Social Media Scatters Your Brain, and Then You Buy Stuff You Don't Need – Gizmodo

Image: 1st footage (Shutterstock) Instagram is Testing Adding Songs to Your ProfileSocial media can be mentally draining. And when mentally drained, you are more likely to be influenced by a high number of likes on posts – even to the point of clicking on ads for products you don’t need or want – according to our recent experiments on how social media affects behavior.As a professor of advertising, I have studied social media behavior for years. In late 2022, my colleague Eric Haley and I conducted three online studies on Americans aged 18-65 to test how people under various mental loads respond to ads differently. The control group in each study was given no introductory task – we just had them look at an ad. A second group had to memorize a nine-digit number and then look at the ad. The third group scrolled through their Instagram feed for 30 seconds and then looked at the ad. The first study used an ad for a meal prep service, the second was for ice cream and the third was for coffee beans.The ad photo and caption were the same for everyone in each group, with only the number of likes manipulated.
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