The challenges of social media are wide-ranging, both in the stunts involved and the reasons why people do them.
But why do young people take on challenges that threaten their health, well-being, and sometimes their very lives?
We are both engineering professors who specialize in understanding how humans interact with computers, and psychology professors with expertise in mental health, specifically traumatic stress and suicide.
In collaboration with our research team, we conducted a series of studies to understand what motivates teens and young adults to participate in various tasks.
For these studies, we interviewed dozens of high school and college students who participated in social media challenges from January 2019 to January 2020 in both the United States and southern India. We also analyzed 150 news reports, 60 public YouTube videos, his more than 1,000 comments on those YouTube videos, and 150 of his Twitter posts. All of this was specifically about the blue whale challenge. The challenge, which went viral in 2015 and his 2016, reportedly involved increasingly dangerous acts of self-harm, eventually culminating in suicide.
We have identified four key factors that motivate young people to participate in challenges. It’s social pressure, the desire for attention, entertainment value, and a phenomenon called the contagion effect.
1. Social pressure
Social pressure typically occurs when a friend encourages another friend to do something and that person believes that if he does it, he will be accepted within a particular social group.
We found that participation in challenges that promote goodwill, such as the Ice Bucket Challenge, was often achieved through direct encouragement. For example, participants in the Ice Bucket Challenge, after completing the challenge, publicly nominate others to do the same.
On the other hand, young people working on higher-risk tasks primarily wanted to feel included in a group already participating in such tasks. This was also the case with the Cinnamon Challenge, where participants ingested cinnamon too quickly and could experience lung damage and infections. For example, 38% of his study participants who participated in the Cinnamon Challenge admitted that they were seeking approval from their peers rather than being directly encouraged to participate.
“I think I did it because everyone I went to school with at the time was doing it,” said one student who saw the challenge as popular among his peers. “And I thought, if everyone is doing it, there must be something.”
2. Get attention
One form of attention-seeking behavior unique to participants in the Ice Bucket Challenge was the desire to be recognized as supporting a worthy cause.
However, the attention-seeking behavior observed among teens and young adults often led participants to devise riskier versions of the task. This includes enduring the associated risks longer than others.
For example, one participant in the Cinnamon Challenge swallowed powdered cinnamon for a longer period of time than the other participants. “It was definitely a companion, and like I said, it was attention-seeking,” they said. “Watch other friends post videos and see who can take the challenge longer.”
3. Entertainment
Many young people took part in these challenges for fun and curiosity. Some were interested in potential reactions from those who witnessed their performance.
One participant said of the Kiki Challenge, “It looked like fun, and I personally liked the artist singing this song.” The challenge involves getting out of a moving car and dancing next to it to the tune of Drake’s song “In My Feelings.” https://www.youtube.com/embed/SuXudLOP5bo?wmode=transparent&start=0 A Florida man was hit by another car during the Kiki Challenge.
Others were interested in experiencing the sensations associated with performing the challenge. They wondered if their reactions reflected the behavior of other people they had observed.
One participant said her motivation for taking the Cinnamon Challenge was “mainly curiosity.” “I wanted to see how other people reacted and see if I would have the same reaction.”
4. Contagious effect
Problems, even seemingly innocuous ones, can spread quickly across social media. This is due to the contagion effect where behaviors, attitudes, and ideas spread from person to person. How content creators portray these challenges on digital media platforms also contributes to the contagion effect by encouraging others to participate.
After analyzing digital media content related to the Blue Whale Challenge, we found that a YouTube video about the challenge violated the Suicide Prevention Resource Center’s nine message guidelines. This means that the post demonstrated risk factors that facilitate the transmission of harmful behavior.
Specifically, of the 60 YouTube videos analyzed regarding the Blue Whale Challenge, 37% adhered to fewer than three guidelines and were primarily classified as unsafe. The most commonly violated guidelines include avoiding detailed or romanticized depictions of suicide and its victims, failing to describe resources for seeking help, and failing to highlight effective mental health treatment. It was included.
In our study, we also investigated how participants perceived the task after completing it. Half of those who took part in a dangerous challenge said they might have chosen not to do it if they had understood the physical danger and potential risks to their social image.
“If I had done that, I wouldn’t have done the cinnamon challenge.” [I had known that] In the end, someone ended up in the hospital to do it,” one respondent told us.
Based on our research, we believe that if more information about the potential risks of social media challenges were provided to students at school, communicated to parents, and shared on social media, teens and young adults would We believe it can help people make thoughtful, informed decisions and potentially deter them. They don’t participate.
Kapil Chalil Madassir is the Wilfred P. Tienken Professor of Industrial and Civil Engineering at Clemson University, and Heidi Zinzo is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Clemson University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
see chart