Selfsymbolizing on social media: Incomplete medical students post more medicine-related symbols on Instagram to restore completeness

Applying the theory of symbolic self-completion (Wicklund & Gollwitzer, 1982), we hypothesized that medical students who sense incompleteness regarding their professional identity goal (i.e., becoming a physician) engage in compensatory self-symbolizing on Instagram by increasing their posting of respective indicators of goal attainment (e.g., wearing medical white coats). To test this hypothesis, we recruited highly committed medical students, applied an experimental negative/positive feedback paradigm to induce incompleteness/completeness feelings, gave participants a set of pictures from which to choose, and observed their subsequent posting on a real Instagram profile. We observed that incomplete medical students posted more medicine-related pictures than their complete counterparts, F(1, 64) = 25.10, p < .001, d = 1.25, as well as more medicine-related profile pictures, χ2(1) = 7.44, p = .006, φ = .336. Implications for explaining online behaviors, preventing negative consequences of self-symbolizing on social media, and deepening the understanding of self-completion processes are discussed.