The creeping influence of doomscrolling

Spending hours on your phone looking at miserable news stories, to many, feels easier than ever. Obsessively looking at negative content online, also known as doomscrolling, can feel both horrendous in the moment, and also really difficult to stop.

Taking in so much awful news hits many people on a deeper level than passing sadness. Writing in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, Rexa Shabahang and colleagues look at the broader effects of doomscrolling from an existential perspective, exploring what it does to our views on human nature, and our beliefs about what gives life meaning. They find that the effects of doomscrolling reach well beyond the time with our screens, and can make us more generally pessimistic about the world.

Participants for this study were 800 university students from Iran (620) and the United States (180), all of whom were active social media users. Firstly, the students completed a scale designed to measure their tendency to doomscroll, indicating how much they agreed with statements including "I have the urge to view more and more negative content on social media."

Next, the team assessed existential anxiety. This scale covered three domains — fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, and guilt and condemnation — through statements such as "I often think that the things that were once important in life are empty." Participants then answered questions on two other areas of negative affect: belief in a just world, and misanthropy (the extent to which they feel dislike towards other people).  

In both Iranian and American participants, doomscrolling predicted higher levels of existential anxiety (though the association was moderate, rather than strong). In Iranian students, doomscrolling also predicted slightly higher levels of misanthropy; while it was a predictor of misanthropy in US students, too, this was not significant.

There were also associations between the other factors. Lowered belief in a just world was associated with higher levels of existential anxiety and misanthropy in Iranian participants, and there was also a relationship between existential anxiety and misanthropy, suggesting that the three domains are closely interlinked.

Overall, the results suggest that doomscrolling can not only have a negative impact on our mental health, but can exacerbate deep existential concerns about ourselves and the world (though it is important to note that the results were correlational, rather than causal). The team points to a hypothesis that suggests challenging experiences, such as viewing traumatic content, can weaken mechanisms that protect us from thoughts of death, making them more present in our minds beyond just the moment we interact with disturbing content.

This study was unable to get information on the exact content participants were viewing, which somewhat limits the analyses. Some online content is actively traumatic — images of death or war, for example. Yet other forms of doomscrolling, while negative, may be less extreme: spending too much time looking at election news might make us feel bad, but is unlikely to traumatise us. Drawing on some of that nuance may form a more complete picture in future work.

It would be tempting to neatly conclude that logging off is a simple solution to this issue, but this isn't always easy. Other research suggests that doomscrolling can be addictive, making it hard to switch off. For those looking to quit, however, knowing the potential impact of their scrolling could be a good first step —  and might even help them see the good in the world once more.

Read the paper in full:

Shabahang, R., Hwang, H., Thomas, E. F., Aruguete, M. S., McCutcheon, L. E., Orosz, G., Hossein Khanzadeh, A. A., Mokhtari Chirani, B., & Zsila, Á. (2024). Doomscrolling evokes existential anxiety and fosters pessimism about human nature? Evidence from Iran and the United States. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 15, 100438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100438