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IB DP Psychology — Technology and Well-Being | SL & HL | Paper 2
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define problematic social media use, digital stress, and technoference using IB-aligned terminology.
- Explain how social comparison theory accounts for the relationship between social media use and self-esteem.
- Describe the role of variable reward schedules and dopaminergic reinforcement in sustaining compulsive technology use.
- Evaluate research evidence on the link between technology use and mental health outcomes using supporting and opposing studies in ACAS format.
- Apply concepts of technology and mental health to a real-world case study from cognitive and sociocultural perspectives.
- Discuss the extent to which social media use causes depression and anxiety, or whether the relationship is more complex.
- Analyse research in this area using relevant concept areas: Causality, Bias, Perspective, and Responsibility.
Introduction & Context
Imagine scrolling through your phone late at night. You see a classmate's photo from a party you were not invited to, a friend's holiday that looks impossibly perfect, and a series of posts from people who seem more successful, more attractive, and more connected than you feel right now. By the time you put the phone down, something has shifted — a quiet unease, a vague dissatisfaction with your own life that was not there an hour ago. This is not an unusual experience. It is, in fact, one of the most commonly reported psychological effects of modern technology use.
The relationship between technology and mental health has become one of the most debated questions in contemporary psychology. Rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness among adolescents have risen sharply in many countries over the same period that smartphones and social media became ubiquitous. Whether this is coincidence, correlation, or causation is precisely what psychologists have been trying to determine — and the answer turns out to be far more nuanced than either enthusiastic technologists or alarmed critics would suggest.
Understanding this relationship requires us to think carefully about what we mean by "technology use," how mental health is measured, and what mechanisms might explain any link we observe. It also requires us to resist the temptation to draw simple conclusions from complex data — a skill that is central to psychological thinking at every level.
🔄 Analogy — The Funhouse Mirror Think of social media as a funhouse mirror at a carnival. A real mirror shows you as you are. A funhouse mirror distorts the image — making some things appear larger, some smaller, and the overall reflection unrecognisable. Social media functions similarly: it does not show us real life, but a curated, filtered, and strategically presented version of it. The problem is that most users know their own mirror is distorted, but unconsciously assume everyone else's is accurate. This asymmetry — comparing your unedited reality to others' highlight reels — is at the heart of many technology-related mental health concerns.
Core Concepts
Before we can evaluate the research, we need to understand the psychological mechanisms that have been proposed to explain why technology use might affect mental health. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive — they often operate simultaneously and reinforce one another. We will examine four key concepts: social comparison, variable reward reinforcement, technoference, and digital stress.
Consider what happens when you look at someone else's social media profile. You are not simply observing information — you are, almost automatically, evaluating yourself in relation to what you see. This tendency to assess our own abilities, opinions, and circumstances by comparing them to others is a fundamental feature of human cognition, described by Leon Festinger as early as 1954. The question for contemporary psychology is what happens to this deeply human tendency when it is amplified and accelerated by social media platforms that are specifically designed to showcase the