An international online survey of young people found that those who spend more time on social media and on dating apps tend to have slightly lower body satisfaction and appreciation. People who spent more time on social media also had a slightly higher desire to be slim, and the more time they spent on dating apps, the more they had a slightly higher desire to be muscular. The paper was published in. British Journal of Health Psychology.
Social media and dating apps have become central to many young people’s daily lives, shaping not only how people communicate but also how they view their bodies. The highly visual platform constantly exposes users to carefully selected and edited images of attractive peers, influencers, and celebrities. These images often promote unrealistic appearance ideals, such as extreme thinness in women or toned muscles in men.
When users compare themselves to these standards, they can become more dissatisfied with their bodies, value their lower body more, and feel more pressure to change their appearance. Dating apps can intensify these effects because they place users in situations of direct evaluation, competition, and potential rejection. On these platforms, profile photos are often the main criteria by which people judge each other, increasing self-scrutiny and concerns about physical attractiveness.
Gianluca Lo Coco, a researcher at the University of Palermo in Italy, and his colleagues wanted to investigate the interrelationship between social media and dating app use on the one hand, and body image on the other. They hypothesized that young people who spend more time on social media may have poorer body images.
More specifically, they expected these people to show lower body satisfaction and appreciation for their bodies, higher acceptance of the thin ideal, and higher aspirations for tonedness and muscularity. Their second hypothesis was that the more time you spend on dating apps, the worse your body image will be.
Researchers conducted an online survey and surveyed 5,933 young people from around the world. The largest proportion of participants were from the United States, followed by Spain, Canada, China, Italy, Belgium, Australia, and Japan. A total of 4,003 participants were female. Across countries, the proportion of female participants ranged from 58.5% to 84.9%. Depending on the country, between 73.1% and 99% of the sample were university students.
Study participants answered questions about whether they used social media or dating apps. If they answered affirmatively, questions followed about how much time they spent on social media and dating apps.
The survey also included several measures of body image, including the Body Perception Scale-2, the Body Area Satisfaction Scale, the Physical Appearance Comparison Scale, the Desire for Thinness Scale, the Desire for Muscularity Scale, and the Internalized Thin/Low Body Fat subscale from the Sociocultural Attitudes toward Appearance Questionnaire-4. The researchers calculated participants’ BMI from their reported weight and height values.
The results showed that 94% of participants use social media. They reported spending an average of six to seven hours a week on social media. Women reported spending more time on social media than men. Depending on the country, between 5% and 45% of participants reported using dating apps. They reported spending an average of one to two hours a week on dating apps. Men were more likely than women to report spending more time on dating apps.
The results further showed that people who spent more time on social media tended to be slightly less satisfied with their bodies and have lower self-esteem. They had slightly higher desire for thinness, higher desire for muscularity, higher thin ideal internalization, and higher appearance comparison. In other words, they had a stronger desire to be thin or muscular, were more accepting of thinness as an ideal body standard, and were more likely to compare their appearance to that of others.
The more time you spend on dating apps, the less you’ll have slightly lower body esteem, the more you’ll want to be muscular, as well as the less you’ll compare appearances. The association with desire for muscularity tended to be stronger for men than for women.
The study authors concluded that “increased use of social media and dating apps may be associated with poorer body image and related indicators in each country, especially among young men.”
This study contributes to scientific understanding of the psychological correlates of social media use. However, it should be noted that the observed associations were mostly very weak and detectable, mainly due to the very large number of study participants.
The authors of this paper are Gianluca Lo Coco, Rachel Rogers, Emily A. Harris, Charlotte Markey, Alvaro Sicilia, Annie Emme, Jacinte Dion, Laura Salerno, Naomi Hayami-Chiswa, Hannah J. White, and Carolyn R. Pla Tor, Antonio Granello-Gallegos, Christophe Maiano, Gian Mauro Manzoni, Giada Pietravissa, Catherine Biggin, Marie Eve Blackburn, Esben Strodl, Matthew Fuller Tyskiewicz, and Marita McCabe.
