Social Media Ills and Evolutionary Mismatches: A Conceptual Framework

“…of evolved psychological mechanisms and the role of evolutionary mismatch—particularly, mismatches inducing negative consequences or costs to individuals and society—may be able to lead to more informed problem-solving and public policy (Griskevicius et al., 2012; Li et al., 2018, 2020).”

“Consequently, social information held substantial relevance and importance due to the intimate size of the village community (Yong & Li, 2018).”

“Individuals who were less intelligent faced greater difficulty in distinguishing television characters from real friends (Kanazawa, 2002, 2006).”

“What is considered beautiful is likely highly heterogeneous and dependent on the specific advantages conferred upon those who possess the traits across a multitude of human ecology (Bovet, 2018).”

“This input can overload our evolutionarily endowed cognitive system, generating undue stress and decreased work productivity (Hughes et al., 2024).”

“For instance, while social media usage is often linked to declines in self-esteem, recent research findings indicate that this may not hold true, particularly when individuals have social media networks of evolutionarily novel sizes, such as 500 friends (Lim et al., 2021).”

“This is evident by the complex layering of evolved communication systems that facilitate face-to-face interaction in various domains of life (Thibault, 2008, p. 292).”

“People may give “Likes” for several reasons and interpret “Likes” in various ways rather than as actual appreciation of the content (Jungselius, 2019).”

“…that promote self-efficacy and social skills, we may be able to restore formative environments that more closely reflect those of our evolutionary history, which facilitates the development and acquisition of socially, ecologically, and culturally relevant skills (see Periss & Bjorklund, 2011).”

“FOMO has been linked to activating the right middle temporal gyrus, a brain region associated with processing social inclusion signals (Liu et al., 2021).”

“Computer-mediated virtual social interactions increasingly resemble in-person interactions (Bailenson, 2018; Nass & Reeves, 1997).”

“For instance, intelligence has been recognized as a factor underlying responses to evolutionarily novel stimuli (e.g., Kanazawa & Hellberg, 2010; Kanazawa et al., 2022).”

“Due to high social interconnectivity on social media, people are frequently exposed to the presence of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (Michaelidou et al., 2021) and their pretenders, who often flaunt their wealth on social media (Chen, 2022).”

“Indeed, our findings are in line with the mismatch hypothesis (Lim and Tan, 2024), which suggests that SNSs hijack our evolved social comparisons mechanisms by offering (too) abundant opportunities for upward comparisons.”

“…addictive use (Cai et al., 2023), interference with sleep (Brautsch et al., 2023), evolutionary mismatches resulting from biased social cues (Lim and Tan, 2024), and exposure to online risks such as hate speech (Bührer et al., 2024), sexting (Mori et al., 2019), or self-harm-related…”