Overestimates of social media addiction are common but costly
Ian A Anderson, Wendy Wood · 2025
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Description
Ian Anderson and Wendy Wood argue that people overestimate how addicted they are to social media. Their 2025 paper holds that heavy use mostly builds habits: automatic urges to open, scroll, post, and react. Calling that pattern addiction, they say, carries real costs for the user.
Two studies cover one thousand two hundred four people in total. In the first, Instagram users in a national sample rated their addiction higher than their habits warranted, and felt less control when they saw themselves as addicted. Media framing seems to feed that self-view. In the second, an experiment showed that labeling use as addiction cut users' sense of control and raised self-blame. The authors warn the label can divert people from habit-based fixes.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Ian A Anderson, Wendy Wood |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 47 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |