Instagram and Social Media Are Making Us Forget What We Look Like | Allure

For many, the age of social media has turned us into blurry-eyed, doom-scrolling hobbyists. From anxiety to disrupted sleep to negative thoughts about how we look, social media’s impact on how we feel about ourselves is well documented. Now, a new study suggests it’s also making us forget what we look like. Published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, 95 people—Millennial and Gen Z men and women, all of whom had a history of using Instagram for an average of eight years—underwent a virtual reality experience called body illusions. Researchers hypothesized that prolonged Instagram use and “exposure to idealized, homogenized appearance-focused content” would make it harder for an individual to tell this difference between their own face and that of a stranger’s. In one part of the experiment, a person wearing a virtual reality headset watched a stranger’s face being brushed on the cheek while feeling that same stroke on their own cheek for 120 seconds. The only similarity between the person participating in the experiment and the stranger was gender—the stranger’s face was not a doppelgänger. After the experiment, participants took a survey in which they had to say how much they agreed with statements like “Sometimes, I
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