More than 20? Or less than 75? As I scan my feedback on a recent social media post, my brain just can’t seem to help registering the number of “likes.” I’m not alone.
Under a recent settlement that Meta recently reached with states, Facebook and Instagram are about to look different for minors Among the new protections, one seemingly modest change caught my eye. By default, users under 18 will no longer be able to see likes and other reactions in response to their posts or those of others. The reforms are designed for children and teenagers, but touch on a psychological phenomenon just as relevant to adults. As a psychiatrist, I found myself wondering: Why does that little number beneath your post matter so much?
The answer has less to do with social media and more to do with an ancient human tendency: social comparison. Social comparison is the psychological process by which people assess themselves, including their own abilities, opinions, and achievements, in relation to those of others. Likes can both reward us and rank us. They show us that people are validating our posts and also quantify that validation.
We know how much approval we receive relative to what we might have expected, what we got the last time we posted, and what others receive. Feedback is scored. Likes are just one example. Follower counts, views, and shares are other metrics that make social information measurable. When social approval is numerically valued, comparison becomes harder to avoid.
From an evolutionary perspective, social comparison may have served an adaptive purpose. Humans evolved in social groups. Knowing where you stood relative to others might have helped you identify what behaviors were approved, whether you belonged, and how to navigate hierarchy. But moving beyond prehistoric time to the last century, comparison still had constraints. Your 25-year high school reunion? It happened once in your lifetime, maybe in a city far away from you, with only your fellow classmates in attendance. Now, the high school reunion lives in the device in our hands, capable of giving anyone quantitative signals from a vast reference group at any moment on our personalized scoreboards of social approval. If the subjective question is whether we belong, what can feel like an objective answer is the 100 likes our post gets from 2,500 followers. The scale, frequency, quantification, and accessibility of social comparison have all changed.
Our brains weren’t built for this much comparison. Neuroimaging studies show that our brains allocate value to how we believe we stack up next to others. Downward social comparison, in which we learn someone performs worse than us, can engage neural circuits associated with reward and valuation. Upward comparison, in which we learn someone performs better than us, can engage neural circuits associated with processing unpleasant emotions. These are ways in which our brains process social outcomes much like other kinds of gains or losses.
But our brains don’t just register numbers; we also tend to evaluate their meaning. In one study, likes functioned as a type of currency that adult users compared themselves on, shaping how they felt in that moment. In another set of studies, adults who made more frequent and extreme upward comparisons reported an immediate decline in self-evaluation and cumulative declines in self-esteem and life satisfaction over a browsing session. Research has also found that across generational groups, greater user tendency to engage in social comparison, together with greater maladaptive ways of coping with emotions, is associated with more symptoms of anger, anxiety, and depression.
Social comparison isn’t inherently harmful. But as repeated opportunities to compare mount, the mental health effects can add up.
While hiding likes may not eliminate social comparison, it does remove a metric from the scoreboard. The instinct to compare or desire to belong won’t just vanish. But even if we might wonder where we stand next to who’s performing better, there’s a difference between wondering and a number answering that question for us.
Social media didn’t invent our instinct to compare ourselves to others. We’ve had that for millennia. What it did was shift the environment surrounding our instincts, encoding one form of social feedback into numbers we can monitor.
That's why changing our relationship with social comparison will mean more than adapting digital platforms. What do we value? What gives us purpose? What makes our lives matter?
The cultural shift that lies ahead is to ask the questions about our social worth that don’t need a scoreboard to answer.