Facebook and Instagram rack your brains to buy things

picture: First shots (stock struggle)

Instagram is testing adding songs to your profile

Social media can be mentally draining. And when you’re mentally drained, you’re more likely to be affected by a high number of likes on posts — even to the point of clicking ads for products you don’t need or want — according to our recent online experiences. How does social media affect behavior?.

As a professor of advertising, I have taught social media behavior for years. In late 2022, my colleague Eric Haley And three online studies of Americans ages 18 to 65 tested how people with different mental burdens responded to ads differently.

The control group in each study was not given any introductory task – we just had them look at an advertisement. The second group had to memorize a nine-digit number and then look at the advertisement. The third group scrolled through their Instagram feed for 30 seconds and then looked at the ad. The first study used an advertisement for a meal prep service, the second was for ice cream and the third was for coffee beans.

The ad image and caption were the same for everyone in each group, with only the number of likes manipulated. Participants randomly saw an ad that had a few hundred likes or tens of thousands of likes. After viewing the ad, each participant rated how much they wanted to buy the product, and how much mental effort it took to think about the information. The group that used Instagram first were the most likely to want to purchase the featured product when there were a lot of likes or comments, and they also reported using maximum mental effort to evaluate the ad.

In one study, we asked people to explain why they wanted to buy a product, and those in the control group gave simple, rational answers for their choice: “I was thinking about ice cream flavors and how they would taste.” or “I love advertising. It’s simple and clean. You get straight to the point…”

However, those who just swiped on social media for 30 seconds gave answers that made no sense. For example, some gave one-word answers such as “food” or “dish.” Others told us explicitly that it was difficult to process: “It had too many words and options in the picture.”

Why the “cognitive overload” of social media matters

Researchers refer to this mentally exhausting condition as “cognitive overload. Using social media puts you in this state because you’re constantly evaluating different types of texts, photos, and videos from many different people. Within several seconds, you can see a text from your spouse, a photo from a co-worker, a video from a celebrity, and a meme from your brother. All this scrolling and evaluating leaves us feeling disoriented and disoriented.

Imagine asking your roommate if he wants to go get pizza. Under normal circumstances, a roommate might consider several factors such as cost, hunger, timing, or schedule. Now imagine asking your roommate the same question while he’s on the phone with a sick relative after he stepped on dog poop, and he also just got a text from his ex while remembering he was late for work. They no longer have the mental energy or resources to think logically about whether pizza for dinner is a good idea. They might just exclaim “Yeah, sure!” while running inside to clean their shoes.

The only exception to this is when a person has a lot of experience, history, or knowledge of a particular product or idea. When this is the case, they can consider whether they would actually benefit from purchasing the advertised item. We confirmed this in the experiment with coffee bean advertising. In general, coffee enthusiasts will carefully consider many factors — type of bean, roast level, country of origin, and more. So even when these people were in a state of mental fog, they were not persuaded by the high-profile ads.

By understanding how they are affected by social media in unconscious ways, consumers can be more thoughtful and deliberate in regulating their usage — and hopefully not buying another bottle of water they don’t need.

What is still unknown about social media

We don’t know yet which social media platforms are the most draining.

Media-rich environments like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube are supposedly the most mentally taxing because they contain text, images, videos, animations, and audio—often all at once and overlapping. These platforms are too Where advertisers spend a lot of moneybecause they provide a High return on investment for brands.

Matthew BatemanAssistant Professor of Advertising and Public Relations, University of Tennessee

This article has been republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons Licence. Read the The original article.

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