Effects Of Social Media And Self Esteem

Register to read the introduction… According to Coopersmith’s definition, self-esteem is “the evaluation which the individual makes and customarily maintains with regard to himself: it expresses an attitude of approval and indicates the extent to which an individual believes himself to be capable, significant, successful and worthy. In short, self-esteem is a personal judgment of the worthiness that is expressed in the attitudes the individual holds towards himself.” (p. 4–5) To put it more simply, self-esteem is the attitude that people have toward their own …show more content…
Social media has an immense impact not only on how people interact with each other, but also on how people perceive themselves. Whether the impact is positive and negative is a question whose answer varies in different researches. Many scholars have designed experiments to find out the effect of social media on people’s self-esteem. Each study offers different hypotheses, and arrives at different conclusions that provide interesting aspects of the effect of online socializing. Gonzales and Hancock joined effort to test the effect of Facebook exposure on self-esteem. Their research provides two theoretical approaches that are relevant to the influence of social media on people’s self-confidence: the objective self-awareness theory and the selective self-presentation theory. Gonzales and Hancock referred to Duval and Wicklund’s claim that in an objective self-awareness state, “people are prone to self-evaluations based on broader social standards and norms,” which often leads to “a greater sense of humility, or downgraded ratings of self.” Social media serves as a stimulus that allows its users to form their own standards based on the information they are exposed to online, and consequently compare themselves to those standards (Gonzales and Hancock, 2011). On the other hand, selective self-presentation has a positive effect on …show more content…
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