An international online survey of young adults found that individuals spending longer time on social media as well as those spending longer time on dating apps tended to have slightly lower body satisfaction and body appreciation. People spending more time on social media also had a slightly higher drive to be lean, while longer time on dating apps was associated with a slightly higher drive for muscularity. The paper was published in the British Journal of Health Psychology.
Social media and dating apps have become central parts of everyday life for many young adults, shaping not only how people communicate but also how they see their own bodies. Highly visual platforms constantly expose users to carefully selected and edited images of attractive peers, influencers, and celebrities. These images often promote unrealistic appearance ideals, such as extreme thinness for women and lean muscularity for men.
As users compare themselves with these standards, they may experience greater body dissatisfaction, lower body appreciation, and stronger pressure to change their appearance. Dating apps may intensify these effects because they place users in situations of direct evaluation, competition, and possible rejection. On these platforms, profile photographs often become the main basis on which people judge one another, encouraging greater self-scrutiny and concern about physical attractiveness.
Gianluca Lo Coco, a researcher affiliated with the University of Palermo in Italy, and colleagues wanted to explore the interrelations between social media and dating app use on the one hand, and body image on the other. They hypothesized that young adults who spend more time on social media have poorer images of their bodies.
More specifically, they expected these individuals to show lower body satisfaction and body appreciation, higher acceptance of the thinness ideal, and to show a higher drive for leanness and muscularity. Their second hypothesis was that more time spent on dating apps would be associated with a worse body image as well.
The researchers conducted an online survey, polling 5,933 young adults from across the world. The largest share of participants was from the United States, followed by Spain, Canada, China, Italy, Belgium, Australia, and Japan. In total, 4,003 participants were women. Across countries, the share of female participants ranged from 58.5% to 84.9%. University students were between 73.1% and 99% of the sample depending on the country.
Study participants answered questions about whether they use social media and dating apps. If they answered positively, a question about how much time they spent on social media or dating apps followed.
The survey also contained several assessments of body image, including the Body Appreciation Scale-2, the Body Areas Satisfaction Scale, the Physical Appearance Comparison Scale, the Drive for Leanness Scale, the Drive for Muscularity Scale, and the Internalization Thin/Low Body Fat subscale from the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire-4. The researchers calculated participants’ body mass indexes from the weight and height values participants reported.
Results showed that 94% of participants used social media. On average, they reported spending 6-7 hours per week on social media. Women reported spending more time on social media than men. Depending on the country, between 5% and 45% of participants reported using dating apps. On average, they reported spending 1-2 hours per week on dating apps. Men tended to report spending more time on dating apps than women.
Results further showed that individuals who spent more time on social media tended to have slightly lower satisfaction with their bodies and to be less appreciative of them. They had a slightly higher drive for leanness, higher drive for muscularity, higher thin-ideal internalization, and higher appearance comparison. In other words, they tended to have a stronger desire to be lean or muscular, greater acceptance of thinness as the ideal body standard, and more frequently compared their own appearance with that of other people.
Longer time spent on dating apps was also associated with slightly lower body appreciation and a higher drive for muscularity, but also with lower appearance comparison. The associations with the drive for muscularity tended to be stronger in men than in women.
“Greater social media and dating app use may be related to poor body image and related indicators across countries, particularly among young men,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological correlates of social media use. However, it should be noted that the observed associations are mostly very weak and detectable primarily because the number of study participants was very large.
The paper “Investigating the relation between social media, dating app use and body image dimensions: A cross-country study” was authored by Gianluca Lo Coco, Rachel Rodgers, Emily A. Harris, Charlotte Markey, Alvaro Sicilia, Annie Aimé, Jacinthe Dion, Laura Salerno, Naomi Hayami-Chisuwa, Hannah J. White, Carolyn R. Plateau, Antonio Granero-Gallegos, Christophe Maïano, Gian Mauro Manzoni, Giada Pietrabissa, Catherine Bégin, Marie-Éve Blackburn, Esben Strodl, Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, and Marita McCabe.