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Out today! My very FIRST first (co)author paper is now available in @NatureComms 
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Lots of very smart people have argued about whether social media is good or bad for you; I& #39;m in the camp that agrees with papers that find, on average, there is 0 effect. Here, we took a different approach, inspired by research that looks at HOW people use social media 2/14
One tension that I face (ahem #AcademicTwitter) is whether to post authentically or to post in a way that is idealized or socially desirable 3/14
Our RQ: Does posting in a way that is authentic (vs. idealized) impact well-being? 4/14
We faced a major challenge to answering this question - there& #39;s no consensus around the best authenticity measure, and the self-reported measures we do have been shown to be biased 5/14
In order to solve this puzzle, we developed a measure we called "Quantified Authenticity" 6/14
We matched Facebook user& #39;s self-reported Big 5 traits from the MyPersonality project with two predicted personality models of the same users from prior studies 7/14
We then calculated Quantified Authenticity as the inverse Euclidean distance between these two points in 5-dimensional space (woahhhh) 8/14
The logic being that someone who views themselves as an introvert would be authentic if they posted about reading a book at 10 pm on a Saturday. Hmm maybe that was too specific of an example... 9/14
We found that Quantified Authenticity was positively correlated with life satisfaction, an important component of life satisfaction and that this effect was pretty robust to a number of different ways of calculating Quantified Authenticity 10/14
In study 2, we recruited undergrads and randomly assigned them to post in a way that was authentic or idealized. The next week, they swapped! We found that switching strategies impacted mood and positive affect at the within-person level 11/14
This data was coming in during SPSP and you know what happened next… COVID! So, Study 2 got cut short as NYC shut down. However, we& #39;re still encouraged by the convergent evidence around authentic posting (vs. idealized posting) 12/14
You can read more in my "Behind the Paper" blog up now: https://socialsciences.nature.com/posts/behind-the-paper-authentic-self-expression-on-social-media-is-associated-with-greater-subjective-well-being">https://socialsciences.nature.com/posts/beh...
Huge shoutout to my coauthors, Sandra Matz, @youyouwooo, and @Sheena_Iyengar, and an amazing review and editorial team who gave us amazing feedback along the way (seriously!!!) 14/14
