors the courtesy of looking at their methods and pointing out where you think they fall short?
- QuantumChaos 12y ago
  I agree that we should always at least read the linked article (and sometimes the original paper) before bringing out "correlation does not equal causation". However, you are overstating the case for the author's having dealt with reverse causality. From the conclusion: When we addressed causality in IV estimates, the significance of the correlation between participation in social networking sites and subjective well-being disappeared. See my top level comment for my own take on the article.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    I'm not trying to make any comment on the significance of the result; the authors discuss those factors in detail in the body of the paper (around page 20) as well as mentioning the limitations in the abstract and conclusion. My gripe is with reflexive and unjustified statistical one-upmanship in HN discussions.

notastartup 12y ago

I signed up on facebook because my friends went on a trip and I wanted to see the photos of the foreign country they are visiting. When you add people you barely know, I think it would be a different feel when they upload how beautiful their life is.

fein 12y ago
That's just it though: No one has much of an interest of presenting anything less than a "beautiful" life on FB. What you're watching in that news feed isn't reality, it's a carefully curated set of ideal content to make that person look better/happier/richer than they actually are. Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers.
- thinkmassive 12y ago
  I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the point being made by notastartup though. Given that people are going to try to make their selves look good regardless, it's wise to be selective in who you let into your newsfeed. Someone who connects with a lot of people they barely know will be worse off than someone who only accepts (and requests) connections to people with whom they have a close enough relationship that the happiness will always be mutual.
  - fein 12y ago
    My point was to remind people that they simply shouldn't care. It's like getting mad at yourself because you don't look like that perfectly cut (and photoshopped) Abercrombie model. It's not an accurate representation of reality. I don't use facebook outside of what is required for API usage on whatever random dev project I get thrown into this week. The people that are truly in your circle of acquaintances probably don't need FB to stay in touch.
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers. The only people who would think nobody bitches/whines/complains on FB are those that have never used it.

kreutz 12y ago

Relevant: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-defining-decade/201203/just-say-no-facebook-social-comparisons http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-defining-decade/2012...

nextweek2 12y ago
This is the reason I don't use social networks. So many people are comparing each other and only seeing highlights. Where is the balance and objectivity? Where is the truth in our relationships when viewed through a filter?

lostmsu 12y ago

Bad title. Article only says about correlation.

QuantumChaos 12y ago

This is my summary based on skimming the article: The authors find that social network usage has a negative correlation with happiness. To control for unhappy people turning to social networks (reverse causality), the use instrumental variables (IV). This involves finding an instrument, that is something that causes people to use social networks more/less in a quasi-random way. Their instrument is availability of DSL. I'm not sure how they deal with DSL availability also affecting happiness through other mechanisms (e.g. general internet usage). In any case, the correlation between social network usage and happiness is not significant once they use the IV strategy. They then use a method I'm not familiar with (structural equation modelling, SEM) to obtain some other results which are discussed in the abstract. I believe that the abstract (and the popular article discussing it) should have mentioned the insignificance of the correlation when using the IV strategy, since I doubt many casual readers would by able to critically evaluate the SEM strategy (which yielded the results that the abstract and journalistic article discussed).

xux 12y ago

The title is misleading. Spending time on social networks doesn't cause unhapiness, in fact it's the opposite. It gives you a jolt of brief happiness. This can explain the correlation. It's not hard to see why people who are unhappy with their lives would spend more time on Facebook. Facebook is an alternative place where you can get a brief sense of "social" feeling. If you're perpetually unhappy and lonely, you crave it more. And the more you time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life, causing you to crave it even more. Vicious cycle.

goldfeld 12y ago
A jolt of brief happiness, not unlike that produced by a sugar spike, may not be all healthy. It's addictive and conditions you to procure instant rewards more, at the expense of delaying gratification which is essential for having some control over your life over the long haul (habits, hobbies, relationships, projects all take concerted effort with non-imediate payoffs.) In other words, the easy availability of these jolts of brief happiness (and ones not associated with getting fat or spending money) may well set the user up for long-term unhappiness. I'm disheartened to see many of my friends who were never gamers (hence mostly women) now fall prey to addictive social games like Candy Crush and that Kim Kardashian shit, which are things tightly coupled with Facebook usage. I happily find myself immune to their draw--my teens were spent getting on and off addiction to all sorts of games, including even dating sims, though most having far more depth and intellectual stimulation.
wutbrodo 12y ago
> Spending time on social networks doesn't cause unhapiness > And the more you time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life These two statements directly contradict each other. If something gives you a brief jolt of happiness and "the more time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life", it's only superficially true that it gives you happiness, and it's much much more correct to say that it causes unhappiness. I'm literally only using the propositions from your own comment here.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  They don't contradict each other. It's "correlation does not imply causation" framed differently.

Havoc 12y ago

Online social networks are fine on a conceptual level...beautiful even. Its the commercial interpretation that is completely screwed. Profit driven, privacy invading, dark pattern driven kind of bullsht. Today my phone wanted me to install this (additional) facebook app to read my friend's 2 line message to me. i.e. Blocking the 2nd half of the message and giving me two options - link to useless help article and an install their app button (hiding the fact that the existing app can read the message - which btw strangely didn't trigger the usual alert). So...Dear Facebook...go * yourself. And yes FB employees reading this - I really do feel like that.

dwaltrip 12y ago
The faults you are identifying are not related to the article. The implication of the article is broader. It would seem to imply that the statement Online social networks are fine on a conceptual level...beautiful even. may not be true. Of course, this topic needs further study.
- nardi 12y ago
  I agree. This comment seems off-topic. Not sure why it's the top comment.
  - Havoc 12y ago
    Off-topic indeed & for that I apologize - was just mighty annoyed at the time & the semi related headline trigger a reaction. >Not sure why it's the top comment. The new FB app is universally hated - see app store ratings. I wasn't specifically aiming at that but looking back it makes sense that my angry comment resonated widely despite off-topic. Anyway - sorry for the derail.
- toufka 12y ago
  It's entirely likely that the dark patterns mentioned above are part of the driver in the context of the article. Knowing and avoiding those dark patterns likely tip the sociological balance of the network towards a less fulfilling place.

chrismai 12y ago

The online to offline social networks can solve the faceless social networking; however, you can lead the horses to the water, but you cannot make them drink the water. "They found for example that face-to-face interactions and the trust people place in one another are strongly correlated with well-being in a positive way. In other words, if you tend to trust people and have lots of face-to-face interactions, you will probably assess your well-being more highly."

marcosscriven 12y ago

Whenever I read about the downsides of social media, for some reason I clearly remember a line from the film To Die For (meant as satire): "Because what's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching? And if people are watching, it makes you a better person." I feel much the same way about it myself. It seems so many are crazily self obsessed.

istjohn 12y ago

I am unconvinced that social networks are the cause of the correlation here. The proposed mechanism, that social network use engenders a loss of trust, just doesn't make sense to me. Exactly what is it about social networks that would cause trust to erode? More plausible is that people who lack strong social ties with mutual trust use social networks more instead of interacting face to face.

walru 12y ago

When all you do is view everyone's best moments from that day it's no wonder it leads to a certain kind of depression. I saw it in spades in my ex-gf who is a lawyer working 10-12hrs/day. She would get so depressed looking at 'everyone playing outside' while she was stuck inside working that she would inevitably take it out on me. Facebook is the Billy Mays of interacting with your friends. The sooner one steps away from the herd they realize the toxicity of the life that's being sold. Disclaimer: I 'deactivated' my account a month ago and feel fantastic!

tim333 12y ago

Reading the paper the article is based on (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3550v1.pdf)- http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3550v1.pdf)- the evidence seems pretty weak: "Subjective well-being is observed through the answers to the question “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?”. Answers range on a scale from 0 (extremely dissatisfied) to 10 (extremely satisfied)" The average results are about 7 ( between 7.25 and 7.76 in the North, 7.02 and 7.21 in the Center and 6.85 and 7.26 in the South) And for social networking sites "the total net effect is negative and amounts to about -0.15%." So that's a change of like 7.25 down to 7.24 approx Which seems a pretty marginal result to me. I know they've tried to correct for spurious correlations and the like but it's an inexact science. I mean the change is 1/40 of that of moving from north Italy to the south for example.

arjn 12y ago

I've long suspected this and have been off social networks since 2007/08. Have taken a lot of grief from friends about it though.