Social Media Influencers and Dopamine Overdose

Social media influencers are sometimes called ‘microcelebrities,’ although that term may be a misnomer, as some reach many thousands, if not millions, of people. As influencers can reach those numbers, they can be highly effective advertisers. Improvements in the availability and price of technology extend the reach of influencers, and firms paying influencers for their endorsements can sell more. According to an economic analysis, the ‘influencer economy’ increased from $2 billion in 2020 to $13.8 billion in 2021, with nearly 50 million people engaged as influencers¹. Those figures were derived during the COVID pandemic, but there is little reason to assume that this market will decline and little reason to assume that this is not a major feature of some societies.

The growth of potential social media impact on choice behaviours provokes questions like: Why is this influence so effective? Is it dangerous to society? The answers to both questions are not comfortable, but no more uncomfortable than answers given about any form of marketing tool over the last couple of centuries. Digital influencers are just another example of social influence, and patterns of social influence in the real and digital worlds are similar. However, consideration of neuroscience findings suggests that understanding dopamine's roles in social decision-making may illuminate the core of these concerns.

The effectiveness of social media influencers pivots around the ubiquity of digital media and the relative esteem in which opinion-formers from digital and other domains are held. Of course, these issues have always needed consideration when people wish to sell something. When people used to want to open real shops, they discussed ‘footfall’ (numbers of passers-by). If lots of wildebeest go to a watering hole, that’s where the lions and crocodiles will be. It also turns out that younger people often trust social media influencers more than other purveyors of products or ideas². Credibility is important when judging sources of information on social media³, but this is nothing different from the real world. If social media influencers are now thought to be more credible, then influencers in the real world, like politicians and salespeople, will just have to ‘up their game.’ The successful lion or crocodile often lies well-hidden until the point of attack, and the rest just starve.

Metaphors about predation in the wild suggest possibilities of destructiveness, and such concern has prompted discussion of the societally negative effects of social media influencers. The apparent scale of turnover and potential influence¹ appears startling, at least, until put into the context of the full marketplace. Advertising represented a $720 billion economy in 2021 (50 times higher than the social media influencer share)⁴. Given this, social media influence may not be as threatening as it first appears. Moreover, it is generally less threatening than the effects of a deranged political leader influencing their country into war. People rarely die from the endorsements of social media influencers, although this can happen when they endorse crazed things⁵. However, while social media influencers can be dangerous, this goes for most things, and overestimating impact is just as misleading as underestimation.

Nevertheless, some are so troubled by social media influencers’ potential for impact that they have been discussed as a threat to democracy based on the power of the digital form. When this worry is unpacked, these above issues, per se, are not key—most commentators recognise that they have happened before. Rather, the apparent ease with which social media impacts the dopamine system is a worry. Social media influencers have been termed a ‘dopamine democracy’: “Dopamine democracy refers to a general system…in which persons are generally of the belief that they make free choices that directly contribute to governance, even though choices are actually directed by incentive salience, or the immediacy of wanting and seeking, without critical reflection or deliberation.”⁶. The idea here is that people will become so overwhelmed by a rush of dopamine from social media that they cannot think rationally and will behave impulsively. In fact, there is something to this concern, but it also applies to all socially-mediated decision-making.

Digital exposure makes some people impulsive⁷, and impulsivity can be increased by increasing levels of dopamine⁸. However, it is unclear whether social media exposure always increases dopamine levels. Numerous media articles have claimed that social media increases the amount of, and need for, dopamine⁹, and many discuss dopamine as a sort of ‘reward’ chemical. There are two problems with this. Higher social media use, especially in social contexts, can sometimes reduce dopamine activity and synthesis, which contrasts with the effects of many other behavioural addictions¹⁰. Moreover, dopamine is involved in regulating several neuro-behavioural systems (e.g., sensory-motor regulation, time perception, saliency and change assessments, and motivation¹¹), but encoding reward-value is not one of them¹².

Levels of dopamine index changes in the environment. Dopamine levels increase when some aspect of the presented environmental stimuli increase (e.g., presence, number, salience, etc.), and dopamine levels decrease when those environmental stimuli show decreases in something; this especially occurs when that environmental change is unexpected^11,13. However, as dopamine is associated with many regulatory systems, its levels are also impacted by the nature of the stimuli involved. Importantly, for social media influencers, levels of dopamine increase in the presence of a cue that is perceived to be social¹².

Levels of dopamine in the system are associated with being able to discriminate change in the environment. However, this is a relative judgment; detecting small increases in dopamine against a relatively low baseline is easier than detecting small increases against a high background level. Indeed, studies have shown that artificially increasing dopamine levels during a discrimination task involving ‘unlearning’ something old and learning something new reduces the ability to learn the new discrimination¹³. The notion of a ‘dopamine overdose’¹⁴ experienced in some physical and psychological conditions captures this problem—too much dopamine makes adaptation to changing situations more difficult.

Here, we get to the nub of the problem of socially facilitated decision-making, which applies to social media influencers but not uniquely. When people are making judgments (discriminations), changing levels of dopamine are important, as they are associated with detecting change¹¹. In a social context, dopamine levels fluctuate with the changing nature of stimuli^11,12; however, they also change with the presence of social cues, like people or their representations^12,13. If judgments are made against an elevated background dopamine level due to the presence of social cues, then those judgments will be less accurate¹³ and potentially more impulsive⁸. This is the problem with making judgments in a social setting, under social influence, and it is not just confined to the digital world.