J Child Fam Stud (2018) 27:69–79 DOI 10.1007/s10826-017-0872-8 ORIGINAL PAPER The Impact of Social Media on Social Comparison and Envy in Teenagers: The Moderating Role of the Parent Comparing Children and In-group Competition among Friends Peerayuth Charoensukmongkol 1 Published online: 6 October 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 Abstract Teenagers tend to gravitate towards a group that is highly susceptible to negative psychological and beha- vioral outcomes from social media use. Because teenagers’ behaviors are easily shaped by the social context to which they belong, it is likely that parents and friends might be the key persons who have a strong influence on the behavioral outcomes that teenagers develop from social media use. Given the concern about the negative consequences of social media use by teenagers, this research aims to explore the relationship between social media use intensity and the tendency of teenagers to engage in social comparison and envy. Survey data were collected from 250 teenagers using a snowball sampling. Results from a partial least-squares regression showed that the positive relationship between social media use intensity and envy was significantly higher in teenagers whose parents compared children and teenagers in a peer-group which was characterized by high in-group competition. However, the positive relationship that social media use intensity had with social comparison was sig- nificantly higher only in teenagers who are in a peer-group characterized by a high in-group competition. Keywords Social media ● Social comparison ● Social learning ● Envy ● Teenagers ● Parenting Introduction Social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram, creates a virtual community where people can unite together with family and friends no matter where they are located. Advances in social media technology also allows users to present themselves and to share their life events with others through personal messages and photos. However, although social media helps individuals to stay updated about what is going on with their friends’ life events, exposing too much to content that friends have posted on social media can inevitably trigger individuals to compare themselves with their friends, eventually leading to envy (Chou and Edge 2012). In particular, teenagers tend to gravitate towards a group that is highly susceptible to negative psychological and behavioral outcomes from social media use (Living- stone 2008; Twyman et al. 2010). Research showed that teenagers are usually in the age group that highly deploys social media for self-presentation to impress others (Car- penter 2012; Mehdizadeh 2010). Therefore, exposing teenagers to favorable life events that friends may have posted in order to create impressions in social media can easily make teenagers engage more in social comparisons, thereby causing them to feel envious of what they view from their friends’ posts (Tandoc et al. 2015). Literature on outcomes associated with social media reported both positive and negative consequences of social media use (Charoensukmongkol 2015; Zhan et al. 2016). On the positive side, social media promote the active par- ticipation of users in producing content, thereby making them a powerful tool for people to engage in content sharing and self-presentation on the Internet (Lee and Ma 2012). People also rely heavily on social media to develop and maintain relationships with family and friends (Ariate et al. 2015). Moreover, studies showed that social media can be * Peerayuth Charoensukmongkol peerayuth.c@nida.ac.th 1 International College, National Institute of Development Administration 118 Moo 3, Sereethai Road, Klong-Chan, Bangkapi, Bangkok 10240, Thailand