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 (e.g., as of Fall 2026, with a video n = 398, we are finding an accuracy rate of just 24%). While accuracy rates correlate with engagement, that correlation is practically quite small. The most important fact is that many millions of eyes are viewing a staggering amount of inaccurate content. We share Lilienfeld's (2012) concern that the misrepresentation of psychological science "in the wild" feeds Psychological-Science skepticism and that there are costs to this. Thus as we assess the accuracy of the landscape we are preparing to experimentally test the impact of junk-psychology exposure on individual beliefs and our discipline's reputation as a science.  

Media Matters Conference Presentations | #Psychology Social Media Landscape 

• Kleinknecht, E., Castro, I., Cowherd, J., Tsybina, D., Millier, T., & Antick-Oslund, M. (2026, May). Reality Curated: The Misrepresentation of Psychology in the Social Media Landscape. Poster presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Psychological Science, Barcelona, Spain.

• Kleinknecht, E. (2026, April). Sci-Comm Needs More Psychology: Are you in? Invited address to the Western Psychological Association Teaching Conference, Tacoma, WA. 

• 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