Reality Curated:
The [Mis-]Representation of Psychology in the Social Media Landscape
Reality Curated:
The [Mis-]Representation of Psychology in the Social Media Landscape
Social media may have started as a virtual third-place for social connection, but its role in folks’ lives rapidly expanded. Today, individuals go to various platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube-Shorts) to share stories, read news, seek answers to personal questions, to scroll and discover, and to connect. Surveys show that US adults spend ~2.5 hours/day scrolling social media, whereas teenagers spend ~5. We posit that social media consumption has individual consequences thus an interrogation of the psychology-landscape is needed. Bruner (1991) remarked that an individual’s working intelligence (indeed, one’s very sense of reality) is never solo. Reality comprises what one consumes. Belief formation is an automatic process, wherein accepting information precedes effortful validation (if validation happens, at all). Any content (true or false) can inform beliefs.
To assess the scope of topics one can find during a social media scroll and the accuracy of those posts therein, we poll social media users and then conduct content analyses of the most frequently cited sites: Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Thus far our research shows that the field is not well represented and less than half of the hundreds of videos we've assessed so far present accurate information. That said, we also find that accurate posts do recieve more engagement than inaccurate ones, but many millions of eyes are viewing the inaccurate content, too.
Media Matters Conference Presentations - #Psychology Social Media Landscape
Kleinknecht, E., Castro, I., Cowherd, J., Tsybina, D., Millier, T., & Antick-Oslund, M. (2026, anticipated). Reality Curated: The Misrepresentation of Psychology in the Social Media Landscape. Poster presentation submitted for review for the annual meetings of the Association for Psychological Science, Barcelona, Spain.
Kleinknecht, E. (2024, April). Representation Matters in Psychology. Poster presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Science Communicators, Portland, OR.
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Please contact Prf. Erica Kleinknecht, PhD: eko at pacific u dot edu