We identified four key factors that motivate young people to participate in a challenge: social pressure, the desire for attention, entertainment value and a phenomenon called the contagion effect. This challenge, popularized in 20, was reported to involve progressively risky acts of self-harm that culminate in suicide. We also analyzed 150 news reports, 60 public YouTube videos, over a thousand comments on those YouTube videos, and 150 Twitter posts – all of which were specifically about the blue whale challenge. For these studies, from January 2019 to January 2020, we interviewed dozens of high school and college students in both the United States and south India who had participated in social media challenges. Together with our research team, we conducted a series of studies to try to understand what motivates teens and young adults to participate in different challenges. But why do young people take up challenges that pose a threat to health, well-being and, occasionally, their very lives? We are an engineering professor who specializes in understanding how humans interact with computers and a psychology professor with expertise in mental health, specifically traumatic stress and suicide. Social media challenges are wide-ranging – both in the stunts they involve and the reasons why people do them.
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