Makenzie Schroeder and Lissa Behm-Morawitz at the University of Missouri recently released a study about how using social media filters to change one’s appearance can lead to a phenomenon called “social self-comparison," as well as unhealthy and dysmorphic behaviors.
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Makenzie Schroeder: I had noticed a few years ago a trend going around on TikTok where people were showing, I'm assuming, AI-generated images of themselves as being thinner than their real-life appearance.
And these images were captioned with things like, “This is my motivation. I can look like this.”
And it was a really social process where other users were then commenting on these TikTok images, or it was a video of the image commenting like, “Yeah,” like, “just hit the gym, get a good diet. You can look like this. What great motivation.”
So, comments of this nature, and it made me really start considering what happens when we're able to see ourselves in these digitally altered ways that are also so highly realistic.
Lissa Behm-Morawitz: Immediately, when she brought this idea to me, I knew, “Wow, this could be a really powerful study” because social media is just so pervasive in our lives and examining how we use social media and the effects on us, I think, is really important.
So, we know what these hours and, you know, minutes that we spend every day on these different platforms – what kind of impacts they might have on us.
Makenzie Schroeder: We did find that folks using the slimming filter were engaging in state comparison, or that social self-comparison, and from this, they had a higher desire to lose weight.
There were, you know, higher reports of self-objectification and increased anti-fat attitudes, and we found – from that the body dysmorphic relationships – even more outcomes.
So, as people used this filter, or they even saw someone else use the filter, it led to those higher body dysmorphic cognitions, and then further through that mediating relationship – outcomes of body ideal discrepancy, meaning there's a larger gap between my real life appearance and what I wish I looked like, desire for weight loss, self-objectification, anti-fat attitudes and a reported preference for their filtered image.
Lissa Behm-Morawitz: I think the power of the social self-comparison phenomenon is in that it's inherently social.
So, in digitally altering images of the self or just posting image of yourself to social media – that's a social process whether your account is on private or public, it does not matter.
And so, there is this real or this imagined audience that you're presenting yourself to, and that has a lot of power in it, and that is different than looking at photo albums of, you know, maybe photoshopping an image of yourself on your computer and not posting it anywhere.
The act of posting on social media is social, regardless of how many followers you have or not, or how many people see the image.
That, I think, engenders this powerful cognitive process that can occur for us in thinking about ourselves as an object, thinking about ourselves as being observed and judged by other people.
