Facebook Profile Boosts User's Self-Esteem, Reduces Motivation to do Tasks

Facebook profile affects behavior and provides psychological benefits to the user, a new study has found. Researchers also found that this high self-esteem, in turn, results in people being less motivated to perform well in other tasks.

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who found that users experienced a boost in self-esteem after spending just five minutes looking at their own profiles.

Previous research has shown that Facebook is addictive, sometimes even more than sex, and that not being a Facebook user is considered as being a threat to the society. Other studies have associated Facebook use with anxiety, debt and even higher weight. A recent study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had shown that a person's Facebook profile can reveal his or her personality.

Catalina Toma, a UW-Madison assistant professor of communication arts, and author of the study conducted a test called the Implicit Association Test on the users to assess their self-esteem before and after they looked at their Facebook profiles. The test measured how quickly a participant associates a positive or a negative adjective with words such as ''me'', ''my'', ''I'' and ''myself''.

"If you have high self-esteem, then you can very quickly associate words related to yourself with positive evaluations but have a difficult time associating words related to yourself with negative evaluations. But if you have low self-esteem, the opposite is true," said Toma.

Also, the study found that people who look at their profiles tend to be less motivated to perform well in other tasks. Participants in the study were asked to perform a serial substraction task - where they had to count down from a large number by intervals of seven.

Researchers found that people who had viewed their Facebook profiles answered fewer questions than those who hadn't seen their profiles.

"Performing well in a task can boost feelings of self-worth," Toma said in a news release. "However, if you already feel good about yourself because you looked at your Facebook profile, there is no psychological need to increase your self-worth by doing well in a laboratory task."

Toma said that since the test looked at just one aspect of Facebook use, it couldn't derive broad conclusions on either behavior or motivation.

"This study shows that exposure to your own Facebook profile reduces motivation to perform well in a simple, hypothetical task," she explained. "It does not show that Facebook use negatively affects college students' grades, for example."

The study is published in the journal Media Psychology.