To understand behavior on social media, researchers have created and validated dozens of scales. Many can be sorted into two main categories: those that focus on the intensity of social media use and those that focus on addictive aspects. These scales tend to result in different conclusions regarding people’s well-being: studies asking about addiction find that social media use is often associated with higher reported depression scores, whereas studies focusing on intensity typically find an association with improved well-being. While these different outcomes may be explained by real underlying differences in well-being, the difference may also be due to the priming effects that addiction and intensity scales have on subsequent well-being measures. In this article, we report on two studies that examine priming effects on reported depression for these two types of social media use scales. We examine the possibility that different associations between social media and depression may be caused by the survey design itself, not by underlying differences in depression. In light of our findings, we propose that researchers investigating the relationship between social media and well-being adopt the methodology of asking questions about well-being before questions about social media use to mitigate effects of priming.

为了了解社交媒体上的行为，研究人员创建并验证了数十种量表。许多可以分为两大类：关注社交媒体使用强度的类别和关注成瘾性的类别。这些量表往往会得出有关人们福祉的不同结论：关于成瘾的研究发现，社交媒体的使用通常与较高的抑郁指数相关，而专注于强度的研究通常发现与福祉的改善相关。虽然这些不同的结果可以用幸福感的根本内在差异来解释，但差异也可能是由于成瘾和强度量表对随后的幸福感测量所具有的启动作用。在这篇文章中，我们报道了两项研究，研究了这两种社交媒体使用量表对报道的抑郁症的启动作用。我们研究了社交媒体与抑郁症之间不同关联可能是由调查设计本身而不是由抑郁症的根本差异引起的可能性。根据我们的发现，我们建议研究者在研究社交媒体与幸福之间的关系时采用先询问有关幸福的方法，然后再使用有关社交媒体的问题来缓解启动效应。