Under the Influence: How Viewing Extreme Partying and Drinking on Social Media Shapes Group Perceptions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social media use is omnipresent among college students. The current study investigated how exposure to student risk-taking forms of alcohol use on social media shapes the perceptions of the prototypical student and drinking norms among students. A 2020, three time-point experiment was conducted that measured 208 (M age = 18.85, SD = 1.94; 160 female) participant’s partying/drinking prototypes along with their perceived normative support of alcohol consumption. At Time 2, participants were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions, three video conditions and one non-video condition, with one video condition displaying risk-taking drinking behavior. A Mixed ANOVA revealed that within the risk-taking drinking condition, participants used more pro-alcohol words to describe the typical ingroup member and perceived an increase in normative support of alcohol consumption. Implications of this study suggest that risk-taking content from social media may pose barriers to developing social norms interventions to address problematic college student drinking.