Social media can be mentally draining. And when mentally drained, you are more likely to be influenced by a high number of likes on posts — even to the point of clicking on ads for products you don’t need or want — according to our recent experiments on how social media affects behavior.
Matthew Pittman, assistant professor of advertising and public relations, has studied social media behavior for years. In late 2022, Pittman and his colleague Eric Haley conducted three online studies on Americans aged 18 to 65 to test how people under various mental loads respond to ads differently. Read about their findings in the full article on The Conversation.
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