Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

When Looking Up Leads To Feeling Down: Situational Moderators Of The Effects Of Social Comparisons On Social Media, Madison L. Eamiello

Masters Theses

Social media use is ubiquitous, especially among young adults. Negative consequences of social media use has been associated with engaging in upward social comparisons with others on social media. The current paper presents a series of two studies that seek to understand the nuances of social comparisons as they occur while browsing social media. In Study 1 (N = 161) we tested whether upward social comparisons would be less harmful when the comparer focuses on the similarities, rather than differences, with the comparison target. We observed a marginal interaction indicating that when thinking about similarities with the target, upward …