Beyond Active and Passive Social Media Use: Habit Mechanisms Are Behind Frequent Posting and Scrolling on Twitter/X

This dissertation examined the motivations behind scrolling and posting behavior on Twitter (now X). In particular, I tested whether these passive and active forms of social media use become habitual and insensitive to the various rewards provided by Twitter/X. Habitual, frequent social media use should build posting habits that are automatically cued by contexts, whereas new or occasional users should be driven by rewarding outcomes, especially rewards greater than expected (Anderson & Wood, 2021; 2023). The first study (N = 400) used a novel scraping procedure to track users’ postings for two weeks through the Twitter API. As predicted, highly frequent posters continued to post regardless of the social rewards they received from others. Reward impact was assessed through reward prediction error (RPE), or the quantity of rewards on the last post compared with typical experience. In contrast, less frequent posters changed their posting rates given larger RPEs (i.e., were reward-responsive). A second study (N = 320) used an experimental design to test scrolling of curated sets of content. As predicted, habitual scrollers were relatively unaffected by the rewardingness, or interest value, of the tweets scrolled (calculated as RPEs). In contrast, less habitual and less frequent Twitter/X scrollers were more likely to dwell on a tweet with especially rewarding content. In sum, the repeated use of social media makes habits a fundamental mechanism for understanding the motivations that drive active and passive site use.