Social Anxiety, Cannabis Use Motives, and Social Context’s Impact on Willingness to Use Cannabis

Social anxiety is often purported to be a risk factor for increased cannabis use. Cannabis use motives are strong explanatory predictors of cannabis use embedded within social contexts. This investigation explored the impact of social anxiety, cannabis motives, and their interaction on willingness to use cannabis in a community sample of emerging adults. Social anxiety was anticipated to positively correlate with coping and conformity motives and greater willingness to use cannabis in peer social contexts. Motives to use were hypothesized to potentiate social anxiety’s influence on cannabis use decision-making. In total, 124 participants completed an audio simulation of social cannabis use contexts (Can-SIDE) and standard measures of social anxiety (SIAS) and use motives (MMM). Contrary to expectations, social anxiety exerted a protective effect on willingness to use cannabis, but only when conformity, social, and expansion motives were at or below average. These effects varied by social contexts of use. Social anxiety leading to increased cannabis use may be most apparent in clinical samples and in high-risk cannabis users, but this pattern was not supported in this sample of community living emerging adults below clinical cutoffs for cannabis use disorder with relatively high social anxiety.