Driver For Social Media Likes

Social media has become a part of everyday life for many of us. In 2020, social media was estimated to be used by over 4 billion people who spent several hours every day consumed by the platforms. This engagement level has been likened to an addiction where people pursue positive online feedback, such as “likes”, instead of direct social interaction. While there is ample research in human-social media interaction, the elements that drive people to engage with social media (sometimes obsessively) are less understood. This element of the human-social interaction question is what a team of researchers, led by NYU, sought to explore.

In their paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they analyzed more than one million social media posts from over 4,000 individuals on multiple social platforms. The researchers used computational models to analyze & extract common behavior. Next, the research team recruited 176 participants and encouraged them to post “memes” on whatever social media platform they preferred and as often as they wanted during a 25-minute online session. During this session, participants both received and provided likes to other content on the chosen social networks.

In their findings, the researchers reported that the computational analysis revealed behaviors similar to reinforcement learning. This long-established psychological concept posits that behavior may be driven and reinforced by reward. The researchers then compared the behaviors of the 176 human participants to that of the computational analysis. The behaviors between the two data sets were nearly identical. These findings suggest that people’s desire for others to “like” their content is the same as receiving a reward for doing an action. The researchers also found that participants posted more often after they received likes from others. It would seem, the more people like our content, the more content we share.

While replicating these findings is needed, the researchers believe they have uncovered one of the underlying drivers behind the sometimes obsessive social media use. These data may lead to a better understanding of why social media dominates the lives of so many people and could provide leads into the treatments of social media addiction and overuse.

This was Article 159 from the Studio Quick Facts Series.

References:
Hayes, R. A., Carr, C. T., & Wohn, D. Y. (2016). One click, many meanings: Interpreting paralinguistic digital affordances in social media. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 60(1), 171–187.

Lindström, B., Bellander, M., Schultner, D. T., Chang, A., Tobler, P. N., & Amodio, D. M. (2021). A computational reward learning account of social media engagement. Nature Communications, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19607-x

‌New York University. (2021, February 26). Social media use driven by search for reward, akin to animals seeking food. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 27, 2021 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210226103811.htm

Rosenthal-von der Pütten, A. M., Hastall, M. R., Köcher, S., Meske, C., Heinrich, T., Labrenz, F., & Ocklenburg, S. (2019). “Likes” as social rewards: Their role in online social comparison and decisions to like other People’s selfies. Computers in Human Behavior, 92, 76–86.

Sherman, L. E., Hernandez, L. M., Greenfield, P. M., & Dapretto, M. (2018). What the brain ‘Likes’: neural correlates of providing feedback on social media. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 13(7), 699–707.