Is social media making you more irritable? According to research led by Northeastern University professor David Lazer, the answer is yes — but with some caveats.
The study, published this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that social media use is correlated with higher rates of irritability — being prone to anger — among a broad swath of U.S. adults.
“Our results suggest an association between high levels of social media use, particularly posting on social media, and irritability among U.S. adults,” researchers wrote. “The implications of this irritability and the potential for interventions to address this association require additional investigation.”
Researchers surveyed 42,597 U.S. adults in two waves from November 2023 to January 2024. Irritability was measured using the Brief Irritability Test, a five-item questionnaire that surveys participants’ mood over the previous two-week period. In total, 33,325 participants reported using at least one social media platform daily, and researchers further parsed users according to frequency of use.
Researchers used a cross-sectional design, meaning the study serves as a snapshot of sentiment at a particular point in time. The survey used “attention checks” and open-ended questions to weed out “unreliable or automated respondents.”
Focusing on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, they examined the association between “maximal amount of social media use and degree of irritability”; whether “interest in and exposure to political views” was associated with higher irritability; and whether more frequent engagement (more frequent posting) was similarly linked to higher irritability.
What they found was that frequency of social media engagement — measured according to responses that varied from “never” to “most of the day” — was correlated with ascending degrees of irritability. Engaging in “more frequent political discussions” online similarly resulted in rises in reported irritability.
“This offers a bit of psychological insight into the mental states of people who post online,” Lazer says.
The researchers acknowledged the limitations of the study, noting that they cannot establish a causal relationship because of the cross-sectional framework — and because of the “complex” and “potentially bidirectional” nature of social media use. Also, social media researchers have noted how certain algorithms actually serve to promote user outrage — a phenomenon referred to as “rage-baiting.”
Lazer elaborated on some of the challenges in measuring the relationship between social media use and mood: “It’s the question of whether people who have high levels of baseline levels of grumpiness are online more, or is it just that people go online when they feel grumpy. And we really can’t tell that with the cross-sectional analysis.”
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Lazer notes there is a “remarkably strong relationship between age, socioeconomics and irritability.”
“If you’re older, more educated and have higher income, you’re much less likely to be irritable,” Lazer says. “But you’re also much less likely to be using social media.”
“We controlled for those things, but of course our controls are imperfect,” he adds.
“At a minimum it tells us that the social media space consists of a lot more people who are irritated compared with the population writ large,” Lazer says.
There is a growing body of research focused on the link between social media use and mental health disorders, particularly as it relates to teen and adolescent mental health. But Lazer says that few studies have zeroed in on specific forms of negative effects, such as irritability and anxiety.
“We generally think of irritability as something that is more fleeting,” Lazer says. “Depression isn’t permanent, but you don’t go from being depressed today and not-depressed tomorrow — that’s not the nature of depression. Whereas irritability, true to the expression, is like waking up on the wrong side of the bed.”
Researchers note that results merit further analysis because of “known associations” between irritability and depression and suicidality.
Lazer touches on the implications of the research, also, for public discourse, which increasingly finds expression through online channels: “When we think about spaces for public discussion, it would be great to think that people are coming to these points of discussion from a place of empathy and generosity. Social media is not typically associated with that kind of positivity and generosity of spirit, and that does not seem like a good thing for our society or our body politic.”
