A study Toma conducted this year found that admiring one’s own Facebook profile has palpable self-affirming effects, and that people naturally gravitate to Facebook for a boost when their ego has been knocked. Her unwitting participants were asked to carry out a public speaking task, only to receive crushingly negative feedback. Half of the subjects were allowed to peruse their own Facebook profiles before receiving the feedback, and this group turned out to be way less defensive than the others. Instead of accusing their evaluator, for example, of incompetence, they said: “Yeah, there’s some truth to this feedback. Maybe there are things I can do to improve my performance.”

Toma asked yet more participants to give the same speech, only this time she gave them either neutral or terrible reviews. They were then presented with a choice of five (fake) further studies to take part in – one involving logging on to Facebook, and four decoys. “We were excited to find,” she says, “that when participants’ egos were threatened, they chose Facebook at twice the rate than the others” – evidence of what she calls “an unconscious mechanism to decide to repair feelings of self worth. This is why people spend more time on Facebook after a hard day or something bad happening – because it reassures you that you’re connected, that you have interesting activities and hobbies, photographs, etc.”

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