Social Media and Identity Development

Adolescence now unfolds in a social media-infused era. How does social media use affect identity formation, the key developmental task of adolescence? In this chapter, we argue that social media can be understood as a novel communicative setting, with unique features and affordances, in which fundamental psychological needs related to identity development play out, just as they do in offline settings. To explicate how social media interfaces with these needs, we introduce the 4S framework, anchored in four psychological processes essential for identity development: self-presentation, self-reflection, social comparison, and social feedback. For each process, we discuss how social media use affects identity-relevant outcomes, such as self-concept clarity, self-esteem, and peer relationships. Far from arguing that social media is either “good” or “bad” for adolescents’ identity development, our framework articulates a complex set of psychological effects of social media, that depend on how it is used, by whom, and what identity-related outcomes are considered.