Who are you on Facebook?

There are very few things in life that are either entirely evil or entirely good. Diving into a crisp, foaming surf on a summer evening is an exception of course, and is completely good. Similarly “deep-fried bubble gum”, as found at the Texas State Fair, is another exception, being utterly bad and without redeeming features. Most things though are a little bit good and a little bit bad, it’s part of the duality of existence. Even something adopted with fervour by more than a billion people, like Facebook, has been shown to have two sides.

This study involved the use of psychological testing device known as the “Implicit Association Test” (IAT). The IAT involves subjects associating positive or negative adjectives with words like “me” or “myself”. If you have high self-esteem at the time of the test then you can easily associate positive words with personal pronouns but have a difficult time relating negative descriptions. If you have low self-esteem the opposite is true. Since high self-esteem is valued in Western culture people will typically over-estimate their self-esteem if asked to report on it. However, the IAT has been shown to overcome this bias and genuinely reflect self-esteem levels.

For this analysis, the subjects took the IAT immediately before and after using Facebook. The results showed that using Facebook led to a boost in self-esteem.

In a second study just after using Facebook people were asked to perform a task where they had to count backwards from a high number in multiples of seven. Compared to a control group who had not been using Facebook, the Facebook users were much slower and more inaccurate in performing the task. This performance reflected a lack of motivation in the Facebook users.

This all happens because Facebook is essentially an exercise in public relations. People portray themselves in an ideal light on Facebook and so a few minutes spent with their idealised self and its cyber interactions gives a lift to the self-esteem. However, that lift in self-regard reduces motivation to perform well on tasks because the need to impress and increase self-worth in the “real world” scenario is reduced.

The question is of course, who is the real you? The Facebook-you or the you who creates the Facebook and where does one end and the other begin? Or is that too big a question to face (book)?