Social Media, Body Image, and Economic Decisions

The rise of social media has coincided with growing mental health challenges, including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. Low-income individuals who spend more time on screens and young women exposed to unrealistic beauty standards are especially vulnerable. Simple policies may be able to alleviate these effects. We seek to provide proof of concept of interventions to improve people's social media experience and to mitigate its adverse impacts on mental health. Specifically, can modifying the content seen on social media improve well-being? We propose a field experiment on TikTok, the most popular social media app for US teens, in which 875 young women are randomly assigned to view content featuring plus-sized creators. We hypothesize that exposure to plus-sized TikTok creators will (1) enhance well-being by broadening beauty standards to include larger bodies and (2) foster empathy and reduce discrimination against plus-sized individuals. Outcomes include beauty ideals, body image, mental health, health behaviors, discrimination against plus-size individuals, and demand for body-positive content. Conservative power calculations suggest that we are powered to detect differences of 0.2 SD in body satisfaction between treatment and comparison, which is smaller than treatment effects reported in prior studies and suggested by our pilot.