MINDFULNESS: A POTENTIAL MITIGATING MECHANISM FOR CONDITIONED PROBLEMATIC SOCIAL MEDIA USE

John Correia

As social media becomes ubiquitously infused into business and other areas of modern life, there are encouraging and disturbing outcomes associated with their use. Social media services provide tremendous value to individuals, organizations, and society by connecting people and providing access to helpful information. On the other hand, when combining the profit-driven decisions behind their design with the algorithmically controlled user experience and ubiquitous multipurpose nature of modern devices, social media use is resulting in various problematic outcomes. This behavior is termed problematic social media use and defined as single or multiple instance(s) of social media use that results in experiencing negative outcomes in the present situation and/or increases the probability of experiencing negative outcomes in the future. Despite its prevalence in modern society, the IS literature lacks a theory that explains how these behaviors are developed and also how they can be mitigated. Therefore, this dissertation develops the conditioned problematic social media use (CPSMU) process model which is used to understand the influence of affect-specific conditioned social media use on problematic use and its associated negative outcomes. The CPSMU is used to evaluate the limitation in existing mitigating approaches to problematic IT behavior and provide a theoretical tool to evaluate the proposed mitigating mechanism in this dissertation, mindfulness. The various forms of mindfulness are reviewed pointing out the IS fields emphasis on western form while lacking an understanding of mindfulness’s fundamental eastern concepts. To evaluate the relationship between mindfulness and conditioned problematic social media use, two empirical studies were developed to demonstrate how mindfulness influences social media addiction, stress, social overload, escapism, hedonic motivation, and compulsive use. Results show that mindfulness is negatively associated with these concepts which provides empirical support for potential efficacy of mindfulness-based intervention in the social media context. This dissertation improves the understanding of problematic social media use and thoroughly introduces the IS field to two grand theories of conditioned behavior and eastern mindfulness. These findings can be used to develop a mindfulness-based social media program that promotes wiser reactions to ones’ environment which can have a positive impact on individuals, organizations, and society.

MINDFULNESS: A POTENTIAL MITIGATING MECHANISM FOR CONDITIONED PROBLEMATIC SOCIAL MEDIA USE

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