You Seem Happier Than Me (At Least on Facebook)

Facebook study

According to a study by Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge in a recent issue of “They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am”: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives, at least one form of social networking may not facilitate sociability after all. Facebook “friends” may not only misinterpret the level of happiness of each other, but may actually become unhappy on the site.

The authors Chou and Edge at the Department of Behavioral Science, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah studied the lives of 425 undergraduate students across myriad academic disciplines from a local state university.

They found that the longer one is on Facebook the more apt he or she is to perceive that life is unfair. According to the study, those who have used Facebook longer “agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives.”

Interestingly, the study spotlights a well-known elephant in the room when it comes to Facebook truisms – that a “friend” on Facebook may actually be a stranger. Moreover, those study participants who said they didn’t know some of their Facebook friends “personally” agreed more that others had better lives.

At a time when Facebook is planning a multi-billion-dollar IPO, the site has come under fire for an array of ills – everything from messing up married couples’ lives to intruding upon one’s privacy. Some even bemoan the chore of responding to so many requests daily, including reading updates from the aforementioned unfamiliar friends.

Chou and Edge examined the impact of using Facebook on people’s perceptions of others’ lives. “It is argued that those with deeper involvement with Facebook will have different perceptions of others than those less involved due to two reasons,” the study found. Firstly, Facebook users usually base judgments on examples easily recalled, what is called the “availability heuristic”; and secondly, Facebook users tend to attribute the positive content presented on Facebook to others’ personality, rather than situational factors, or what is called “correspondence bias.”

In another paper, “Misery Has More Company Than People Think: Underestimating the Prevalence of Others’ Negative Emotions”, researcher Alexander H. Jordan, et. al find that “these studies suggest that people may think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are,” a tacit observation ostensibly also found by the Utah researchers.

In Jordan’s paper, four studies document underestimations of the prevalence of others’ negative emotions and suggest causes and correlates of these erroneous perceptions. As with Chou’s paper, studies show that people may think they are more alone in their emotional distress than are. In one part of the “Misery” study, lower estimations of the prevalence of negative emotional experiences, “predicted greater loneliness and rumination and lower life satisfaction,” while, “higher estimations for positive emotional experiences,” predicted greater life satisfaction.

1 thought on “You Seem Happier Than Me (At Least on Facebook)”

  1. This study actually confirms something my friend and I were just talking about the other day- going on Facebook sometimes makes us depressed. A lot of times, it seems like my friends on Facebook have much more amazing lives than I do. After I graduated from college, I took an unpaid internship rather than a full-time job and I would always see stories pop up on my newsfeed on Facebook about friends from high school or college who were the same age as me and found (what appeared to be) amazing jobs and were living fabulous lives in NYC. It definitely made me jealous, but also unhappy b/c I felt like they were so much more successful and “adult-like.”

    Also, as for the “elephant in the room,” that people’s friends on Facebook are in actuality strangers, this is SO true. I have tons of friends who are people I met in college once at a party, people who were seniors when I was a freshman and whom I never really got to know, and people from high school whom I never once talked to. I think this phenomenon of becoming “friends” with virtual strangers is really strange, but it’s something everyone does!

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