Digital media has changed how adolescents’ behavior is socialized, and this is especially relevant to the development of character-building traits such as generosity, prosocial behavior, and self-control. Yet, most prior research on adolescent digital media use has examined “screen-time,” rather than specific features and content adolescents are exposed to online, little research has examined longitudinal associations, and almost no prior work has examined how digital media experiences may interact with individual differences in neural development.
Our team will examine adolescents’ neural responses to online content as a moderator of the prospective association between exposure to character-building content online (i.e., conveying pro-generosity, self-control, and civic engagement norms) and adolescents’ own short and long-term changes in character-building traits. Specifically, we will utilize a youth-centered approach in developing and validating a measure assessing exposure to peers’ character-building content in online settings, and experimentally test character-building peer influence effects in a digital context. Further, we will explore neurobiological responses to character-building social media content (i.e., exposure to character-building TikTok videos).
The resulting dataset, academic publications, and presentations from our project will offer crucial information to help guide parents, educators, and teens themselves on how to best leverage social media platforms to promote virtuous behaviors among adolescents in an era when social media has been vilified as a source of moral, intellectual, and social decline.
