Too Many ‘Friends,’ Too Few ‘Likes’? Evolutionary Psychology and ‘Facebook Depression’

Abstract

Psychologists (and subsequently the media) have defined ‘Facebook depression’ as the affective result of spending too much time on the social networking site (Selfhout et al., 2009; Kross et al., 2013). Some social psychologists have denied that Facebook is causally implicated in any such negative affect (Jelenchick et al., 2013). This article argues that if we want to understand modern mass media and new social media, we need a better understanding of the (old) psychology bequeathed us by natural selection (Barkow et al., 2012). Disentangling the relationship between social media and depression using evolutionary social competition theories of depression, I argue that the mismatch between current social milieu and the environment of evolutionary adaption affords some predictions about the use of social media as a trigger for mild depression or dysphoria. I hypothesize that users of Facebook may be more susceptible to causal triggers for mild depression under the following (specific) circumstances: (a) the greater the number of ‘friends’ that the user has online; (b) the greater the time that the user spends reading updates from this wide pool of friends; (c) the user does so regularly; and (d) the content of the updates tends to a bragging nature. I hypothesize that the frequency and the number of displays of higher status cues observed by the user may incur the perception of low relative social value among users (automatically triggering this response). The article concludes with directions for future research on the behavioral and cognitive effects of social media sites such as Facebook.