Social media can be mentally draining. And when mentally drained, you are more likely to be influenced by a high number of likes on posts – even to the point of clicking on ads for products you don’t need or want – according to our recent experiments on how social media affects behaviour.
As a professor of advertising, I have studied social media behaviour for years. In late 2022, my colleague Eric Haley and I conducted three online studies on Americans aged 18 to 65 to test how people under various mental loads respond to ads differently.
