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Does Social Media Have a Negative Impact on Body Image?

Engaging with social media may damage appearance satisfaction.

Key points

  • Engaging with social media can affect users’ appearance satisfaction.
  • This effect is twice as strong when engaging with posts of known people compared to unknown people.
  • People who are prone to body image challenges may find it beneficial to limit their time on social media.

Social media plays a big part in many people’s lives—helping them mediate their personal and professional relationships, keeping track of local and international news, and providing them with a distraction from everyday life. But alongside these positive effects, many psychologists have also highlighted the negative impact of social media on our mental health and body image. For instance, internal research by Facebook showed that for one in three teenage girls who were already struggling with body image issues, the Instagram app made them feel worse. In public, however, the company—and developers of many similar apps—has consistently downplayed any harmful impact on users’ body image.

Facebook’s internal conclusions mirror a number of other recent reports suggesting that engagement with social media can have a negative impact on body image. In fact, psychologists are increasingly highlighting the fact that social media creates new pressures to engage in bodywork and sculpt the “perfect” body. When users see idealized images of appearance on social media and compare themselves to those images, they are much more likely to experience negative body image and, in turn, a host of detrimental outcomes, including symptoms of disordered eating. However, very little of this research has examined the impact of social media on users in their everyday lives outside the lab.

Social media use and body image

My colleagues and I recently conducted a longitudinal study running for two weeks using wrist-worn wearables to assess participants’ experiences when they engaged with social media in their everyday lives (Stieger et al., 2022). Participants reported their appearance satisfaction each time they engaged with pictures or videos depicting others while they were using social media platforms. To make the assessment as easy as possible, we used wearables and their onboard sensors to assess appearance satisfaction at that very moment. To do so, we developed a “physical analogue scale” where the angle of the forearm in a 3D space represented a gradual measurement scale of appearance satisfaction. This meant that participants did not have to answer questions on a paper-and-pencil survey but could instead bring their forearms to the desired angle to report their appearance satisfaction.

The results of the study showed that engagement with social media reduced participants’ appearance satisfaction. In other words, engaging with social media posts had an immediate negative effect on body image. Interestingly, this negative impact was twice as damaging when engaging with posts by people participants knew—such as friends and family members—compared with unknown people, such as influencers and celebrities. This effect was consistent even accounting for demographic factors, such as gender and body size, as well as body image-related factors.

Why might posts by known people be more impactful than those of strangers? One possible explanation comes from social comparison theory (e.g., Festinger, 1954), which suggests that if someone is very different from you (i.e., strangers), you are less likely to make social comparisons with them. Conversely, when users engage with posts by known others, any appearance ideal being communicated may feel more personally relevant or attainable. At the same time, users may be more critically engaged with posts from models and celebrities and therefore perceive the images they share to be more unrealistic.

Given these findings, it would seem that fears about the negative impact of social media on body image may very well be justified. Engaging with social media appears to have an immediate negative impact on appearance satisfaction, which may translate into longer-term body image concerns. To mitigate such effects, users of social media might be advised to limit their social media use. In the study above, for instance, participants used social media actively (for example, creating Facebook posts, writing Tweets, and sending WhatsApp messages) for an average of 73 minutes per day and passively (watching YouTube videos, reading Facebook posts, viewing Snapchat pictures) for 90 minutes per day—almost three hours per day in total. Additionally, changing the profiles and posts that one follows may also help—in particular, engaging with posts that promote healthier body image may help mitigate against some of the worst effects of social media on body image.

References

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140.

Stieger, S., Graf, H. M., Riegler, S. P., Biebl, S., & Swami, V. (2022). Engagement with social media content results in lower appearance satisfaction: An experience sampling study using a wrist-worn wearable and a physical analogue scale. Body Image, 43, 232-243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2022.09.009

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