A German study has confirmed what I have long suspected: Using social networking sites such as Facebook can provoke envy and frustration and lead to increased dissatisfaction with life. These are the conclusions of a joint study by two German universities, the TU Darmstadt and the Humboldt-Universitat Zu Berlin, where researchers surveyed 584 Facebook users in Germany on how they felt after using Facebook. What they found is that one-third of respondents reported strong negative feelings after using the FB platform, and the main cause of this whirlwind of negative emotion was envy. Facebook makes available at the click of a button thousands of images and pieces of information on other people's lives; that's its raison d'être. Used well, it is a tool that helps people make connections with others. But the flipside of having all this information laid out for all to see is that the platform becomes a fertile territory for social comparison, and social comparison often leads to envy and dissatisfaction. There are several interesting factors in this insidious process. The first is that Facebook “friends” are nothing like real friends. Whereas with real friends you know who they are and what their lives are really like, Facebook allows you to see into the lives of people you hardly know. Furthermore, the picture you get is a constructed image, and generally a flattering one. Facebook users will quite naturally want to portray themselves in a favorable light on their profiles. It is akin to thinking all women look like the touched-up pictures you see in magazines. If you didn't actually meet and know real women, you would get an entirely skewed picture of women's beauty, and consequently social comparison would more readily lead to dissatisfaction. In fact the negative effects of media images of women on their body image and self-worth is something we have long seen. What is interesting here is that Facebook allows people to compare themselves not just with celebrities or other role models, but with relevant others, people who they relate to in a direct and meaningful manner, people who they've accepted as “friends”. The effect of this peer-to-peer social comparison is compounded by the fact that it touches every aspect of their lives, from how many people wish them a happy birthday, to how good friends look at the latest party, to where they go on holiday, to the latest pair of shoes they are wearing. Finally, there is what the authors of the study have termed the “envy spiral”. Users feel envy when they look at the profiles of others, so they embellish their own profiles to make themselves look better in comparison, which in turn leads to others being envious and embellishing their own profiles and so on. But what is important here is that the researchers found that Facebook events represented a significant proportion of events that provoked negative emotions in users' everyday lives. When people were asked about recent events in their lives that had provoked envy, one-fifth had occurred within a Facebook context. The other significant finding is that those who were most affected by envy and other negative emotions were those who tended to have little or no active use of Facebook for interpersonal communication. In other words those who use Facebook like a magazine, browsing through it, looking at images, reading other people's posts, noting other people's activities, are those who tend to come out of their Facebook sessions with negative emotions. The researchers went further and found that the negative emotions provoked during the Facebook sessions then fed into dissatisfaction with life in general. In other words, they found a strong negative link between Facebook envy and dissatisfaction with life. Dissatisfaction with life sounds a little banal as an expression, we are all to some extent dissatisfied with life, the glass can be half full or half empty depending on your point of view and on the day of the week! But for psychologists the terms is much more significant; dissatisfaction with life is associated with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and a whole host of other negative outcomes. What I found rather amusing about this German study is that the events that caused the most envy were related to travel and leisure. People posting holiday snaps lead to others feeling envious and low. The researchers plan further studies with a wider net in which they look at Facebook envy across different cultures. The results should be quite intriguing! Facebook is just one of many social networking sites, and in itself it is a harmless information technology platform. It is not Facebook that causes envy and dissatisfaction with life, it is social comparison. Facebook merely fuels a process. People who were already dissatisfied with their lives end up feeling even worse about themselves as a result of the information the site makes available to them. The key is that old glass analogy again, if you see the glass as half empty, Facebook will make it look even emptier. The trick is to see the glass as half full. But how does one do that? Perhaps that is a skill that could be taught to all those frustrated Facebook users. — Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
