This is a paper that I wrote in my last semester of college. The full title is “Smile for the Camera: The Effects of Instagram on Happiness and Mental Health”. I wrote it as my final paper for CS4001, which was an ethics course (and a very good class). The pdf version is available here. The associated presentation with graphics is available here: (pdf, pptx). This page contains a version edited for the web and was placed here in December of 2019.
Smile for the Camera: The Effects of Instagram on Happiness and Mental Health
Drew Polstra
Georgia Institute of Technology / CS 4001
Professor Sauvik Das
A few months ago, I heard from a friend of mine who claimed to have quit Instagram. She said it with a self-satisfied tone, like it was a milestone comparable to quitting smoking or losing twenty pounds. She made it clear that she thought it had seriously improved her happiness and self-esteem. Until then, I hadn’t really considered the implications of the platform; most friends of mine seemed to really enjoy it. Was she right? Had Instagram been making her unhappy? If it truly had been, was it an isolated case, or do most users of the platform decrease their own quality of life? I kept this question in the back of my mind for the next few months.
During that time, I watched as my sister held an Instagram photo shoot for her dog, which made it look like the most perfect, happy, adorable furry companion in the whole state of Texas. A few days later, I heard about the same dog destroying another piece of clothing while she was at work. I’m sure that no pictures of that made it to her Instagram, though. In the same period I watched a good friend, who was dating a relatively successful “Instagram model”, as he attended the Music Midtown festival. From their pictures you’d think they had a fantastic weekend, but while we were there they only seemed to really smile whenever they were posing. I don’t think either of them really wanted to go to the concert; it was just something that they did to show to their audience. With these experiences in mind, I began to think that my friend who quit might have been right. When it came time to pick a topic for this research paper, I chose to investigate the question: Does Instagram have a net positive or a net negative impact on our lives? Was my friend correct in her decision to quit, or was hers an isolated case?
Bear the dog is adorable and perfect… in this photo.
Click to expand. Left chart: pay attention to the wide spread for Snapchat and Instagram; they’re wildly popular among young people but almost unused by older generations. Right chart: Instagram was the fastest growing social network between 2016 and 2018.
This paper focuses on Instagram specifically. There is plenty of existing research on older social media platforms such as Facebook, and the general idea that Facebook might not be good for you seems to have permeated our culture to some extent. This is consistent with its user statistics; a Pew Research study from 2018 has found that the percentage of Americans using Facebook has remained static since 2016 (Smith 2). The platform’s growth has flatlined. Luckily for Facebook, Inc., which owns Instagram as well, the percentage of Americans using Instagram has grown from about 25% to 35% in the same period, making Instagram the fastest-growing social platform in the country (Smith 2). If Instagram does make us depressed, there hasn’t been enough time for the population to really discover this for themselves. According to the same study, Instagram is disproportionately popular among people in the university age group, with an astonishing 71% of Americans age 18-24 using it regularly (Smith 8).
Unfortunately for this research paper (which was supposed to be about thoroughly exploring both sides of an issue), the answer to the question “Does Instagram make us unhappy” seems to be a clear and resounding “yes”. It’s actually fairly difficult to find any real scientific argument that could support the “no” position; every study that I researched for this paper showed a fairly clear correlation between Instagram usage and unhappiness or depression. Instagram is not even better than other social networks; in fact, it may be the worst of them all, according to the UK’s Royal Society for Public Health. Out of a study of nearly 1500 people from ages 14-24, Instagram scored worst for its effects on health and wellbeing out of the five most popular social websites (Cramer 23). YouTube was the only site to receive an even moderately positive overall score (Cramer 19). According to the same study, Instagram is strongly associated with heightened anxiety, depression, bullying, and “fear of missing out” (Cramer 23).
Though there are no scientific papers that strongly take up the position of Instagram and other social media being explicitly good for your mental health, it’s clear that many people do choose to use these sites, so they must feel as if they are extracting some benefit from them. What gain, then, do the users of Instagram mostly get from the platform? According to a 2017 study done by Procedia Computer Science in the European Union, most (97.2%) of the users of social media feel that its use benefits them because it facilitates “Exchange of information and communication” and “data sharing” (Drahošová 1008). There are several other categories of benefits in this study, but none of them seem to apply to Instagram’s feature set; Instagram is not particularly useful for “teamwork and working from home” or “education” (Drahošová 2008). So therefore it seems that Instagram’s main benefit is for keeping in touch with what your friends are up to, and sharing your own experiences with your friends. The #StatusOfMind study from the Royal Society for Public Health also listed some advantages for Instagram; though the platform’s overall score was the most negative of any social media platform that was reviewed, it did score highly for “Self-expression”, “Self-identity”, “Emotional Support” and “Community building” (Cramer 23). This mostly suggests the same idea as the Procedia study; people use Instagram to present themselves to the world, to keep up with their communities, and to receive support when they are feeling down. All of this looks relatively harmless, so why does Instagram have such a strong and clear correlation with decreased happiness?
What sort of positives and negatives people tend to feel from various social media platforms. The original study includes two more; Youtube was the only one with an overall positive score, and Instagram was the most negative.
High usage of several social media platforms seems to be correlated with unhappiness. Instagram users are the most likely to also use many other social media platforms.
This new question is hard to answer. The specific effects of Instagram are hard to isolate from the general effects of living in a high-tech and highly connected society. Within that difficulty, the effects of social media in particular are hard to isolate from each other, since almost nobody uses only one form of it. This challenge is most pronounced for Instagram, because its users are the most likely to also use many other forms of social media. According to the Pew Research study, Instagram has the highest percentages of “reciprocity” among major social media sites, meaning that more of its users also use other sites than any other site (Smith 15). For example, 91% of Instagram users also use Facebook, 95% also use Youtube, and 60% also use Snapchat. On the other hand, only 45% of Youtube users use Instagram, 45% use Facebook, and 35% use Snapchat (Smith 15). This leads to the idea that the negative effects on mental health caused by Instagram may be caused, in whole or in part, by the overuse of social media in general, because Instagram users are the most likely to be perpetually connected to some form of social media. The idea that overuse of social media leads to decreased happiness also has a scientific basis; a recent study from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Research on Media, Technology, and Health has found that “the use of multiple social media platforms is more strongly associated with depression and anxiety among young adults than the total amount of time they spend on social media” (Hydzik 1). The study found that those who used at least seven of the eleven social media platforms surveyed had nearly 3.1 times the chances of high levels of depressive symptoms than those who used between zero and two platforms (Hydzik 5). If Instagram users are more likely to use lots of social media platforms - and they overwhelmingly are - then this is a good explanation of at least some of the negative effects associated with this particular platform.
So, given that Instagram users are associated with overuse of social media which causes unhappiness, what about overuse of social media causes this unhappiness? A paper from EPJ Data Science seems to think that the unhappiness may rise from two paradoxes; the “Friendship Paradox” and the “Happiness Paradox”. The friendship paradox is described in the paper as the idea that “most people will have fewer friends than their own friends do on average. This phenomenon … has been attributed to an inherent structural bias in social network that favors popular individuals: they are by definition more likely to belong to someone’s social circle, thereby elevating local levels of popularity. One may speculate that if an individual compares their own popularity to that of their friends, this effect may, in some cases, lead to increased levels of dissatisfaction” (Bollen 1.2). This concept of a “friendship paradox” seems unintuitive at first but does make a lot of sense, and can perhaps go a long way to explaining the happiness issues caused by social media. According to the Bollen paper, the results of their study indicate that the Friendship Paradox is very real; the data indicates a “very significant Friendship Paradox across all subjects, meaning that a great majority of users are less popular than their friends are on average” (Bollen 3.1).
It seems likely that this “Friendship Paradox” effect would be even more pronounced on a platform such as Instagram, which has a reputation for being fake or narcissistic, where users attempt to make themselves appear as popular and glamorous as possible. Indeed, a study from LendEDU found that Instagram has an overwhelming perception of being the most narcissistic social media platform by a large margin. According to a study of 3701 college students from 2015-2017, LendEDU found that nearly 65% of their participants considered Instagram to be the most narcissistic, with the second-closest, Snapchat, coming in at only 15% (Brown 7). This suggests that there is a general perception that Instagram’s culture leads to people posting mostly self-glamorizing and possibly exaggerated content, which in turn leads to the idea that many users might feel like their own experiences don’t measure up. According to the same study, Instagram has a very high chance of users reciprocally liking the posts of those who like their own posts. Over 65% of study participants reported that it is “unspoken Instagram code” to like the posts of someone who likes your posts (Brown 15). This concept of reciprocal post liking leads to the general idea that more popular people who have more friends will almost always have more highly liked posts. Since the friendship paradox shows that your friends will mostly be more popular than you, this leads to the unhappy idea that most of your friends’ posts will get more likes than yours, which would be a constant reminder of your friends’ popularity. This popularity difference is also exaggerated by Instagram’s ease of use for keeping up with celebrities, who are the ultimate popular people and who will certainly make anyone feel unpopular by comparison with their millions of likes and perfectly posed and edited photos.
The friendship and happiness paradoxes. Sorry for the quality, this is a great illustration but I can’t find a bigger version.
The Bollen et al. paper also discusses the idea of a “Happiness Paradox” that stems from the Friendship Paradox, which is the idea that “If popular individuals tend to be happier, their elevated happiness will become more prevalent as well. This may in turn lead to… [an effect] where most individuals are less happy than their friends on average” (Bollen 1.3). It goes on to say that this happiness paradox most directly contributes to the negative effects of social media since it affects how individuals perceive their own “Subjective Well-being”, their general happiness or life satisfaction relative to that of others. Bollen et al. did find that a Happiness Paradox exists (Bollen 3.1). Given knowledge of the narcissism and popularity-focused behavior of Instagram, it seems logical that Instagram might generate a stronger version of these two paradoxes than other social media, leading to a stronger negative effect on subjective well-being.
In the course of writing this paper, it would have been very useful to have more research available into the positive and beneficial results of the usage of sites such as Instagram. Though I have plenty of anecdotal reasons from discussions with friends, there are no papers, scientific or otherwise, that I can find that make much mention at all of any beneficial effects on the user. Surely the effects are not all negative or else nobody would use the platform. Even the papers that mentioned the happiness paradox, which implies that some people have increased happiness due to social media, did not say hardly anything about the nature of that increased happiness. Anecdotally, friends report enjoyment from being able to share their lives with their friends, and from seeing what their friends are up to, but that anecdotal evidence is all that I can offer. Even Instagram’s own website says nothing about any motivation for using it on any of the public-facing pages that I can find without logging in (and therefore having already signed up for the platform).
Instagram is making somebody happy… it’s just not you. It’s their shareholders.
Interestingly, there are many articles available on Instagram being beneficial, but only for one particular group: advertisers and businesses. That in itself is a reminder of the true purpose of Instagram and social media in general: they do not exist to provide a service to the user, but to cause you to be exposed to new things to spend money on. Though Instagram’s website says nothing about why you as a user should join Instagram, it has plenty to say for advertisers, with statements like “60% of people say they discover new products on Instagram” and “⅓ of the most viewed stories are from businesses” (Instagram). It also discusses product placements and sponsorships. If anyone clearly benefits from this platform, it’s the platform’s true customers: the businesses who pay to sell you things.
Though few scholarly articles offer much in support of the use of Instagram, there are several that discuss a reason that people might use it even though doesn’t benefit them: addiction. According to a study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, addiction to social networking sites is quite common and is highly correlated to the idea of “fear of missing out” or FOMO, which is an emotion that varies in commonality among people. The paper goes on to say that “higher levels of FOMO have been associated with greater engagement with Facebook, lower general mood, lower wellbeing, and lower life satisfaction, mixed feelings when using social media, as well as inappropriate and dangerous SNS use (i.e. in university lectures and or [sic] whilst driving)” (Kuss 2.6). As previously discussed, the United Kingdom’s Status of Mind study found that Instagram had a high level of association with this FOMO trait (Cramer 23). Since FOMO relates to both increased engagement with social media and also to increased unhappiness, it’s easy to see why Instagram is growing so rapidly in popularity and also so strongly related to unhappiness.
In conclusion, the evidence is conclusive that Instagram has an overall strong negative effect on its users’ mental health. This is largely due to its users higher chances of spending lots of time using it and other social networks, and also due to its culture of narcissism and its focus on popularity. This culture magnifies the friendship and happiness paradox effects that are already common on other forms of social media to create a relatively toxic, yet completely inescapable, environment.
Thank you for reading! If you notice any inaccuracies in this article, or there’s anything you think I should add here, please reach out to contact@ddpolstra.com. I’d be delighted to hear from you.
References Cited
Bollen, J., Gonçalves, B., Van de Leemput, I., & Ruan, G. (2017). The happiness paradox: your friends are happier than you. EPJ Data Science, 6(4). doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-017-0100-1
Brown, Mike. Millennials Say Instagram is Most Narcissistic Social App. (2018, August 31). LendEDU. Retrieved from https://lendedu.com/blog/millennials-instagram-narcissistic-social-media-platform/
Cramer, S., & Inkster, B. (2017) #StatusOfMind: Social media and young people’s mental health and wellbeing. Royal Society for Public Health. Retrieved October 23, 2018, from https://www.rsph.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/62be270a-a55f-4719-ad668c2ec7a74c2a.pdf
Drahošová, M., & Balco, P. (2017, June 12). The analysis of advantages and disadvantages of use of social media in European Union. doi:10.1016/j.procs.2017.05.446
Get Started on Instagram for Businesses. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2018, from https://business.instagram.com/getting-started
Hydzik, A. (n.d.). Using lots of social media sites raises depression risk. University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute. Retrieved November 23, 2018, from http://www.braininstitute.pitt.edu/using-lots-social-media-sites-raises-depression-risk
Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017, March 17). Social Networking Sites and Addiction: Ten Lessons Learned. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Retrieved from http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/3/311
MacMillan, A. (2017, May 25). Why Instagram Is the Worst Social Media for Mental Health. Retrieved October 23, 2018, from http://time.com/4793331/instagram-social-media-mental-health/
Seabrook, E. M., Kern, M. L., & Rickard, N. S. (2016). Social Networking Sites, Depression, and Anxiety: A Systematic Review. JMIR Mental Health, 3(4). doi:10.2196/mental.5842.
Smith, A., & Anderson, M. (2018, September 19). Social Media Use 2018: Demographics and Statistics. Retrieved November 23, 2018, from http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/
Statista (later addition): https://www.statista.com/statistics/271633/annual-revenue-of-instagram/