What Too Much Facebook Sharing Tells Us
New research looks at who, exactly, keeps posting those public declarations of love on your newsfeed.
Okay, so maybe you don’t want to know the nickname that girl from your high school has given her new paramour, just like you don’t particularly want to know the color of the daisies he bought her last week, or what they ate on their anniversary date, or the fact that he is, hands down, the best boyfriend ever. Surely, there are other, more valuable things that could be taking up the space in your brain currently occupied by the knowledge that she’s the luckiest girl in the world.
As it turns out, Facebook knows a lot of things about its users’ romantic lives. It knows when they’re falling in love, and it knows when they’re falling out of love. But what it sees in between may have a lot to do with the self-esteem of the individuals doing the falling: New research from Abington University found that people whose confidence is more closely tied to the strength of their romantic relationship—or those with higher levels of relationship-contingent self-esteem, in psych-speak—are more likely to use the social networking site to broadcast their happiness.
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Researchers surveyed a small group of volunteers in relationships ranging from one month to 30 years in duration about their satisfaction and relationship-related Facebook habits, including how often they posted couple photos and how much they interacted with their partners’ pages. Separately, they used a self-reporting personality test to assess participants’ personalities based on five traits: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, comprising what’s known to psychologists as the “Big Five.”
Logically, it makes sense that relationship-contingent self-esteem, which has previously been linked to lower overall self-esteem and higher social anxiety, could lead someone to seek validation by systematically “liking” each of their partner’s status updates or insisting on making things Facebook official: “There is positive correlation between your self-esteem being contingent on relationships and it being contingent on other things external to you (e.g., others’ approval),” lead study author Gwendolyn Seidman told me in an email. “Those high in RSCE feel the need to show others, their partners and perhaps themselves that their relationship is ‘OK,’ and thus, they are OK.”
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Category: Anniversary
