2025 - Reprints: Marketing

Social platforms facilitate the daily interactions of billions of people globally. Prior research generally concludes that social platforms negatively affect people's welfare. This research reopens this debate by using a robust methodology to examine the time series effects of social platform use on users' subjective well-being, psychological well-being, physical health, and financial security. We report a 6-month longitudinal study of 1029 adults. Participants' daily time using social platforms on their mobile device was unobtrusively tracked and their well-being was measured every 2 weeks. The findings suggest a small, positive effect of time spent using social platforms on both subjective well-being and psychological well-being (but no significant effects on physical health or financial security). Further, it is time spent using social platforms that facilitate interactions with intimate/close ties, that is correlated with positive subjective and psychological well-being.

Willful ignorance is often framed as a strategy for avoiding moral responsibility in social decision making. We propose a broader view: individuals also avoid or seek information in purely individual contexts as a way to regulate emotions. People may delay confronting themselves to useful, yet painful, truths, or, paradoxically, pursue distressing but useless information to relieve uncertainty. This duality reflects a strategic balance between the emotional costs of knowing and the psychological discomfort of not knowing. We review recent research illustrating how information avoidance and search serve both self-protection and moral regulation. Ultimately, willful ignorance is reframed as a dynamic emotion-regulation strategy that helps individuals navigate the tension between uncertainty, truth, and emotional endurance in both social and personal domains.