The Psychology of Social Media

Hey dear community, first of all I would like to welcome you all to my new post and hope you had a day full of positive experiences! In this post, I would like to discuss an interesting topic and hope you can expand your knowledge.

In this post, I would like to discuss the effect of social media from a psychological point of view and first of all it is important to explain what the most common reasons are for people to visit these platforms. Of course, the focus is on the way of communication with others and it is possible to get in touch with people what would otherwise not be so easy from the distance and these social effects can lead to an exchange with each other and in addition, social networks often suggest a feeling of security and create a sense of belonging. An important aspect of many is the own self-realization and here it is all about sharing the own interests and there are many good approaches when it comes to supporting and promoting charitable purposes or other events and social media makes it also possible to support culture and maintaining certain values. Social media platforms often work with the reward effect and when a user receives likes, comments, followers or other form of recognition, there is a release of the hormone dopamine what is responsible for feelings of happiness and conversely, this leads to a higher probability of sharing more things in the future. An interesting example is also the emotional behavior which is triggered by social media and by imitating emotions, a feeling of connection is created and others react more to things and a good example here is the use of emojis or memes. Through the artificially generated humor, you activate stimuli of people and completely impair the emotions and depending on the discussed topic, different reactions such as anger, joy, hate, surprise and many more are triggered and these experiences have been proven to shape the future behavior of users of social media platforms.

A good example of emotional behavior is also the use for advertising purposes and here is often worked with certain methods that can increase the attention and here emotions are in the foreground and an important tool is often to create fear and to explain this better you should look at the fear of missing out effect, which suggests to people that it would be bad if they missed something. This effect is often seen in the context of social media and the triggered sense of belonging, which in turn is closely linked to mass psychology and can quickly make users think that it would be bad to miss certain things and mass psychology is of course one of the biggest influencing factors in social networks, which can often also lead to negative behavior. A well-known example is cyber bullying or social comparisons which take place online and lead to the fact that symptoms such as courage, envy, stress or others are triggered and the individual is oppressed and people are often incited against each other by the anonymity and it comes to a definition of certain values. Often these negative effects take over and there are much cases that social networks sometimes change people so much that it has unsightly effects and with especially young people it is particularly important to pay attention to behavior and to pay attention to certain dangers. Real trends are often set via social media and social behavior is greatly changed and from a psychological point of view it is particularly interesting and can also be seen as a huge social experiment and I have written a post about mass psychology in the past and if you want to go even deeper into detail, I can recommend visiting this post from me here if you want to learn more about this phenomenon, which is closely related to it.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read through my post and I hope you like it and can learn something new about this interesting topic!