A new research has been conducted on the effects of social media use on the human brain. The research conducted under the leadership of Matthew Pittman, who continues his studies at the University of Tennessee in the USA and also writes an article for Gizmodo, revealed that social media tires people and affects the decisions they make.
Within the scope of the research, a group of social media users between the ages of 18-65 were divided into 3 different groups. The first group saw only one ad. The second group encountered another advertisement after memorizing a 9-digit number. The third group saw another ad after just browsing Instagram for 30 seconds. These ads were about food, ice cream and coffee, respectively.
Brain manipulated for 30 seconds with Instagram posts made buying decision faster
The researchers manipulated the number of likes in the advertisements they showed to the subjects. The numbers here are completely random. One ad had hundreds of likes, while another ad had tens of thousands of likes. The review revealed that those who used Instagram for 30 seconds before wanted to buy more products in ads with more likes and comments. Moreover, when the participants in the other groups were asked why they wanted to buy the products in the advertisements they saw, logical answers were received. Users who decided to buy after using Instagram generally gave one-word, meaningless answers. In other words, users who bought the product because they saw it on social media could not explain why they bought that product.
Matthew Pittman states that this is due to the fact that each post on social networks such as Instagram contains a completely different topic. The fact that the brain constantly sees different categories of content and tries to understand them one by one causes people to feel exhausted. As a natural consequence of this, the brain cannot focus. However, there is only one exception to this. So much so that if there is a past experience with the advertisement seen, the decision taken is more consistent…
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