Exposure to the Positivity Bias and Adolescents’ Differential Longitudinal Links with Social Comparison, Inspiration and Envy Depending on Social Media Literacy

Social media literacy is assumed to protect adolescents from negative social media effects, yet research supporting this is lacking. The current three-wave panel study with a four-month interval among N = 1,032 adolescents tests this moderating role of social media literacy. Specifically, we examine between- vs. within-person relations of exposure to the positivity bias on social media, social comparison, envy, and inspiration. We find significant positive relations between these variables at the between-person level. At the within-person level, a different pattern of results occurred: higher exposure to others’ perfect lives on social media was related to increased inspiration, and higher social comparison was related to increased envy, yet both associations only occurred in one of the two time intervals. Additionally, no within-person associations between exposure to positive content and envy were significant, nor between exposure and social comparison or social comparison and inspiration. These results thus seem more complex than traditional paradigms of selective and transactional media effects assume. Furthermore, multiple group tests showed that the within-person cross-lagged relation between social comparison and envy only occurred for adolescents with low affective social media literacy. The moderating role of social media literacy was not supported in any other instances. The results overall point at the need to instruct affective social media literacy to help adolescents navigate positively biased social media platforms in a healthy way.