If you’re under the age of 27, there’s a good chance you’ve abandoned all other social networks in lieu of Snapchat. The three major players all have their own unique utility — Facebook is where your grandmother shares recipes for carrot cake and people argue with each other over politics, Instagram is where your friends upload vacation pics, and Twitter is where narcissists who work in media gasbag about getting wings with each other.
But Snapchat remains cool. Really cool, especially for goofing around with your friends.
Researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a study analyzing Snapchat and happiness. They discovered that people are actually happier when using Snapchat as opposed to Facebook or Twitter. Via the University of Michigan:
“On the surface, many people view Snapchat as the ‘sexting app,'” said U-M researcher Joseph Bayer, the study’s lead author. “But instead, we found that Snapchat is typically being used to communicate spontaneously with close friends in a new and often more enjoyable way.
The study was conducted using college students interacting with social media on their smartphones:
Bayer and colleagues recruited 154 college students who used smartphones. The study used “experience sampling”—which measures how people think, feel and behave moment-to-moment in their daily lives—to assess the participants’ well-being by texting them at random times six times a day for two weeks.
Each text message contained a link to an online survey with five questions:
-How negative or positive do you feel right now?
-How did your most recent interaction occur?
-How pleasant or unpleasant was your most recent interaction?
-Within that interaction, how supportive or unsupportive was that person to you?
-How close are you to that person?Snapchat interactions are associated with more positive emotions than Facebook and other social technologies, the researchers say. Simultaneously, Snapchat interactions are viewed as less “supportive” than other types of interaction, including Twitter, texting, email, calling and face-to-face.
And the conclusion? Snapchat made people happier because of the app’s ephemeral messaging nature. Also, people are wayyyyy more IDGAF on Snapchat (because they’re talking to their friends) than other social networks, where they’re more likely to be called a beluga whale by some asshole stranger:
Bayer and colleagues also investigated what aspects of Snapchat use might cause the increased emotional reward. Their findings suggest that reduced “self-presentational” concerns are a major reason, such as not worrying if shared pictures seem ugly or conceited.
“Since Facebook has become a space for sharing crafted big moments such as babies, graduations and birthdays, Snapchat seems to provide users with a distinct space for sharing the small moments,” said Bayer, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies whose research focuses on communication technologies.
In addition, participants reported focusing more attention on Snapchat messages than archived content on platforms like Facebook, which may contribute to the increased emotional reward.
On the flip-side, a big University of Houston study found that Facebook use can be linked to “depressive symptoms” in users. Then again, Facebook was original Snapchat back in the day circa 2006, lonnnnnng before your uncle got on it to share memes about Obama going back to Kenya.
[H/T: Business Insider]