Because social media is used so pervasively in modern society to tap into people's behaviors and thoughts, neuroscientists are finding Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to be very useful tools in a broad range of research areas. A review published November 11 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences describes some of the approaches that neuroscientists can use to gain valuable insights from social media and highlights some of the questions that might be answered by social media-based studies. "Neuroscience research with social media is still in its infancy, and there is great potential for future scientific discovery," says co-lead author Dar Meshi of Freie Universität in Berlin. "The sheer number of people using social media is enormous, and continues to increase, with some people spending several hours on social media each day."

In their review, Meshi, Diana Tamir, and Hauke Keekeren note that neuroscientists can take advantage of similarities between online and offline behavior--essentially using measures from online social media use as a proxy for real-world social behaviors. For example, a social media user's broadcasts can be analyzed to measure his or her emotional state. Also, by examining changes in a user's broadcasts after exposure to friends' broadcasts, social media can be used to measure social conformity. How people scroll through social media newsfeeds and click on content can provide insights into users' curiosity, and their digital footprint on social media may offer clues to their personality traits. Also, how people interact within their social network might be used as a proxy for their offline social interactions. 

Alternatively, neuroscientists can capitalize on the differences between online and offline social environments and investigate brain structure and function in light of these differences. For example, during face-to-face discourse, people spend approximately 30% of conversations sharing information about themselves; however, online, where people have limitless opportunities to share information, such self-disclosure skyrockets to comprise 80% of online posts. Furthermore, politeness norms dictate that people should behave cordially to one another in face-to-face interactions, but the social distance provided by certain social media platforms can violate these norms.