Facebook Can Boost Your Self-Esteem, If You Use It Sparingly

Photo via tschundler/Flickr

It might make you a narcissist, it makes you a worse employee and it could make you depressed, but dammit if it also doesn’t make you feel good. According to a new study, looking at your Facebook profile can actually raise your self-esteem.

It seems like every couple of months, a study comes out that asserts that Facebook is a bummer, or it’s ruining British idioms, or ruining our health, and so on. But researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that looking at your Facebook profile for five minutes a day can actually raise your self-esteem. Even though gazing at your own reflection—on Facebook or in, say, a pond—is usually called narcissism, your Facebook profile is a place to see yourself in a positive light, without slipping into dishonesty.

“Most have a very large audience of friends and they selectively present the best version of self, but they do so in an accurate manner,” said study leader Catalina Toma, assistant professor of communication arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison, in an interview with ABC News. ‘We had people look at their own profiles for five minutes and found that they experienced a boost in self-esteem in a deep, unconscious level.”

The typical Facebook user’s profile is closely hewn to the meat-world, so even if you’re trying to give yourself the appearance of cheekbones with the duck face in your profile pic, you’re at least using an actual picture of yourself. 

The researchers used the Implicit Association Test to measure participants’ self-esteem, which tests the positive or negative connotations to words like my, me, myself and I. Participants who viewed their profile for five minutes were more inclined to associate themselves with more positive and flattering words. The research didn’t look at how the entirety of the Facebook experience—the newsfeed, everyone else’s profiles and inane political opinions—impacts the user.

The research did discover that Facebook-profile huffing can sap your motivation, though. The study said that those who were buzzing from a hit of the ‘book didn’t try as hard on a subtraction test that researchers presented after the Implicit Association Test. “Facebook gives you a real good image of yourself, but you then don’t have to look for that in other ways,” said Toma.

I’m usually on Facebook when I’m already not feeling motivated, so it’s troubling to think that when I look at my own profile, I’m falling into a vortex of easy validation and slack-jawed lollygagging. I mean, isn’t that what drinking was for?  

So looking at the research, it seems like looking at your own best-cultivated self-image makes you happy, but comparing yourself to others via the newsfeed or their profiles makes you depressed. Or spending too much time on a social network without posting much depresses you. Or maybe the depressed are already the ones lurking around without clicking, so they need to look at their own profile more often and cheer up? Not to mention that Twitter is devolving into a corporate hellscape that will consume us all.

Maybe it’s all of these things; maybe none. This is just the latest study in the rushing river of Facebook research; what’s proved in the spring is disproved in the fall.

Just as the medical community can’t come to a consensus on the beneficial or deleterious effects of coffee, there’s going to be varied reports on Facebook’s merits and problems. With Facebook still under a decade old, social networking is still in its infancy and it has research-appeal that spans disciplines—all the social sciences, biology, linguistics—and so the varied approaches that every research group brings is going to vary the results.

It’s like the story about the blind men feeling an elephant—the first feels the trunk and concludes that elephants are like snakes, another feels the tusk and says elephants are like spears, another feels the elephant’s side and concludes elephants are like walls.

The elephant himself, however, checks his Facebook profile, and knows that, serpentine, spear-like or the size of a house, he’s one handsome bastard.