Examining the Efficacy of Using a Change Blindness Framework as a Novel Social Media Intervention

Abstract

Exposure to idealized, appearance-focused images on social media has been found to be damaging to young women’s body image and self-esteem (Groesz et al., 2001). The goal of the current study was to examine the efficacy of a novel intervention that could serve as a buffer to idealized content, thereby reducing the amount of physical appearance comparisons made by young persons on social media. The intervention consisted of a single disclaimer that informed participants about the difficulty in detecting edited photos from a change blindness framework. Participants (N = 46) were randomly assigned to view either the experimental or control disclaimer before being shown 10 image pairs that depicted a single college-aged woman wearing a bikini. In 5 of the pairs, the second image was edited to reflect the slight changes social media users make to achieve a slimmer look. We found that women who were shown the experimental disclaimer and edited image pairs (M = 3.71, SD = 1.27) more accurately detected changes than those shown the control disclaimer (M = 2.77, SD = 1.11, p < .001). Results suggest that the disclaimer informed women about photo-editing practices, and this change in awareness led to them more accurately detecting changes in edited image pairs. However, we found no effect between disclaimer conditions on physical appearance comparisons. The study’s primary limitation was that the experimental disclaimer functioned as a brief, single-exposure intervention, and thus, more in-depth interventions aimed at informing young persons about their media consumption should be designed and tested.