Abstract Many social media users have lost some agency over the use of these sites. Restoring this sense of agency is important as it can help users live responsibly with the technology, and can serve as a target for therapists treating people with difficulty to control their social media use. Nevertheless, knowledge about ways to increase people's sense of agency has been limited. In this study I propose that invoking reflections about agency but allowing normal use will likely produce realization about loss of agency, and result in undesirable reduced sense of agency. In contrast, I suggest that if invoking reflections on agency is followed by a brief abstinence attempt, people will process insights on their actual ability to exert control over social media use, which will result in an increase in perceived agency. I further argue that this information processing will only accrue in people high in cognitive reflection tendencies. A 2 (time: pre vs. post) by 2 (condition: abstinence vs. control) by 2 (cognitive reflection group: low vs. high) experiment with 610 Facebook users showed an increase in agency only among high cognitive reflection participants who experienced abstinence; all other groups showed decline in perceived agency. Implications are discussed.

中文翻译：

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通过短暂的禁欲可以增强对社交媒体使用的代理，但仅限于具有高度认知反思倾向的用户

摘要 许多社交媒体用户因使用这些网站而失去了一些代理权。恢复这种代理感很重要，因为它可以帮助用户负责任地使用该技术，并且可以作为治疗难以控制社交媒体使用的治疗师的目标。然而，关于如何提高人们的代理意识的知识是有限的。在这项研究中，我提出，对代理进行反思但允许正常使用可能会导致对代理丧失的认识，并导致不受欢迎的代理意识降低。相比之下，我建议，如果在对代理进行反思之后进行短暂的禁欲尝试，人们将处理关于他们对社交媒体使用施加控制的实际能力的见解，这将导致感知代理的增加。我进一步认为，这种信息处理只会在认知反思倾向高的人身上产生。对 610 名 Facebook 用户进行的 2（时间：前与后）乘 2（条件：禁欲与控制）乘 2（认知反思组：低与高）的实验表明，只有在经历过高认知反思的参与者中，代理才会增加节制; 所有其他组都表现出感知代理的下降。影响进行了讨论。