Instagram users overestimate their "addiction" to the social network, study reveals

The work was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Classic addiction - to a substance or behaviour - is usually defined by a set of characteristics: difficulty controlling use, compulsive craving, withdrawal symptoms when quitting, and continued use despite harm or serious negative consequences.

Ian Anderson and Wendy Wood surveyed a representative sample of 380 Instagram users in the US (50% female, average age 44 years). Participants were asked to rate whether they considered themselves addicted to Instagram and were also tested for symptoms of addictive use.

It turned out that 18% of respondents at least partially agreed with the statement "I am addicted to Instagram" (5% - to a great extent). However, only 2% of participants showed real signs of potential addiction, according to the researchers' criteria.

To understand the nature of this difference between subjective feelings and objective signs, the authors analysed how the media write about social networks. They found 4,383 publications with the phrase "social media addiction" and only 50 with the phrase "social media habit" in US media news texts between November 2021 and November 2024. This suggests that frequent use of social media in public discourse is almost automatically labelled an "addiction".

In the second part of the paper, the researchers tested how this framing ("I am addicted") affects the users themselves. On a new sample of 824 adult Instagram users, they were asked to describe their behaviour on the social network in different ways - as a habit or as an addiction.

When people were pushed to see their Instagram use specifically as an addiction, they:

• felt less control over their social media behaviour;
• blamed both themselves and the platform more strongly for "excessive" use.

Taken together, the results show:

• media and official institutions, by actively using the term 'social media addiction', may contribute to people overestimating the extent of their addiction;
• such labelling can impair subjective feelings of control and increase feelings of guilt, even if clinical dependence is very far away.

The authors believe that more careful and accurate use of the word "addiction" in relation to social media by journalists and politicians would help to reduce these distortions.