Case Study 11-1: The Instagram Envy Research — Passive Use, Wellbeing, and the Verduyn Studies

Background

When Instagram launched in 2010, it was understood primarily as a photo-sharing application — a way for people to apply artistic filters to photographs and share them with friends and followers. What no one fully anticipated in the platform's early days was that it would become one of the most psychologically consequential environments in the history of media, particularly for its effects on social comparison, envy, and wellbeing.

By 2015, Instagram had 400 million users and was growing rapidly. Researchers studying the psychology of social media use were beginning to notice a pattern in their data that did not match the conventional assumption that social media was either uniformly beneficial (connecting people, reducing loneliness) or uniformly harmful (fostering addiction, reducing face-to-face contact). The picture was more complicated: some types of social media use appeared to be associated with better outcomes, while others were consistently associated with worse ones. The key variable was not how much you used social media, but how you used it.

It was within this context that a research team led by Philippe Verduyn at the University of Leuven, collaborating with scholars including Oscar Ybarra at the University of Michigan, designed a series of studies to examine the relationship between passive social media consumption and wellbeing. Their work — published between 2015 and 2017 — would become among the most cited and influential in the emerging field of social media psychology, and it would begin to answer a question that had significant policy and design implications: Is it Facebook itself that harms wellbeing, or is it a specific type of Facebook use?

Timeline

2013–2014: Study Design Phase The Verduyn team designs a longitudinal study using experience sampling methodology (ESM) — a technique in which participants receive random prompts on their phones throughout the day and respond to brief questionnaires in real time. This approach allows researchers to capture momentary experience rather than relying on retrospective self-report, which is prone to memory distortion and self-presentation bias.

Participants in the initial study are recruited from the University of Michigan community. The study runs for two weeks, with participants receiving ESM prompts five times daily. Each prompt asks about recent Facebook use (passive or active), current emotional state, and current levels of loneliness and social comparison.

2015: Publication of the First Landmark Study Verduyn, Ybarra, and colleagues publish "Passive Facebook usage undermines affective well-being: Experimental and longitudinal evidence" in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The paper reports two studies: the ESM longitudinal study and a separate laboratory experiment. The combined findings represent the strongest evidence to date of a causal pathway between passive social media use and negative wellbeing.

The ESM study finds that passive Facebook use (scrolling through the News Feed without interacting) predicts decreased affective wellbeing over the subsequent time period, while active Facebook use (posting, messaging, commenting) shows no such negative effect. The laboratory experiment assigns participants to either passive Facebook browsing or an active Facebook use condition and finds that passive use leads to more negative affect immediately afterward.

2017: Extension and Replication Verduyn and colleagues publish a follow-up study extending the analysis to envy as a mediating mechanism. The new paper demonstrates that passive Facebook use increases envy — specifically, the social comparison-based form of envy characterized by feelings of inferiority and resentment — and that this increased envy partially mediates the relationship between passive use and decreased wellbeing. The finding has mechanistic significance: it suggests the pathway from passive use to poor wellbeing runs through social comparison processes rather than through some other mechanism such as reduced physical activity or displaced face-to-face social interaction.

2018–2020: The Research Landscape Expands Building on the Verduyn foundation, multiple research groups extend the passive/active distinction to other platforms. Studies on Instagram (then the dominant image-sharing platform for young people) find effects similar to or stronger than those found on Facebook, with particularly pronounced effects on body image and appearance-related self-esteem. The image-first architecture of Instagram — where the dominant content type is photographs of people — appears to intensify the social comparison effects relative to text-heavy platforms.

2021: The Facebook Files The Wall Street Journal publishes the "Facebook Files," based on internal documents obtained by whistleblower Frances Haugen. The documents include internal Meta research that closely mirrors the findings of the academic literature: Instagram use is associated with worse body image for a substantial portion of teenage girl users; passive browsing drives negative affect; and the company has known this for years while continuing to optimize for engagement metrics that maximize the very behaviors associated with harm.

The Facebook Files create a significant public reckoning with the gap between what social media companies know about their products' effects and what they disclose or act upon. For researchers like Verduyn and Ybarra, the leaked documents are a disturbing confirmation: the academic findings were not merely academic. They were findings the platforms had replicated internally and then, in important respects, acted against.

Analysis

The Passive/Active Distinction: Why Does It Matter?

The finding that passive and active use have different effects is, at first glance, somewhat puzzling. Why should scrolling through a feed be more harmful than posting or commenting on it, if both activities involve time spent on the platform exposed to the same social information?

Several explanations have been proposed and partially tested. The most well-supported involves social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954). Passive consumption puts users in the role of audience for others' curated self-presentations. As the audience, you are receiving information about others' experiences, appearances, and social connections — information that readily triggers upward social comparison — without producing countervailing information of your own. You see that others are at parties, look attractive, have interesting lives; your own life, as you scroll, feels ordinary by comparison.

Active use changes this dynamic. When you post, comment, or message, you shift from pure audience to participant. You receive responses and feedback that satisfy relatedness needs. Your own contributions to the social environment become visible, and others respond to them. The social exchange becomes reciprocal rather than one-directional. This reciprocity — even if asymmetric, even if you receive mixed responses — appears to be psychologically different from pure passive consumption.

A second explanation involves attention and presence. Passive scrolling is a form of split attention: you are physically somewhere (your bedroom, a waiting room, a bus) while mentally elsewhere (the social world visible on screen). This split presence may reduce the psychological benefits of whatever physical environment you are actually in — the friends you could be talking to, the meal you could be tasting, the scenery you could be noticing — without providing the full psychological benefits of actual social engagement.

Platform Design and the Passive/Active Balance

If passive use is more harmful than active use, this raises an important design question: which type of use do platforms incentivize?

The answer, by most analyses, is passive use — and the incentivization is not accidental. Infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic content selection are all features designed to minimize the friction of consumption and maximize the time users spend as an audience for content. Features that encourage active use — commenting interfaces, posting tools, direct messaging — exist on all major platforms, but they are typically less prominent in the user experience and require more deliberate action to initiate. The default behavior of social media — picking up the phone, opening an app, and beginning to scroll — is passive consumption.

This design choice reflects engagement economics. Passive consumption generates more page views and more advertising revenue per unit of time than active production. A user who is scrolling is encountering more content, and therefore more advertisements, than a user who is composing a post. The economic incentives of attention extraction favor the form of use that research has identified as more psychologically costly.

Methodological Contributions

Beyond its substantive findings, the Verduyn research program made important methodological contributions to the field. The experience sampling methodology it employed addresses a major limitation of conventional survey research: the reliance on retrospective self-report. When people are asked at the end of a week how much they used Facebook and how they felt during that week, they are drawing on imperfect memories subject to multiple biases.

ESM captures experience in the moment, reducing memory distortion. It also allows researchers to examine within-person dynamics over time — not just whether passive users feel worse than active users on average, but whether the same person feels worse after passive use than after active use. This within-person analysis controls for stable individual differences (perhaps people who feel bad in general both use social media passively and report worse wellbeing) and focuses on the effect of the specific behavior.

The ESM approach has limitations: it requires participants to respond to frequent prompts, which itself may alter the experience being studied (people who are being regularly asked about their emotional state may become more emotionally reflective); and participation may be subject to attrition, with the most distressed participants being least likely to complete the protocol. These limitations are acknowledged in the research and inform ongoing methodological debate in the field.

What This Means for Users

Understanding the passive/active distinction has immediate practical implications for anyone who uses social media. The research suggests that the form of engagement matters as much as the amount. A user who spends thirty minutes posting, commenting, and messaging is likely to have a different psychological experience than a user who spends the same thirty minutes scrolling silently through a feed — even if they encounter the same content.

This finding suggests some evidence-based guidance for social media use:

Prefer active engagement over passive consumption. When you use social media, make it a two-way interaction where possible. Reply to posts, comment on things you find interesting, message people you care about. The evidence suggests that these activities are associated with better outcomes than passive scrolling.

Notice when you have shifted into passive monitoring mode. Many FOMO spirals — like Maya's Friday night experience — begin as active checking (looking for specific information) and shift into passive monitoring (scrolling without clear purpose, waiting for something to change). Recognizing this shift can be a cue to put the phone down.

Understand that platform defaults favor the more harmful form of use. The infinite scroll that opens when you launch Instagram is designed to facilitate passive consumption. Active engagement typically requires more deliberate initiation. Awareness of this default can help users make more intentional choices.

Recognize that you are the researcher's subject, too. The internal research that Meta conducted on its own users — which, when leaked, showed patterns remarkably similar to the academic findings — was conducted without users' knowledge. The behavior you exhibit on social media platforms is being studied in real time, by teams with access to data at a scale that academic researchers cannot match.

Discussion Questions

1. The passive/active distinction suggests that how you use social media matters as much as how much you use it. Does this finding shift moral responsibility for social media harms? If passive use is harmful, is it more the user's responsibility (for choosing to scroll passively) or the platform's responsibility (for designing defaults that favor passive use)?

2. Meta's internal research replicated the Verduyn findings but the company did not take significant action on them. What obligations do corporations have to act on internal research that documents harm to their users? What structural factors might explain the gap between knowledge and action?

3. The ESM methodology used in this research captures experience in the moment. How might this methodological choice affect the findings? Are there aspects of social media's psychological effects that ESM would systematically underestimate or overestimate?

4. The research focuses primarily on individual psychological outcomes (affect, wellbeing, self-esteem). What social or structural outcomes might passive social media use affect that are not captured by these individual measures? How would you design research to capture those effects?

5. If a social media platform redesigned itself to actively discourage passive consumption and encourage active engagement — for example, by removing infinite scroll and requiring users to initiate each piece of content they view — what would happen to its business model? What does your answer reveal about the relationship between platform economics and user wellbeing?