Posting on Social-Media Undermines Academic Performance and Well-Being

Medical authorities and policymakers raise mounting concerns regarding the detrimental influence of social-media on students’ academic performance and well-being. Surprisingly, empirical evidence that supports these strong concerns is unclear. We provide a novel psychological framework that specifies fundamental elements of social-interaction to predict under which conditions social-media usage will have its most pernicious effects. Our framework argues that posting personal social-media content (relative to scrolling through others' content) elicits opportunities to receive strong social-feedback from others, which tempts individuals to procrastinate on social-media instead of studying, resulting in negative academic and well-being consequences. Three experimental studies causally test our framework using state-of-the-art methods, behavioral measures, and outcomes. Experiments 1 (Facebook) and 2 (Instagram) demonstrated that experimentally having participants post (vs scroll), leads to enhanced procrastinatory social-media usage, that in turn undermines academic performance and well-being. Experiment 3 directly demonstrated the detrimental role of opportunities to receive strong social-feedback following posting, in showing that experimentally blocking social-feedback opportunities following posting, eliminates subsequent procrastinatory social-media behavior and its maladaptive consequences. These findings advise professionals and policymakers to shift from making generic recommendations to reduce overall social-media usage, to customized warnings about the negative academic and well-being consequences of posting on social-media.