Social commentators have issued warning after warning that social media use can be detrimental to self-esteem. A recent paper out of the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia Business School and published in the Journal of Consumer Research (online in November 2012 and in print June 2013), however, claims to undermine the conventional wisdom, finding that Facebook can actually inflate users' sense of their own worth.
Finally some good news, right?
Not so fast.
The researchers found that the boost in self-esteem that Facebook users felt after browsing the site can lead to a substantial decrease in self-control -- both on the Internet and off. According to the paper, which consists of five separate studies conducted offline and includes a total of 1,000 Facebook users, the drop in self-control demonstrated things like higher body-mass indexes and higher levels of credit-card debt.
The first and second of the five studies found that the increase in self-esteem --measured through a self-esteem survey -- occurred only in those with strong ties to their social network of friends and only when users were sharing information as opposed to responding to information shared with them. In other words, those talking to themselves about people they're close to felt pretty excellent about themselves