The Social Dilemma from a Psychologist's Persepective

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The Social Dilemma on Netflix is a mind-opening experience that delves into the creation of social media as we know it today. The documentary stars many big names in the technology industry like Tristan Harris, the Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology, Tim Kendall, former President of Pinterest and many more talk about how the technology was created to analyze personality traits and online habits to give you the content you would most likely want to see. I'm going to give you my perspective on this eye-opening documentary as a psychology student at Ohio Northern University.

The idea that depression and anxiety rates in pre-teens and teenagers nearly tripled about a decade ago makes it nearly impossible to not acknowledge the possible correlation between social media and the increase in these rates. Seeing as people, mostly preteen and teenage girls, are comparing themselves to unrealistic ideals of beauty on social media is very harmful to one's well-being. The idea of comparing oneself to someone who is perceived to be better than oneself is called upward social comparison which is a heavily studied subject in the field of social psychology. Also within the field of social psychology there is an idea of cognitive dissonance, or a state of confusion and cognitive discomfort caused by a conflict between one's mental attitudes, values and behaviors. Connecting this idea back to the documentary, social media is not a real space where people are interacting with one another on a deep and personal level. This may lead to people feeling cognitive dissonance when getting social approval or having deeply personal conversations over social media because they are not actually being comforted in the way a human would normally be psychologically and physiologically soothed. 

    There are practically no regulations of social media which begs the question, are there even any regulations that we could put in place or is it too late? People would not be very happy if regulations were put into place because social media is pretty much fully integrated into our society and it would cause tons of social upheaval that would affect every institution of our society. It is hard to stay off social media as the documentary points out, that is how it was designed. Even I fall victim to the infinite feed and fall into echo chambers that lead me to solidify my beliefs further and deny opposition. To end it off on a light note, social media is not all bad as it has created thousands of jobs and united millions in society. It cannot be understated to how revolutionary the invention of social media has been for our society even if it's for  better or for worse.

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