Males (but not females) who use social networking sites excessively make more impulsive decisions than those who do not: Role of gender and delay discounting

ABSTRACT

The aim of the present study was to examine the role of gender and impulsive decision making on social networking site (SNS) use in college students. Participants completed a delay-discounting task with hypothetical monetary rewards, in which they made repeated choices between a larger amount of money obtained later and an equal or lower amount of money obtained immediately. Based on the reported hours spent for SNS use, the participants were first grouped into the high or low SNS use group. They were then grouped by gender. The results show that, in females, the high SNS users did not differ significantly from the low SNS users in terms of rates of delay discounting, whereas in males, the high SNS users discounted delayed monetary rewards at greater rates than the low SNS users. These findings support the conclusion that gender acts as a moderating variable in the relation between SNS use and impulsive decision making. The present study contributes to the literature by providing implications for developing effective intervention strategies for excessive/problematic SNS use.

KEYWORDS:

• Social networking site use
• delay discounting
• gender
• impulsive decision making
• behavioural economics
• college students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics

The institutional review board at the Pennsylvania State University reviewed the study protocol and deemed the study exempt.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Availability of data

The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.

Notes

1 Given the lack of clear threshold for ‘high/low’ or ‘excessive/non-excessive’ use of SNS in the literature, the present study relied on the percentiles of SNS use (33rd and 67th) within the sample for the group assignment. Although the choice of these percentiles is somewhat arbitrary, the results of the group assignment revealed that the high SNS use females and males, respectively, showed more than 7 and 5 hours of daily SNS use on average (but see also the relatively high standard deviations and wide ranges). Because daily SNS use in a general population is 2 hours on average (Clement 2020), we believe our group assignment is at least justifiable for this exploratory study. Nevertheless, it is recommended that future research replicates this study to examine the validity of the group assignment.

2 An alternative way to conduct the analyses was to create groups using the degree of delay discounting as one of the independent variables and SNS use as the dependent variable. The experimental psychopathology approach employed in this study, however, requires that a disorder-related criterion group should be compared to a control group in terms of an explanatory variable. Because the ‘disorder’ to be analyzed in the present study was excessive SNS use and the explanatory variable that could account for the ‘disorder’ was excessive delay discounting (impulsive decision making), we used SNS use as one of the independent variables such that the potential causal influence of excessive delay discounting on excessive SNS use, rather than the influence of excessive SNS use on excessive delay discounting, could be implied.