The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

Researchers in France exposed young women either to media photographs of very thin women or to media photographs of average-sized women.[41] They found that the young women exposed to images of very thin women became more anxious about their own body and appearance. But here’s the surprising thing: The images were flashed on a screen for just 20 milliseconds, too fast for the women to become consciously aware of what they had seen. The authors conclude that “social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.” This means that the frequent reminders girls give each other that social media is not reality are likely to have only a limited effect, because the part of the brain that is doing the comparisons is not governed by the part of the brain that knows, consciously, that they are seeing only edited highlight reels.