People who compare themselves to others spend longer on Facebook

By Donna Lu

Stephen Frost / Alamy

People who are prone to comparing themselves to others, both offline and online, spend more time on Facebook.

To see what effect the time spent on social media has on social comparison and self-perception, Moira Burke and her colleagues at Facebook surveyed 37,729 people from 18 countries, and matched their responses to a log of their activity on Facebook from the previous four weeks.

The activity logs, which were anonymised and aggregated, included data such as the number of posts a user looked at and the time spent looking at profiles …