How social media is used to hack our minds

How are we influenced through social media?

Over the last decade, social media has become a powerful channel through which content from influencers, peers and others shapes individual attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. These influence processes often unfold subtly through everyday interactions such as following an account, engaging with content making it difficult to identify and study from the outside without first understanding how users themselves experience and describe these moments. Yet much remains unknown about which concrete behaviors reliably accompany social media influence, making it crucial to first establish a grounded understanding of these behavioral proxies before they can be studied.

In this thesis project, you will have the opportunity to explore the behavioral and psychological underpinnings of social media influence from the user's own perspective. In particular, you will focus on identifying concrete behavioral proxies of being influenced and the psychological mechanisms that appear to underlie them.

Depending on the study’s design and results, there may also be an opportunity to publish the research in an international peer-reviewed journal, with further support available after completion of the thesis.

Social media, attitudes, beliefs, behaviours, psychological mechanisms, user-perspective

What behavioural proxies do social media users show when they experience being influenced by content they encounter, and how do these proxies map onto underlying psychological mechanisms?

Research questions may be changed based on the student’s interests.

Qualitative interview research or other fitting designs depending on the students' interest.

An exemplary design could, for example, ask participants to recall and describe specific instances in which they recognized social media content shaping their attitudes, beliefs, or behaviour, and inductively code these accounts to identify recurring behavioral proxies and the psychological mechanisms underlying them. 

Data analysis will most likely involve qualitative data gathered via interviews or focus groups, analyzed using thematic analysis or grounded theory coding. The use of quantitative data is also possible if the student suggests a fitting design. 

Please contact Marleen Haandrikman (m.j.m.haandrikman@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. The assignment is open to 2 students. 

• Cinelli M, De Francisci Morales G, Galeazzi A, et al. (2021) The echo chamber effect on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(9). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: e2023301118.
• Eady, Gregory, Tom Paskhalis, Jan Zilinsky, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker. “Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency Foreign Influence Campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US Election and Its Relationship to Attitudes and Voting Behavior.” Nature Communications 14, no. 1 (2023): 62. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35576-9.
• Hoyle, Aiden, Charlotte Wagnsson, Helma van den Berg, Bertjan Doosje, and Martijn Kitzen. “Cognitive and Emotional Responses to Russian State-Sponsored Media Narratives in International Audiences.” Journal of Media Psychology, Hogrefe Publishing, January 19, 2023. world. https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/10.1027/1864-1105/a000371.
• Rocha YM, de Moura GA, Desidério GA, et al. (2023) The impact of fake news on social media and its influence on health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review. Journal of Public Health 31(7): 1007–1016.