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🚨 Does social media use show established neurocognitive signatures of addiction? Concerns about social media addiction are widespread, yet whether platforms' design features actually engage the same neurocognitive pathways as established addictions has remained untested. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

We ran two preregistered experiments (N=330) to examine three neurocognitive signatures of addiction that are well established in the substance and behavioural addictions, using a computational effort-based decision-making framework. The procedure is illustrated below.

The neurocognitive signatures tested: 1️⃣ Elevated wanting: heightened motivational salience. 2️⃣ Wanting-liking dissociation: increased craving alongside stable or declining hedonic enjoyment. 3️⃣ Devaluation insensitivity: loss of goal-directed control resulting in behaviour that is rigid.

What did we find? 1️⃣ No elevated wanting for TikTok vs. Netflix, even in self-identified addicted users. 2️⃣ Wanting-liking dissociation driven by lower enjoyment, therefore inconsistent with incentive sensitisation. 3️⃣ No greater devaluation insensitivity in self-identified addicted users.

Also, none of the neurocognitive markers of addiction were associated with scores on the most commonly used self-report measure of social media addiction.

💡 These findings challenge the idea that problematic social media use shares neurocognitive mechanisms with established addictions. This doesn't diminish real struggles with social media, but questions whether an addiction framework is the right lens and what that means for support and interventions

There are further neurocognitive processes implicated in addiction that we did not examine. Rather than drawing definitive conclusions, we hope this work contributes to a more mechanistic, theory-driven approach to understanding problematic social media use.