• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 2, 2012

It’s no secret that many people act like jerks online, and now there’s some research which suggests why that might be the case. The forthcoming study from professors at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, first publicized in the Wall Street Journal, found that using Facebook increases our feelings of self-confidence and decreases our capacity for self-control.

According to study co-author Keith Wilcox, an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia University’s Business School, the enhanced self-image results from all the apparent affirmations received by Facebook users, in the form, for example, of people “Like”-ing their posts.

The inflated feelings of self-worth and corresponding lack of impulse control, which resemble the effects of alcohol, may lead people to be more aggressive -- including taking offense, dishing out insults and picking fights -- as well as more impulsive in other important areas, including what and how much they eat and how much money they spend. Indeed, the study found that people who spend more time online were also more likely to engage in binge eating, be overweight, and have large amounts of credit card debt. One part of the study found that people who spent five minutes on Facebook were more likely to choose a chocolate chip cookie over a granola bar for a snack.

While these findings certainly seem plausible, I should hasten to point out that Facebook (and social media in general) seems to affect people in a wide variety of ways: while some people may indeed get an unwarranted boost to their self-image from people liking their posts about kittens or whatever, other people seem to come away from Facebook with decreased self-esteem, leading to depression. Back in July I wrote about a study by the University of Salford in the U.K., which found that Facebook could lead to feelings of insecurity or lack of confidence which resulted when users compared their achievements to their friends; fully two-thirds of users with negative outcomes said the psychological distress made it hard to relax or fall asleep after being on a social media site. And in January of this year I wrote about a study by Utah Valley University sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge, published in an academic journal called Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, which found that students who spend a lot of time on Facebook are more likely to perceive other people as having better lives than themselves.

Of course, between these two extremes, there’s probably a large cohort of people whose self-image isn’t significantly altered one way or the other by Facebook. And they’re all a bunch of morons.