Supervised by Denis Persichini.

Introduction

Adolescence is a crucial stage for identity development that now largely unfolds within the digital walls of social media. Rather than a simple background, social media functions as a digital “social mirror” where youths encounter various lifestyles, present themselves and seek belonging. Three key core concepts drive this experience: first, their attention, understood as the selective focus that brings specific content into the psychological focus; second, social comparison, which involves evaluating one’s appearance, values, status and other individual attributes against others; and finally, self-identity, which encompasses the evolving understanding of who one is and who one might become. Debates often reduce social media usage to a “good” or “bad” dichotomy, yet developmental outcomes are rarely uniform. They depend heavily on individual differences and the significance they decide to assign to digital interactions and experiences. What remains less clear is how the content adolescents selectively attend to may become psychologically salient and subsequently relate to self-evaluation and identity construction. 

In this review, attention is considered a way of understanding which aspects of adolescents’ online environments become particularly meaningful, rather than a mechanism that has been independently shown to cause changes in identity. This article aims to examine how attention to social-media content may lead to social comparison, bodily self-evaluation and identity development among adolescents. First, an overview on how social media expands adolescents’ social world and the role of content they engage in will be presented, followed by an investigation of how, consequently, adolescents compare themselves to peers, influencers and celebrities. Finally, it aims to examine how body image, self-disclosure and identity shifting are linked to social media experiences.

1. What Youth See: How Social Media Expands the Social World

1.1 The self in the making

Adolescence is, in many ways, a period of becoming. It is the stage of life in which individuals begin to ask not only who they are, but also who they are becoming, making it a process of shaping and reshaping of the self. Identity development therefore involves more than just discovering and adapting a set of characteristics alone. It is an ongoing process through which adolescents explore different possibilities of self-development as they evaluate their experiences and gradually develop an understanding of the person they are now and the person they want to become.

Branje et al. (2021) describe identity development as one of the central developmental tasks of adolescence and early adulthood. Personal identity therefore refers to an individual’s sense of who they are, including a sense of continuity and coherence across different situations and over time. This sense of continuity refers to the feeling that, despite changes and development, one remains connected to their past and recognises themselves as the same person over time. It does not mean that identity remains unchanged. On the contrary, adolescence is characterised by a continual shift between exploring and commitment. Exploration involves considering different values, beliefs, roles, goals and possible versions of oneself; while commitment refers to developing a degree of certainty and investment in the character one has developed (Crocetti, 2017). Adolescents may therefore reconsider commitments they have already made when new experiences cause them to question whether those choices still represent who they are. Identity development is consequently better understood as a dynamic process of change, rather than a single transition from childhood into early adulthood. Branje et al. (2021) emphasise precisely this dynamic quality. They reviewed literature on identify formation published from 2010 to 2020 and found both considerable stability and systematic maturation across adolescence and early adulthood. In other words, adolescents do not wake up one day with an entirely new identity. Instead, change tends to occur gradually, as everyday experiences, relationships and moments of reflection accumulate.

One particularly important part of this process is how adolescents interpret their experiences and use them to develop an understanding of who they are. Individuals can integrate their past, present and imagined future into a personal narrative: a story through which they make sense of how they became the person they are. This makes identity fundamentally relational and interpretive. People develop an understanding of themselves partly by reflecting on what has happened to them and what those experiences mean.

For adolescents today, an increasing number of these experiences take place within the digital environments. Social media does not replace the developmental processes that have always existed during adolescence; rather, it gives them a new setting in which they can unfold. Its influence on identity development therefore depends not simply on exposure, but on what content adolescents attend to, their interpretation of it and how these experiences subsequently become incorporated into their becoming of self.

1.2 A new place of becoming

Social media can be understood as an additional social context in which adolescents present themselves, encounter other people, receive feedback and experiment with different ideas of who they might become. Pérez-Torres (2024) describes social media as a “digital social mirror”; this metaphor captures the two-sided nature of social media. Adolescents look at others, but they are also constantly presented with reflections of themselves through feedback, reactions and their own curated profiles. In fact, social media allows adolescents to encounter images of peers, influencers and other people frequently and repeatedly. This repeated exposure can create more opportunities for social comparison, as adolescents are regularly presented with other people’s appearances, lifestyles and experiences. In turn, these comparisons may influence how they evaluate themselves. Most importantly, this exposure might increase the opportunity of comparing their own body image with others, and therefore it might play a key role in their self-identity formation. This is important because identity does not develop in isolation. Adolescents construct an understanding of themselves partly through their relationships with other people and through the social environments in which they participate. Social media considerably expands the number of people and identities available for observation. A teenager no longer encounters only the identities represented by classmates, relatives, teachers or the members of their local community. Their digital environment may contain musicians, influencers, athletes, actresses or actors, activists, fan bases, niche communities, strangers and people living entirely different lives.

Yet, exposure alone is unlikely to explain why some of these figures become psychologically meaningful while others disappear into the endless stream of content. This is where attention becomes relevant to identity development. What adolescents repeatedly notice determines which people, lifestyles, values and possible identities become available for sustained reflection.

An adolescent who repeatedly encounters content centred on fashion, for example, may begin experimenting with clothes and styles as a form of self-expression. Similarly, a teenager who repeatedly encounters discussions about environmental activism may begin questioning their own values and morals, and consider whether environmental responsibility should become part of their identity. Someone who repeatedly encounters a particular online community may eventually recognise that the interests or beliefs represented within that community may resonate with aspects of their identity they have not fully concluded yet. In this sense, social media can widen the identity landscape available to adolescents. It gives them more possible selves to encounter, but it also gives them more possibilities against which to evaluate their existing selves.

1.3 A place to find groups of people like us

The identity possibilities presented by social media are not limited to individual influencers. Online communities can also provide adolescents with opportunities to discover people who share interests, experiences or identities that may not be represented within their immediate offline surroundings.

Shapiro and Margolin (2014) argue that social networking sites can facilitate adolescents’ social development by allowing them to maintain relationships, disclose aspects of themselves and encounter people with similar interests. This is particularly relevant to identity formation because adolescence involves a simultaneous search for individuality and belonging. Young people want to establish what makes them distinct while also wanting to feel understood by groups of people. Online communities can bring these apparently opposing needs together. An adolescent can discover that an interest they once considered unusual is shared by thousands of other people. A niche musical preference, artistic style, political concern, hobby or personal experience can become part of a broader social identity once the adolescent finds others who recognise its significance.

Attention is, again, consequential here. The existence of these communities matters only in so far as adolescents encounter and engage with them. Once attention is repeatedly directed toward a community, however, the community may become part of the social environment through which the adolescent evaluates and articulates identity.

On the other side, there is also a human tendency to make identity feel more comprehensible by placing ourselves into categories. Labels such as “introvert,” “artist” or personality types can offer adolescents a language through which they can describe themselves and find people who seem to share something fundamental with them. Yet, identity is rarely as absolute as these categories suggest. Social media can draw attention to particular traits and labels, encouraging adolescents to emphasise certain parts of themselves in order to feel understood or to belong, even though the self remains considerably more complex than any single category can capture.

2. Who Youths Track: Influencers, Physical Comparison and Parasocial Connections

2.1 Looking at others, finding ourselves

Comparison is often discussed in terms of its negative consequences, particularly when it becomes the cause of envy, insecurity or dissatisfaction. However, within identity development, comparison holds a more complicated function. To compare oneself with another person is also to ask, implicitly, “how am I different from them?”, “what do I have in common with them?”, “is this something I want for myself?”. These questions can contribute to the exploration of oneself.

Pérez-Torres (2024) argues that social media allows adolescents to compare themselves not only with peers but also with social models and media figures. Such information can provide information about possible behaviours, interests, appearances, lifestyles and future roles. The significance of comparison therefore depends partly on what the adolescent does with the information obtained from it. A comparison may reinforce an existing commitment, challenge it or introduce an entirely new possibility. This distinction matters because identity development is not simply a process of imitation. Adolescents do not necessarily see something online and decide that they want to become it. Instead, exposure may provoke evaluation. Social media may therefore function as a kind of psychological mirror, but it is an unusual mirror because it reflects not only what adolescents already are. It also reflects what they could be.

2.2 Upward comparison

Understanding how and why adolescents compare themselves with others is important for understanding the effects of social comparison. Not all comparisons are likely to influence body image in the same way, as adolescents differ in the values they hold and in the appearance standards they consider desirable. These differences may shape how they interpret comparisons and evaluate their own appearance. Upward comparison occurs when individuals try to compare themselves with someone that they think has a more desirable appearance. In social media, this phenomenon is maximised as teenagers have many different types of role models to be inspired by. Scully et al. (2023) analysed how 210 adolescent girls relied on this phenomenon, finding that body dissatisfaction was highly associated with upward social comparisons with different female target groups. This suggests that the direction and target of comparison may be particularly important for understanding body dissatisfaction.

2.3 Comparison targets

The effects of appearance comparison may depend on the target against whom adolescents evaluate themselves. Comparisons with different types of people may produce different outcomes. Influencers and celebrities may represent particularly idealised comparison targets and therefore elicit different responses than comparisons with familiar peers. Supporting the importance of comparison targets, Pedalino et al. (2022) examined the role of social comparison with peers and influencers among adolescents and found that viewing others’ appearances on social media was associated with lower body satisfaction through upward comparison with influencers or celebrities, whereas the same indirect association was not observed for comparisons with close or distant peers. This finding suggests that the person adolescents compare themselves with may shape the effects of that comparison. Influencers could provide a more unrealistic and idealised standards of appearance, whereas comparisons with close peers may feel more realistic and familiar. Thus, the target of comparison could be a key factor in understanding how social-media comparison relates to body image.

The reason upward social comparison could have a stronger influence on body image is that social media often shows idealised appearances. In particular, influencers and celebrities on social media often present a certain appearance as desirable. This is the most common way how many adolescents are engaging in upward social comparison. Kvardova et al. (2025) examined 2500 adolescents aged 11-16 and found that the more often an individual engaged with appearance-related social media content, the more prominent their beauty ideals and more frequent their appearance comparisons. These findings suggest that repeated attention to and engagement with appearance-focused content may be associated with greater internalisation of beauty ideals and more frequent appearance comparison.

2.4 Parasociality

Influencers and celebrities are particularly relevant here because they can become symbolic representations of possible identities. Pérez-Torres (2024) explains that adolescents may use media figures as role models while exploring behaviours, interests, appearances and possible future selves. This process can involve imitation, in which adolescents reproduce behaviours they observe, and identification, in which they perceive themselves as sharing meaningful characteristics with a media figure. Ideal identification occurs when the admired person represents qualities that an adolescent wishes to develop. This distinction gives social comparison a deeper role in identity formation. An influencer who appears similar to an adolescent may reinforce an existing aspect of their identity, whereas someone who seems fundamentally different may represent a new direction worth exploring. Attention therefore may influence which role models repeatedly become psychologically salient, while comparison helps determine what those role models mean for the self. Parasocial relationships can intensify this process.

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship in which an audience member develops feelings of familiarity, attachment or connection toward a media figure who does not personally know them. Unlike a brief parasocial interaction, which occurs during a particular encounter with a media figure, a parasocial relationship can develop over repeated exposure. Gleason et al. (2017) provide an insightful example of this phenomenon among adolescents. Their study involved 153 ninth-grade students, with a mean age of approximately 14.8 years. Participants identified a same-gender celebrity they particularly liked and described the relationship they imagined having with that celebrity. Some adolescents imagined an egalitarian relationship, such as friendship, whereas others described a hierarchical relationship in which the celebrity occupied a position resembling that of an authority figure or role model. The researchers found that 75.5% of boys and 53.7% of girls described their celebrity in relationship terms. Boys were particularly likely to imagine celebrities as authority figures, while girls who imagined relationships were more likely to describe celebrities as friends (Gleason et al., 2017). Although the study did not demonstrate that adolescents directly adopted their celebrities’ identities, it suggests that admired media figures can occupy psychologically meaningful roles in adolescents’ lives.

The study also found that emotional intensity and parasocial involvement were more closely related to perceptions of personality than to attractiveness or talent. This suggests that adolescents may become attached not simply to what a celebrity looks like or can do, but to the personality they believe that person possesses. This may be particularly relevant to identity development, as adolescents can compare these perceived characteristics with their own emerging sense of self. Lou and Kim (2019) provide further evidence for the importance of perceived similarity. Their study examined parasocial relationships among adolescents who followed social media influencers. After exclusions, 415 adolescents aged 10-19 were analysed, with a mean age of 15 years. Perceived similarity to an influencer was positively associated with parasocial relationship strength. To summarise, adolescents who felt that they had more in common with an influencer tended to report stronger parasocial relationships with them. Similarity may therefore make an online figure feel less distant and more personally relevant. An influencer does not necessarily need to represent an entirely unfamiliar ideal. Sometimes, the most psychologically compelling figure is someone who seems to resemble the adolescent while simultaneously possessing qualities they admire. In this way, influencers may connect adolescents’ present sense of self with qualities or identities they might imagine developing in the future.

3. How Youth Put Themselves Out There: Body Image, Self-Disclosure and Identity Shifting

3.1 Appearance-based social comparison and body image

Bodily self-evaluation is relevant to identity development because adolescents’ understanding of who they are incorporates perceptions and evaluations of their physical self. Appearance comparison therefore represents more than an isolated judgement of attractiveness: repeated attention to and evaluations of the body may contribute to broader self-concept, perceived social value and the qualities adolescents come to associate with their desired or possible selves. Social-media engagement, particularly appearance-focused comparison, may be associated with how adolescents evaluate their bodies. Adolescents who like to be active and use social media more frequently may have a greater exposure to body-image related content, which may increase their chance of comparing themselves with others. This process is known as appearance-based social comparison. A finding by Avci, Baams and Kretschmer (2024) found that appearance-comparison related content on social media was associated with higher body dissatisfaction, concluding that comparison itself in social media could be an important factor in how adolescents evaluate their body image. This finding suggests that social media may not only be associated with exposure from social media, but also to how those adolescents that were exposed respond to the content they encountered.

3.2 Social appearance comparison as a link to body satisfaction

To build on the research about the relationship between body image and comparison, Jarman et al. (2021) examined whether appearance-ideal internalisation and social appearance comparisons mediate the relationship between social media engagement and body satisfaction in over 1579 adolescents. The researchers found that content related to social appearance was associated with lower body satisfaction, while the social appearance comparison supported this relationship. The study suggests that frequent exposure to social-appearance related content influences adolescents’ body image concerns, especially through comparing their body image with others on social media. This also supports the findings of Avci et al. (2024), which highlight that appearance comparison is an important factor when considering the relationship between social media usage and body image concerns.

3.3 When showing yourself changes how you see yourself

Identity development on social media is also shaped by what adolescents choose to reveal about themselves. Self-disclosure refers to the sharing of personally relevant information, such as feelings, experiences, opinions or interests, with another person. Shapiro and Margolin (2014) describe online self-disclosure as part of an ongoing interpersonal process in which adolescents express themselves, receive responses and continue interacting. This process gives adolescents an opportunity to observe how others respond to different aspects of their identity. A teenager who shares an interest and receives encouragement may become more confident that the interest genuinely belongs to them. Conversely, negative reactions may cause them to reconsider whether they want that aspect of themselves to remain publicly visible. Online self-presentation can therefore become more than a representation of identity; it can become part of its construction.

Walther et al. (2011) found evidence for identity shifts, meaning changes in how participants perceived themselves following computer-mediated feedback. Participants who received feedback consistent with an identity they had presented subsequently showed changes in self-perception that aligned with that presentation. This suggests that the relationship between identity and online self-presentation is not entirely one-directional. Adolescents do not simply express a pre-existing self online and then return unchanged to offline life. The reactions surrounding that presentation may feed back into their construction of who they are.

4. Who Youth Become: The Final Bridge Between the Screen and the Self in the Search of Identity

4.1 The distance between the screen and the self

The ability to experiment with identity also creates the possibility of fragmentation. Laffier and Westley (2025) use the concept of digital identity congruence to describe the degree to which an adolescent’s online identity corresponds with their authentic sense of self. Some divergence is not inherently problematic; experimentation is, after all, a normal part of adolescent identity development. The difficulty arises when the online self becomes persistently disconnected from the person an adolescent experiences themselves to be. For example, an adolescent might repeatedly present themselves as exceptionally confident, sociable, successful or happy while privately experiencing insecurity or isolation. The problem is not simply that the online portrayal is idealised; it is that maintaining a large discrepancy between the presented self and experienced self may make it increasingly difficult to integrate these versions into a coherent identity.

This returns the discussion to the central role of attention. What adolescents repeatedly attend to can shape not only whom they compare themselves with, but also which version of themselves they feel compelled to present. If attention becomes heavily oriented toward highly idealised images of popularity, beauty, success or social belonging, those representations may become the standards against which adolescents evaluate their own identities. Conversely, attention directed toward diverse communities, relatable figures or supportive social environments may broaden the range of identities adolescents feel permitted to explore.

4.2 Social comparison and self-identity

Overall, the reviewed evidence indicates an association between social-media comparison and adolescents’ evaluations of their bodies, and this ultimately connected to how adolescents perceive themselves. Participating in social comparison is a key part of identity formation in adolescents, and this influences how they evaluate themselves. When adolescents are active on social media, repeatedly comparing their appearance to others that they think are more desirable, they are learning how they “should” standardise themselves. Adolescents use this comparison as information for where they belong and how they stand relative to their peers, contributing to their broader sense of self.

Maartinac Dorcic et al. (2023) found this connection directly by examining how identity dimensions, social media use and social media comparison were related to different domains of body image satisfaction, such as appearance, and how adolescents think others judge their body. This demonstrates that appearance comparison that occurs on social media can be more than just judging one’s physical appearance, as adolescents could misunderstand the standards of appearance and eventually affect how they perceive themselves.

4.3 From attention to identity

Taken together, the literature suggests that the relationship between social media and adolescent identity is neither inherently harmful nor inherently beneficial. Its significance lies in the processes that occur between exposure and development. Attention determines what enters the foreground: social comparison gives adolescents information with which to evaluate themselves; self-presentation allows them to experiment with how they wish to be seen; feedback provides social information about those experiments; and influencers and online communities offer models of possible selves and forms of belonging. Through repeated cycles of these experiences, adolescents may strengthen existing commitments, reconsider them or discover entirely new possibilities.

Identity is therefore not simply something adolescents have while using social media. It is something they are continually negotiating while moving through it. This is perhaps the most important distinction. Social media does not mechanically produce a particular identity, nor does every comparison or interaction leave a lasting psychological imprint; rather, digital environments become another setting in which the ordinary developmental work of adolescence takes place. What changes is the scale, immediacy and variety of the social world available for observation. The adolescent self remains unfinished, but it is not empty. It is built from previous experiences, relationships, commitments, aspirations and interpretations. Social media adds another layer to this construction: a constantly moving collection of people to observe, selves to compare, communities to enter, identities to try on and reflections to interpret.

Ultimately, the question is not simply what social media does to adolescents, but what adolescents come to see in themselves through what they repeatedly see in others. The identities encountered online may be rejected, admired, imitated, questioned or incorporated. Some disappear almost immediately, others linger, and somewhere between looking and comparing, between presenting and being perceived, adolescents continue the much larger task of becoming themselves. For adolescents today, an increasing number of these experiences take place within digital environments.

Conclusion

Overall, the evidence reviewed suggests that social media can function as an active developmental centre rather than a passive or a uniformly harmful environment. Attention to digital platforms significantly shapes how adolescents explore potential roles, evaluate self-worth and construct an individual identity. This relationship may operate through several key psychological mechanisms: selective attention to specific content, upward social comparison regarding appearance and lifestyle, parasocial identification with media figures, and iterative feedback received during online self-disclosure that integrates identity shifting. 

However, its effects appear to depend on who adolescents target to compare themselves to and how they evaluate themselves related to those targets. The evidence does not support the conclusion that social media is automatically directly related to changes in self-identity. Taken together, social media provides opportunities where adolescents can encounter others outside of their local community, compare and evaluate themselves, and develop their own identity.

Several limitations should temper these conclusions. Much of the available evidence is cross-sectional or correlational. Some studies include late-adolescent or emerging-adult participants alongside adolescents, and the constructs assessed vary considerably across studies, from general social-media engagement to appearance comparison, parasocial relationships and self-presentation. Consequently, the evidence supports associations and plausible developmental pathways rather than a simple causal progression from online attention to identity change.

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