Out today! My very FIRST first (co)author paper is now available in @NatureComms 1/14

https://rdcu.be/b78Vd 

Lots of very smart people have argued about whether social media is good or bad for you; I'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'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'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'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

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

POSTSCRIPT: Important limitations. We don't know how authentic posting compares to NOT posting. In addition, there are often organizational and social constraints on who gets to be authentic. That Is something someone (okay it's me, I'm doing it) should look at! 15/14