This Is How “likes” On Social Networks Affect Your Brain

Research carried out by UCLA and published in Psychological Science has concluded that seeing how photographs published on a social network are appreciated by other people via the “like” button activates the same areas of the brain that are activated by masturbation. or the fact of tasting very sweet foods like chocolate.

The Psychology behind Instagram and Facebook likes

This study confirms the intuition that many people had: that the functioning of certain social networks is designed so that they are true gyms of narcissism.

However, its implications go much further. Let’s see how the investigation was carried out.

How was the study done?

This research, carried out by the psychologist Lauren Sherman and his team, was based on the use of an imitation of the social network Instagram. Sherman and his researchers recruited 32 adolescents (14 boys and 18 girls) accustomed to using Instagram and, using magnetic resonance imaging, they saw the way in which their brains activated while the young people interacted with the imitation of that social network in which they could see both the images that they had uploaded and the photos of unknown people.

Each of the participants in this experiment were informed that they were going to use a social network used by a small community while fMRI images of their neural activity were taken. However, the truth is that the photographs of unknown people seemed to belong to the accounts of young people, they had been selected by the research team and, in fact, these scientists were also in charge of putting a certain number of likes on all the images. .

Thus, each teenager had the opportunity to react to 40 of the photographs coming from their own real Instagram account and 108 belonging to strangers. Furthermore, the researchers informed the participants that each of the photographs they were going to see had been viewed, rated and potentially “liked” by around fifty young people, something that was not actually true.

The effects that Instagram has on the human brain

By checking MRI images of different brains, Sherman and her colleagues saw that a brain structure called nucleus accumbens It was activated more the more likes an image had. This is very relevant, taking into account that the nucleus accumbens is responsible for us experiencing moments of intense pleasure when winning a prize, having an orgasm drink a smoothie, etc.

This area of ​​the brain is responsible for detecting the peak moments of pleasure and thus plays a role in the appearance of addictions and in the reward mechanisms responsible for trying to create situations so that these “peaks of happiness” are repeated so often. as often as possible.

The influence of others sneaks into digital

But this research also yielded another surprising conclusion: Social media may make teens more inclined to perform reckless acts something that also happens when they are physically accompanied by other people of the same age.

In young people of both sexes who participated in the research, brain regions related to self-control and rule-following were relatively muted when they saw images related to risky behaviors, such as skateboarding on dangerous terrain or driving while taking photos. .. even if they didn’t know the people to whom the photographs supposedly belonged. This effect was intensified if these photographs had a large number of likes

To this effect we must add what we have seen before. Likes activate the small brain structures of pleasure, which can cause not only the images themselves to be associated with well-being, but also the activities that can be seen in them.

Is there a reason for the alarms to go off?

The idea that participating in a social network like Instagram can induce younger people to pursue risk remains a hypothesis that has yet to be proven. Ultimately, what has been seen in this research are only images of activated or deactivated brain regions, and has not been experienced in real environments in which young people might attempt to engage in reckless behavior

However, these results give reasons to continue researching in this line, even if it is so that we have the opportunity to know how to educate and educate ourselves in the use of social networks.