Salt Lake
Community
AN
College
Professor
Jorgensen
UNEXPECTED
BURDEN:
SOCIAL MEDIA
The users of social media are at fault and they must take a
look at just how much time they spend on their devices,
how what they are viewing is affecting them
psychologically, and if it is truly necessary to post every
detail of their daily lives online.
Narcissism
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An Unexpected burden: social media
Cyberbullying
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More
Many users of social media will express their opinions
online and will expect the people that they interact with to
agree wholeheartedly with them. These users will fall into
an abysmal cycle of confirmation bias. This confirmation
bias can be tied in with the narcissism that stems from
social media and if the user is arrogant enough to believe
only their opinions are correct, they will find evidence in
anything biased toward their opinion to prove their points.
This can result in creating an online echo chamber in which
an individual will refuse to hear opinions opposing theirs
and will begin to block or delete anyone who essentially
isnt a virtual yes man.
The reason why these users are engulfed in their own
confirmation bias is that they cannot stand the thought of
being wrong and do not want to be proven wrong,
especially not publicly on their own social platform. The
more emotionally driven the opinion, the stronger the bias
shall be overall. Armen E. Allahverdyan from the
Department of Theoretical Physics at the Yerevan Physics
Institute, Armenia, and Aram Galstyan of the USC
Information Sciences Institute in California published a
research article through Middlesex University which tells us
how they studied the different types of opinion dynamics in
regards to confirmation bias. The two researchers assert
that, essentially, those conditions formalize the intuition
that the agent P does not change his opinion if the
persuasion is either far away or identical with his existing
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opinion
(Allahverdyan &
Galstyan 1)
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Attraction to Negativity
Social media is not a bad thing, there are several positive
movements and awareness programs that have developed
from social media. It ties everyone together and it gives
people a chance to talk to people across the world from the
convenience of their homes. However, It leads to problems
with overuse. Much like overconsumption can be unhealthy,
overuse of social media can be mentally unhealthy. While
there are positive ways to use social media, many times
the users are focused on something negative. Negative
situations, opinions, or words will leave a longer lasting
effect on a person rather than something that is positive.
Ktsyri argues in an essay that: This effect can be
explained by the different sensitivities (i.e., activation
functions) of the appetitive and aversive motivational
systems to positive and negative stimuli, respectively [15]:
although appetitive activation is greater in a neutral
environment (positivity offset), aversive activation
increases more steeply for negative stimuli than appetitive
activation does for positive stimuli (negativity bias),
(Ktsyri et al, 2).
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Mob Mentality
A similar effect that is commonly seen online is known as
the mob mentality. A mob mentality is a situation in which
people are influenced by their peers usually with higher
status and will thus develop certain beliefs or behaviors. If
a well-known figure online decides to boycott a specific
product and tells their fans online that they should not use
the product and also directs hate toward a company
without researching it on their own, this is a mob mentality.
If a person is popular online they have more influence over
people than someone who is not well known. Regular
people may be susceptible to these negative behaviors and
it can lead to cyber-bullying.
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Conclusion
There are negative and positive consequences of the
amount of usage, and as a result, it is affecting the
psychology of human interaction. Due to the lack of
acknowledgement of conditioned behaviors through social
media such as narcissism, virtue signaling, cognitive
dissonance, mob mentality, bandwagoning, and the ease of
cyber-bullying, we have allowed these behaviors become
standard. Confidence and self-worth should not be
determined by the amount of attention an individual
receives on their online social media accounts. Self-worth
should be determined by accomplishments, positive
character traits, well established relationships with peers
and family members. Regardless of all the negative aspects
that come from social media, its here to stay, therefore it
is crucial that these psychological behaviors are confronted
on a personal and national level. Regular users of social
media must take into account how much time they are
wasting on their devices when they could be interacting
with the people in front of them. They are missing out on
developing deep connections with the physical people in
their daily lives whether it be at school, work, or even
people they could meet on the street.
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Works Cited
Allahverdyan, Armen E., and Aram Galstyan. "Opinion Dynamics With Confirmation
Bias."
Plos ONE 9.7 (2014): 1-14. Academic Search Premier. Web. 31 July 2016.
Ktsyri, Jari, et al. "Negativity Bias In Media Multitasking: The Effects Of Negative
Social
Media Messages On Attention To Television News Broadcasts." Plos ONE 11.5 (2016):1-
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