Under a recent settlement that Meta recently reached with states, Facebook and Instagram are about to look different for minors Among the new protections, one seemingly modest change caught my eye. By default, users under 18 will no longer be able to see likes and other reactions in response to their posts or those of others. The reforms are designed for children and teenagers, but touch on a psychological phenomenon just as relevant to adults. As a psychiatrist, I found myself wondering: Why does that little number beneath your post matter so much?
We know how much approval we receive relative to what we might have expected, what we got the last time we posted, and what others receive. Feedback is scored. Likes are just one example. Follower counts, views, and shares are other metrics that make social information measurable. When social approval is numerically valued, comparison becomes harder to avoid.
Our brains weren’t built for this much comparison. Neuroimaging studies show that our brains allocate value to how we believe we stack up next to others. Downward social comparison, in which we learn someone performs worse than us, can engage neural circuits associated with reward and valuation. Upward comparison, in which we learn someone performs better than us, can engage neural circuits associated with processing unpleasant emotions. These are ways in which our brains process social outcomes much like other kinds of gains or losses.
Social comparison isn’t inherently harmful. But as repeated opportunities to compare mount, the mental health effects can add up.
Social media didn’t invent our instinct to compare ourselves to others. We’ve had that for millennia. What it did was shift the environment surrounding our instincts, encoding one form of social feedback into numbers we can monitor.
The cultural shift that lies ahead is to ask the questions about our social worth that don’t need a scoreboard to answer.
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