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• Posted July 19, 2024

One Emotion Drives Teens to Scroll Through Instagram

Boredom is the key emotion behind most teens’ use of Instagram, a new study says.

Teens open the app because they’re bored, then sift through its contents looking for interesting bits to relieve their boredom, researchers report.

Then, bored by slogging through the site’s “content soup,” the teens log off, researchers found.

“We saw teens turning to Instagram in moments of boredom, looking for some kind of stimulation,” said co-senior study author Alexis Hiniker, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington.

“They were finding enough moments of closeness and connection with their friends on the app to keep them coming back,” Hiniker added in a university news release. "That value is definitely there, but it’s really buried in gimmicks, attention-grabbing features, content that’s sometimes upsetting or frustrating, and a ton of junk.”

For the study, researchers tracked 25 U.S. teens moment-by-moment as they used Instagram.

The teens used an app called AppMinder to regularly fill out quick surveys about their emotions while they were using Instagram.

AppMinder pop-up surveys came once every three hours. Teens were asked to use Instagram for seven days and fill out at least one response each day.

“We really wanted to study the mundane, daily experience of teens using Instagram,” said lead researcher Rotem Landesman, a doctoral student with the University of Washington.

Afterward, the teens were interviewed about how they used Instagram and felt about its features, showing researchers in real time how they respond to the app.

Most of what Instagram served up didn’t interest the teens, results show.

But the teens would keep wading through hundreds of posts to find a single meme or piece of fashion inspiration to share with their friends.

Ultimately, the app’s ability to share these sorts of things with friends through direct messages was most valued by teens -- not the scrolling itself.

Researchers also saw that teens employed strategies to help relieve their boredom with the app, including:

• Emphasizing posts that made them feel good rather than bad or bored, using following, unfollowing, hiding and liking features

• Scrolling quickly past or skipping content that made them feel bad

• Turning off notifications and like-counts that could promote negative emotions

“Instagram’s push notifications and algorithmically curated feeds forever hold out the promise of teens experiencing a meaningful interaction, while delivering on this promise only intermittently,” said co-senior study author Katie Davis, director of the University of Washington Digital Youth Lab.

The researchers recommended three design changes that could improve teens’ experience on Instagram and other social media sites:

• Notifications like those from AppMinder which prompt teens to consider why they’re on Instagram in the first place

• Features that help teens highlight positive content

• Using data to track signs of well-being among users

The research team plans to examine these findings with a separate group of teens, aiming for further insights.

“It is not and should not be the sole responsibility of teens to make their experiences better, to navigate these algorithms without knowing how they work, exactly,” Landesman said in a university news release. “The responsibility also lies with companies running social media platforms.”

The team presented the findings recently at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Interaction Design and Children Conference in Delft, Netherlands. Findings presented at scientific meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on teens and social media.

SOURCE: University of Washington, news release, July 16, 2024