Is social media good or bad for your well-being? A decade of research has produced a decade of conflicting answers. A new study from the TIP Center suggests one reason for the confusion: the effects of social media on well-being may depend less on how much time you spend online and more on what you do and in what order you do it.

A new study published in Human Communication Research by TIP Center postdoctoral scholar Anthony Chen and Catalina Toma of the University of Wisconsin-Madison applies self-affirmation theory to show how one social media activity can reshape the emotional experience of the next. Specifically, the study examines what happens when users engage with their own Instagram self-presentation before viewing the profile of a more successful peer. The answer: the first activity can buffer against the harm typically caused by the second.

Instagram self-presentation is self-affirming

Self-affirmation theory holds that reflecting on personally meaningful aspects of the self bolsters feelings of self-worth, leaving people less defensive when their ego is threatened. A 2013 study by Toma and TIP Center Director Jeff Hancock first demonstrated this dynamic on social media, showing that browsing one’s own Facebook profile carries the same self-affirming properties as a classic laboratory technique, writing an essay about one’s core values. Chen and Toma’s new study replicates and extends that finding, applying the same framework to Instagram more than a decade later and asking whether composing new content about oneself, not just reviewing existing posts, can produce the same benefits.

The first of the two pre-registered experiments (N = 197) confirmed that Instagram meets the bar for self-affirmation, something no prior work had established. Participants were first given a cognitive task, then randomly assigned to one of four conditions: browsing their own Instagram profile, browsing a stranger’s profile, composing a self-focused Instagram post, or composing an unrelated post. Participants who browsed their own profile showed significantly lower defensiveness than those who viewed a stranger’s, as did those who composed a self-related post. Browsing one’s own profile also boosted positive affect relative to the control condition; though notably, composing a new post did not, a nuance the authors attribute to the performance anxiety involved in crafting self-related content for a public audience.

A buffer against envy from upward social comparison

Having confirmed the self-affirming nature of Instagram self-presentation, the researchers turned to their central question: could those self-affirming benefits shield users from the envy triggered by viewing a more successful peer’s profile? Study 2 (N = 220) tested this by having participants spend five minutes creating Instagram content (i.e., a post or a story about themselves) before being directed to browse the Instagram account of a “superior peer,” someone they knew and perceived as outperforming them.

The results supported the buffering hypothesis. Participants who created an Instagram post or story beforehand reported significantly less envy after viewing the superior peer’s profile than those in the control condition. Further analysis revealed why: composing Instagram content raised participants’ positive self-evaluation, and that heightened sense of self-worth, in turn, reduced the envy they experienced. 

What one does on social media and in what order matters

A dominant framework in social media research draws a sharp line between active use (creating content) and passive use (consuming content), predicting that active use is good for well-being and passive use is bad. The findings here complicate that picture on both sides of the ledger. Passive behavior, like browsing one’s own profile, emerged as a potent source of self-affirmation. Active behavior, like composing new posts, did not uniformly boost positive affect, suggesting the psychological benefits of creating content may depend on context.

More broadly, the study is among the first to treat social media engagement as a sequence of activities rather than isolated events and to show empirically that doing so changes the conclusions we reach. The benefits of self-affirming activities accumulated in one moment can offset the costs of ego-threatening activities in the next. Overall, this work establishes a proof-of-concept that social media activities should be studied in combination, not in isolation.