Under the Influence: How Viewing Extreme Partying and Drinking on Social Media Shapes Group Perceptions

Social media use is omnipresent among college students. The current study investigated how exposure to student risk-taking forms of alcohol use on social media shapes the perceptions of the prototypical student and drinking norms among students. A 2020, pre-registered three time-point experiment was conducted that measured 208 (M age = 18.85, SD = 1.94; 160 female) participant's partying/drinking prototypes along with their perceived normative support of alcohol consumption. At Time 2, participants were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions, three video conditions and one non-video condition, with one video condition displaying risk-taking drinking behavior. A Mixed ANOVA revealed that within the risk-taking drinking condition, participants used more pro-alcohol words to describe the typical ingroup member and perceived an increase in normative support of alcohol consumption. Implications of this study suggest that risk-taking content from social media may pose barriers to developing social norms interventions to address problematic college student drinking.