A Multidisciplinary Approach to Social Media Addiction: A New Look at Social Media Addiction in the Context of White Bear Thought Suppression and Overuse

Abstract

White bear thought suppression is a vicious cycle of thinking characterized by thinking, wanting not to think, and thinking again, which dates back to the work of Wegner et al. The reason for the present study is that the problem of “white bear thought suppression”, which was proposed in previous years, has re-emerged in the digital environment as psychological disorder accompanying excessive social media use. Some people constantly think about what is happening on social media, cannot distinguish between digital and reality, and cannot manage their mental thinking process. With the effect of visualization, people are exposed more to visual stimulants. This situation may cause disturbances in people’s thought processes. The intense visual flows of social media may pose a risk for excessive users in terms of both thought suppression and social media addiction. This study focuses on providing a new look at social media addiction in the context of white bear thought suppression and overuse. This study can provide a new perspective on behavioral addictions.

1. Introduction

The stress of today’s busy city life and the excessive use of social media have revealed many irregularities in people’s lives. Daily tasks accumulate and exposure to digital media for too long harms people psychologically. Not being able to limit the time spent on social media, turning to social media as a way to escape from daily problems, having sleeping difficulties, avoiding responsibilities, and experiencing interpersonal problems also damage people’s thought management.

Failure to manage thoughts is an open invitation to other accompanying problems. The white bear thought suppression experiment, dating back many years, produced surprising results. When participants were asked not to think about the White Bear for a while, they were unable to do so, no matter how much they wanted to. Based on this experiment, Wegner et al. [1] defined thought suppression phenomenon, which they called white bear thought suppression.

It has two scientific bases. Accordingly, it is a system of thought within the theory developed by Freud [2] within the science of psychology. It was also included in the writings of Dostoyevsky [3] and Tolstoy [4] about the difficulty of avoiding thoughts about the white bear. Many studies on the difficulty of avoiding thoughts form the basis of white bear suppression [5, 6].

It is stated that the reason why it is called white bear is that the idea that white bears eat people in Russia spread among people and was inspired by people’s efforts to remove this. Later, the inability of a person to avoid unwanted thoughts resulting in greater exposure has been studied many times. Examples of this can be given as eating or having recurring thoughts about eating more while on a diet or smoking more when wanting to quit smoking.

If we bring the subject to the present day, social media has a dimension that affects thoughts, which is already one of the determinants of social media addiction and is referred to as “preoccupation”. When people are not connected to social media, they think about it more and they cannot stop themselves from recurring thoughts about what is going on there. Therefore, the dimension called mental occupation is also included in the social media addiction scales and causes difficulties in people’s ability to focus on daily tasks and interpersonal relationships. In addition, excessive users have a high risk of developing social media addiction, which is considered a type of behavioral addiction. In the study of the issues of overuse and addiction in terms of their potential to suppress thoughts or cause impairment, it is necessary to consider their relationship with thought suppression. The reason for this is that people now spend a lot of mental effort in thinking, describing, and interpreting what is happening on social media and what they see there. However, when the scientific literature was examined, it was determined that there was a deficiency in this regard. Addressing the issue of social media addiction and thought suppression together is the original direction of this study, and it is aimed to form a basis for future studies.

2. Thought suppression problem

The idea that people can have unwanted thoughts is one of Freud’s central perspectives, and the idea that people repress such thoughts has long served as a theoretical basis for the study of psychopathology [7, 8]. Classical psychoanalytic theory refers to the problem of thought suppression. Suppressing a thought requires (a) planning to suppress a thought and (b) carrying out that plan by suppressing all manifestations of the thought, including the original plan. Thought suppression therefore requires simultaneously knowing and not knowing. Freud [9, 10] made this theoretically possible by postulating the dissociated state, namely the unconscious. The unconscious can perform the suppression of conscious thought.

This psychoanalytic emphasis on unconscious repression has resulted in a long-standing bias against the study of consciousness during processes of thought suppression. In contrast, contemporary research has addressed directed forgetting [11] and posthypnotic amnesia rather than directed inattention or directed conscious avoidance, since the process of repression is expected to be observable only after the event and to leave a trace in memory. There are many examples of this in daily life. Trying not to think about an upcoming stressful event, avoiding thoughts of smoking when trying to quit, or trying to banish persistent thoughts about a lost love are common experiences for many. Anxiety of all kinds are conscious thoughts in which people express desires they do not have. Researchers have been curious about what happens when people make a conscious effort to avoid a particular thought.

When the literature is examined, there are reports that there is not enough evidence in studies on thought suppression. Accordingly, early studies by Mcgranahan [12] and Sears and Virshup [13] showed that people instructed to avoid making color associations with stimulating words still reported such associations even when threatened with shock. In these cases, people only knew the general color category rather than knowing in advance the specific thought to suppress. In another study, Logan [14] examined response time patterns to stop signals while subjects performed short tasks. Logan found that actions can be stopped midway, but thoughts reach conclusions when stimuli that activate them are present. This method was also tried for obsessive disorders by Wolpe and Lazarus [15].

Another line of evidence emerges from research urging people to ignore information relevant to a decision they have to make. People were instructed to ignore information before encountering it (e.g., subsequent decisions). Jurors are influenced by information they are instructed to ignore [16] and media audiences are influenced by news they are told is untrue [6]. Accordingly, people who evaluate probabilities are reportedly influenced by information, even when they are offered money to ignore it [17]. These effects seem unlikely if people could eliminate their conscious experience of the thoughts they are instructed to ignore [18]. Then, the hypothesis proposed by a wide range of studies to date is that conscious thought suppression is not a cognitive transformation that people perform with great ease.

The mental state produced by attempted thought suppression appears to differ in several ways from the accompanying simple inattention or unwanted distraction. The hypothesis put forward by several theorists is that attempts to suppress thoughts (or emotions) may result in subsequent reabsorption of these issues. Prototypical work in this area [19] demonstrated that individuals who tended to personally avoid thinking about impending surgery subsequently had more anxious responses to it. Although the meaning of this finding is still debated [15, 19], there is some degree of theoretical consensus to conclude that avoiding a stressful thought can lead to subsequent intrusions of that thought [20].

The possibility that thought suppression leads to absorption is also observed in people’s reactions to situations where they have to abstain from food or addictive substances. Given the assumption that attempts to avoid a habitual behavior only precede attempts to suppress or avoid habit-related thoughts, the pattern of behavior that follows attempts at self-control is informative about the pattern of thoughts that may occur. For example, Polivy and Herman [21] noted that, in the case of food abstinence, dieting often leads to subsequent overeating. There is some strong evidence to suggest that restricting eating is a reliable predictor of binge eating and overweight. It seems that attempting to avoid thoughts of food can lead to subsequent preoccupation with such thoughts.

Marlatt and Parks [22] observed the more general abstinence-violation effect and suggested that the abstinence state is delicate because relapse into an addictive behavior can be triggered by a seemingly minor violation of prohibition. This is in line with the idea that an initial attempt to suppress thoughts may be followed by an unusual preoccupation with the suppressed thought domains. In their view, the event that freezes suppression and triggers relapse may be a single event that draws the person’s attention to the originally suppressed thought. Thus, results from past findings emerge in two different directions. First, thought suppression has been shown to be difficult for people; consciously avoiding a thought may be confusing and even time-consuming. Second, there is some evidence to suggest that even if thoughts can be suppressed, they can return to consciousness with minimal stimulation, perhaps to become obsessive preoccupations.

3. Measurement of white bear thought suppression

When the literature is examined, it is seen that some studies have been carried out to measure thought suppression. White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), developed by Wegner and Zanakos [23], is a self-report scale to evaluate the tendency to consciously suppress unwanted thoughts. Other scales such as “Thought Control Questionnaire” [24] and “Interpretation of Intrusions Inventory” [25] have also been developed to be used for similar purposes in this field. However, the use of these scales is largely limited to OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) compared to the WBSI. WBSI offers a wider range of uses. In this context, it has also been used in psychiatric diseases such as OCD, other anxiety disorders, depression, and substance addiction [26, 27, 28, 29].

A scale for thought suppression called the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI) was obtained by Wegner and Zanakos [23], based on two factors: Suppression and Aggression. The WBSI has been associated with measures of obsessive thinking and depressive and anxious affects. It has been stated that it can be used to predict clinical symptoms of obsession among individuals prone to obsessive thinking, to predict depression among individuals motivated to dislike negative thoughts, and to predict failure to habituate to electrodermal responses among people with emotional thoughts [23]. Some findings were obtained in a later study conducted with the scale. According to the findings, it was found that intrusive rumination significantly predicted anxiety and depression [30].

A preliminary study on the validity and reliability of the WBSI was conducted by Ağargün et al. [31] and added the Turkish version of the scale to the literature in 2004. In the study involving 30 patients diagnosed with OCD according to DSM-IV criteria and 47 subjects, the internal consistency reliability Cronbach Alpha value of the scale was found to be 0.92. Psychometric analysis of the study was conducted with individuals diagnosed with OCD and healthy individuals. Study results have shown that the psychometric properties of the WBSI are a reliable and valid scale for assessing the tendency to consciously suppress unwanted thoughts in a Turkish sample [31]. According to the researchers, this scale can contribute to studies on the etiopathogenesis of anxiety disorders, especially OCD, and to studies in the treatment phase, as well as in the emergence of psychopathology.

WBSI measures a person’s tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts, which are ego-dystonic and cause significant distress. Although adaptation studies of this scale have been carried out in different samples in the past years, it is necessary to re-study it within the new conditions such as widespread social media use. Since technological advances provided a new perspective in the evaluation of thought suppression studies, the contribution of current studies in the context of the relationship with different scales is important. Thus, it can be said that new conditions serve as a locomotive that carries existing theories to the present day.

Wegner et al. [1] state that there are various strategies to help “suppress the white bears”, that is, to control obsessive thoughts. These strategies are as follows:

1. Choose a distractor and focus on that instead: Wegner and colleagues asked participants to think of a red Volkswagen instead of a white bear. Giving participants something else to focus on has been found to help them avoid unwanted white bears.

2. Try to postpone worry: Asking people to devote half an hour a day to worry allows them to try to avoid worrying for the rest of the day. So, the next time an unwanted thought comes to mind, it is suggested that one try to tell oneself: “I am not going to think about it until tomorrow.”

3. Reduce multitasking: It has been found that people under increased mental load show an increase in the presence of thoughts of death. It is known that this thought is one of the most undesirable thoughts for most people.

4. Exposure: When a person is allowed to think in a controlled way about what he/she wants to avoid, it will be less likely to return to the thoughts at other times.

5. Meditation and mindfulness: There is evidence that meditation and mindfulness strengthen mental control and help people avoid unwanted thoughts.

4. Social media addiction and overuse

With the widespread use of social media around the world, many problems have emerged. Studies indicate that when social media use cannot be limited, the individual’s daily life is disrupted, such as poor quality of sleep, postponing the work to be done, problems with people in social and private life, excessive mental preoccupation, wanting to limit the use but not being able to, craving when it is not accessible or recurring thoughts about limiting the use of the internet [32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43]. Again, it is stated that, as the duration of social media use increases, life satisfaction among users declines [44].

In studies showing that social media harms many aspects of life, social media addiction was defined as a type of behavioral addiction, and social media-specific addiction diagnostic criteria and psychometric scales were published based on diagnostic criteria similar to internet addiction [33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49]. Nowadays, social media addiction is considered to be more harmful than alcohol and tobacco addiction. Some studies report that the desire to be on social networks is higher than the desire to sleep and rest [50, 51, 52].

Tutgun-Ünal [39] defines social media addiction as “a psychological problem that leads to such issues as occupation, mood modification, relapse and conflict in many aspects like personal, social, work/school areas of daily life, growing through cognitive, emotive and behavioral processes”. Based on this definition, she aimed to develop the first social media addiction scale in Turkey and to examine the problems created by social media in all areas of life. The 5-point Likert-type measurement tool, consisting of 41 items and 4 factors, is used to determine social media addiction levels. Following the study, many researchers in Turkey continued to develop addiction scales with various names on different groups for general social media addiction, which includes all social media applications [45, 47, 48, 53].

It is observed that many studies have been carried out by applying the developed measurement tools to different groups [54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59]. In one study, in individuals with some other disorders such as hyperactivity, and attention deficit disorder (ADD), social media addiction is examined through some other variables [46]. In another study conducted with 473 high school students, the relationship between social media addiction and academic procrastination behavior was examined. Moderate levels of social media addiction were detected in men and women, and academic procrastination behavior was found to be higher in men due to social media [56].

According to research, some additional diagnoses are effective in determining social media addiction. Since daily use alone is not enough, different reasons affecting addiction may vary from person to person. For example, it is stated that young people with narcissistic personality traits are more likely to develop social media addiction [51]. Further, it has been found in many studies that there is a positive relationship between loneliness and social media addiction, and as loneliness increases, social media addiction increases [60]. The opposite is also possible: The increase in social media addiction also increases loneliness [61, 62]. In Bozkurt’s [61] research, young people using social media were examined in terms of selfishness and loneliness. The research, in which 528 users participated, revealed that there is a positive relationship between selfishness and loneliness. On the other hand, a study reporting that social media has an egocentric structure emphasizes that this structure facilitates the formation of social media addiction and makes excessive use attractive [38]. In addition, some researchers suggest that a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors, also referred to as the biopsychosocial approach, will contribute to the etiology of addiction and also to social media addiction [35].

Social media addiction studies have become quite multi-dimensional by separately investigating other behavioral addictions that occur together with social media addiction in individuals. Many such variations can be listed: Work addiction, substance use disorder, compulsive buying-shopping disorder, exercise addiction, etc. [50]. In addition, the activities that people are interested in can lead them to social media addiction. According to the biopsychosocial approach, the fact that social media addiction is open to effects from many combinations and varies according to many personality traits reveals that comprehensive research is still needed.

Nowadays, the desire to be liked and its association with body perception stems from the fact that social media constantly presents the ideal body. People called “influencers” constantly share images of their slim bodies, luxury/expensive places, clothes, cars, circle of friends, and many other posts on social media, creating a perception that people should live like this. Young people particularly run the risk of idealizing this. In fact, excessive use can be considered as the desire to be liked, frequently sharing posts, and spending time to prepare these shares.

On the other hand, as revealed by research, excessive use is not a direct cause of social media addiction but a determinant. It is emphasized that social media used for more than 4 hours a day, opens the door to many emotional, intellectual, and behavioral problems. In a series of current studies, it has been found that people who use social media for 4 hours or more have a decrease in benevolence and an increase in malevolence [63], a decrease in meaning and purpose in life [64] a decrease in spirituality [65], or a decrease in family perceptions and attitudes [66]. These results show that there may be some distortions in the thinking system of people who use social media excessively. It has been thought that social media use for 1 hour a day will not cause negativity on these issues. This brings to mind white bear thought suppression [1]. This widespread use of popular social media channels reveals the need to re-examine how thought suppression is affected by these networks. Digital visual elements in new media have more potential to be remembered than verbal elements. From this perspective, all-day use of visual-based social media channels such as Instagram is a subject worth investigating in terms of white bear thought suppression. It can be concluded that social media addiction, excessive social media use, excessive digital media consumption, and thought suppression should be studied as interrelated issues.

5. The effect of visualization

The issue of the effect of visualization is not new. At first, Dale’s cone of experience shed light, especially on educators (Figure 1) [67]. Teachers/pre-service teachers conveyed the information in a more memorable way by applying what they learned on this subject in their lessons and transferring it to their students. Dale’s cone of experience can be adapted to many areas today and is functional in explaining the retention effect of visuals [68].

Figure 1.

Edgar Dale’s cone of experience [67].

Dale is of the opinion that the basis of education depends on sensory experiences directly interacting with stimulating sources. Dale believes that people remember most of their experiences [69]. For this reason, Dale [67] considers it important to benefit from experiences in teaching strategies according to the Cone of Experience. Similar to Piaget and Vygotsky’s constructivist approach, Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience [67] is based on the transfer of learning around a graph [70]. In Dale’s Cone of Experience model, learning experiences consist of hierarchically ordered steps from concrete experiences to abstract experiences. Another striking point in Dale’s Cone of Experience is the use of materials. At many levels of the cone, there are experiences that prioritize the use of materials. The importance of using materials in education has been clearly emphasized in many studies conducted in the following years. This points to the issue of visualizing information.

As we can see from the figure, the corrupted model purports to inform learners of how much people remember based on how they receive information. According to it, learners generally remember:

• 10% of what they read.

• 20% of what they hear.

• 30% of what they see.

• 50% of what they hear and see.

• 70% of what they say and write.

• And 90% of what do.

Dale’s Cone gives importance to the enrichment of learning experiences like many similar theoretical approaches in the literature. Nowadays, digital posts using enriched media are circulating on social media and have an impact on people’s lives throughout the day. As the level of exposure to digital circulation increases, visual information has a greater impact on long-term memory, thus, managing thought processes may become difficult for the person. It can be said that digital posts on the same subject, which are visible and frequently encountered in the social media stream, may have the potential to have an adverse effect on avoidance efforts. As a result, in future studies on the relationship between thought suppression and social media addiction, the effect of visualization on thought processes should be taken into consideration.

6. Conclusions

This section aimed to provide a new perspective on social media addiction in the context of thought suppression and excessive use. Nowadays, it has become essential to have a multidisciplinary perspective to fully understand the subject. Excessive use and social media addiction are common like a plague in our age and harm many areas in people’s lives. People are experiencing recurring problems despite efforts to cope with work disruptions, interpersonal problems, sleep disorders, and mental occupation. Social media addiction is considered a type of behavioral addiction but nonetheless harms people’s lives just like alcohol and substance use disorder and needs to be treated. Loneliness, depression, and different types of personality disorders can accompany social media addiction and make people’s lives even more difficult. Therefore, the need for updated clinical studies continues. In this study, thought suppression was discussed in order to look at it from a different perspective. It was noted that white bear thought suppression, which was previously proposed by Wegner et al., can be reconsidered today with social media. Although thought suppression is a subject that has been studied separately, it can be studied with a multidisciplinary perspective to understand whether it accompanies social media addiction. Excessive use of social media and overexposure to digital media and visualized messages can lead to unwanted, repetitive thoughts. A person who frequently encounters unwanted messages may not be able to manage thoughts after a while and may try to suppress them. This indicates white bear thought suppression. Therefore, excessive use of social media, social media addiction, and the impact of visual media create a new working area that is needed today. This study aimed to provide a basis for these issues. Thus, new studies with quantitative methods are needed in the future.

Acknowledgments

This study does not include any funding.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

White bear thought suppression was named by Wegner et al. because thought suppression has been likened to the behavior of white bears.