Before I dive into this topic, I need to make a comment about behaviorism, which will somewhat tie into how it pertains to life on social media. That is, the reasons why the field of psychology has moved significantly away from behaviorism almost teeter on a logical fallacy called an *Argument from Ignorance*.
Namely, one of the key justifications for departing from behaviorism is that most of the experimentation was done on animals and not humans; therefore, behaviorism is fallacious. That is actually not a solid reason to ditch a methodology. It says, “Well, we just don’t have all the data. so it must not be the best of approaches.”
Now, granted, we do have documented examples of why running humans through behavioral conditioning tests can be difficult and quite subjective. However, to me, that just means building out more solid criteria for the testing.
It’s also a bit ironic that the field of psychology has been under scrutiny for decades now because of mixed approaches to gathering evidence, yet moved rather far away from an approach that was largely based on, well, scientific experiments.
And I don’t mean to oversimplify that — I know there are other variables involved, and that behaviorism, in its original form, had its own flaws. Yet as the textbook authors point out that the theories we are discussing are not necessarily in competition, but instead are different angles to understanding personality development, then hopefully psychology is continuing — and striving — to become more holistic and interdisciplinary.
Case in point: Social media has turned into a breeding ground for how environment affects our behavior. Moreover, there are now no shortage of studies that have shown patterns in how social media influences us. Just the sheer amount of vitriol that has rocketed over the years makes me wonder how good this has all been for our mental health. Or perhaps a conspiracy theorist would say that it is part of a grand social experiment, where we are the lab rats and someone up in an ivory tower is gathering all the data for pernicious reasons.
Whatever the reason, we know that a large percentage of the world population frequents social media apps / sites. We know that there has been a dramatic rise in vitriol and hate speech. We know that social media is influencing our susceptibility to addiction — including addiction to social media itself. We know that many people are feeling paradoxically less connected, instead of more connected, to other people. We know that we often fall into the trap of comparing our lives to the instant snapshot of other people’s lives.
And that’s not even including that social media providers are collecting data so they can tailor articles, subjects, products, etc. to our lifestyles. That, of course, has its own set of pros and cons. But if you think about it, we are in fact participating in some degree of behavioral experimentation: You visit a page, say, on building model airplanes — then, not even within 24 hours, you see ads on your Facebook timeline about model airplane clubs, model airplane classes, where to buy the best model airplanes, etc. The ads are there to bait us into clicking them. From there, the more we click on ads, the more we are presented with ads that grab our attention — and the more we are likely to reinforce our behaviors.
Or even think about the growing trend in people “unfriending” each other over divisive subjects and content, some of which is specifically presented to those who wish to see that content.
The examples go and on…
Perhaps behaviorism could reestablish its place by helping us understand even more clearly how our responses are conditioned, as well as the long term psychological impact of allowing social media to influence our behaviors.
Cervone, D., & Pervin, L. A. (2013). Personality: Theory and research (12th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Waheed, H. (2017). Investigation of user behavior on social networking sites. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169693
Walton, A. (2017). 6 Ways Social Media Affects Our Mental Health. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/06/30/a-run-down-of-social-medias-effects-on-our-mental-health/#235861612e5a