An Intervention to Reshape Parental Social Media Perspectives through Common Ground

Parents’ increasing concern about the negative impacts of social media motivates the adoption of restrictive measures, which risks children losing out on the benefits of social media use. A balanced view of social media’s benefits and harms is essential. This study employed the theory of common ground to help parents achieve this balance. Participants (N = 160) were pre-selected US parents who think that social media is more harmful for children. To establish common ground, treatment parents viewed a video addressing the harms of social media before presenting evidence of its benefits. The control group only received the second half of the video focusing on the benefits of social media. Parents assigned to the treatment condition (N = 81) have lower perceived agency in their abilities to control their social media habits (Cohen’s d = -0.41; p = .021); significantly higher perceived fairness of the presenter of the arguments (Cohen’s d = 1.29; p .0001); significantly higher perceived similarity with the presenter (Cohen’s d = 0.30; p = .019) as compared to parents in the control condition. This is a preliminary experiment on changing parents’ attitudes and social media mindset. Despite changing three outcomes, the experiment failed to change eight other outcomes. Future researchers could explore other theories and alternative treatments to nudge parents to adopt a more balanced social media mindset.