Social media research often starts with a simple question: how much time are young people spending online? A new study suggests that this may miss something more fundamental. The social skills adolescents bring to digital spaces may help shape what they actually do there.
Researchers studying 127 Canadian adolescents found that stronger performance on one measure of Theory of Mind, the ability to infer what other people think, feel or intend, was associated with more frequent online conversations and greater online self-disclosure. At the same time, those adolescents were less likely to report a preference for online social interaction over other forms of connection.
The pattern matters because it complicates a familiar assumption that heavier or more intimate online communication necessarily reflects a preference for digital relationships. In this sample, adolescents who appeared better able to infer mental states from nonverbal social situations were more communicative online without being more inclined to favour online interaction itself.
Looking beyond screen time
Theory of Mind is a central concept in social cognition. It describes the capacity to understand that other people have beliefs, intentions, emotions and perspectives that can differ from one’s own. This ability develops substantially through childhood and adolescence and supports everyday tasks such as interpreting sarcasm, recognising misunderstandings, anticipating reactions and deciding what information another person needs.
Digital communication changes many of the cues available for those judgments. Facial expression, tone of voice, timing and body language may be reduced or absent in text-based exchanges. Yet online interaction still requires users to infer intention, audience reaction and what another person knows. The researchers therefore asked whether adolescents’ social-cognitive abilities were associated with several distinct dimensions of online behaviour rather than treating social media use as one undifferentiated activity.
How the study tested social understanding
The study recruited 127 Canadian adolescents aged 11 to 18 and assessed them online. Rather than relying on a single Theory of Mind score, the researchers used two established tasks that place different demands on participants.
The Strange Stories task uses short verbal scenarios that require participants to interpret characters’ mental states and communicative intentions. The Silent Films task asks participants to infer mental states from film-based situations without depending on spoken dialogue in the same way. The researchers also measured verbal reasoning using the Similarities subtest from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition.
That verbal-reasoning control was important. If an adolescent performs well on a verbally demanding Theory of Mind task, the score may partly reflect general language or reasoning ability rather than social inference alone. Including verbal reasoning allowed the analysis to test whether Theory of Mind contributed information beyond those broader abilities.
Online behaviour was separated into three outcomes: preference for online social interaction, frequency of online conversations and online self-disclosure. This distinction allowed the researchers to ask whether understanding other minds was related differently to wanting to interact online, actually conversing online and sharing personal information.
Two Theory of Mind measures did not tell the same story
The researchers first examined the structure of the two Theory of Mind measures and then used multivariate analyses to relate them to the online outcomes while controlling for age and verbal reasoning. The two task factors were substantially related, with a reported correlation of about r = 0.71, but their associations with online behaviour were not interchangeable.
Performance on the Silent Films measure was significantly associated with the set of online behaviours after age and verbal reasoning were taken into account. Follow-up analyses showed a consistent three-part pattern: higher Silent Films Theory of Mind was associated with more frequent online conversations, greater online self-disclosure and a lower propensity to prefer online social interaction.
The Strange Stories measure did not show the same significant multivariate relationship. That difference is one of the study’s most informative findings. It suggests that conclusions about Theory of Mind and digital behaviour can depend on how social understanding is measured.
The study also reported strong scoring reliability for the Theory of Mind material, including inter-rater agreement around Cohen’s kappa = 0.80. The analyses considered multiple outcomes together and used procedures including false-discovery-rate correction, helping reduce the chance that a collection of separate tests would produce apparently meaningful findings simply by chance.
More online communication did not mean preferring online life
The direction of the associations deserves careful interpretation. An adolescent who talks more online or discloses more online is not necessarily someone who would rather interact digitally than face to face. In this study, stronger Silent Films Theory of Mind tracked both greater online communication and lower preference for online social interaction.
One possible interpretation is that adolescents with stronger social inference skills may use digital communication as another venue for relationships rather than as a substitute for offline interaction. Greater self-disclosure may also reflect confidence in judging what another person is likely to understand or how a disclosure might be received.
However, the study does not establish that Theory of Mind causes adolescents to converse or disclose more. The reverse direction is also plausible. Repeated social interaction online could provide practice in inferring intentions from incomplete cues, or another unmeasured characteristic could contribute to both social cognition and communication behaviour.
Why the silent-film result is interesting
The contrast between Silent Films and Strange Stories raises a broader measurement question. Social understanding is not a single skill expressed identically in every context. A task built around nonverbal scenes may capture somewhat different inferential processes from a task that requires interpreting written or spoken narratives.
That does not mean the Silent Films task is a direct simulation of social media. Much online communication is heavily verbal, and contemporary platforms also contain photographs, video, emoji, audio and other cues. Instead, the result indicates that the particular social-cognitive processes captured by the film task were more closely associated with the online outcomes in this sample.
For researchers, this is a warning against treating Theory of Mind as a perfectly uniform variable. Two credible measures can correlate strongly and still predict behaviour differently. For digital-behaviour research, it also reinforces the value of moving beyond broad measures such as total screen time toward the cognitive skills, motives and forms of interaction that sit underneath that total.
What the findings do not show
The sample was relatively small and limited to 127 Canadian adolescents. Recruitment and assessment were conducted online, which may favour young people and families who are comfortable participating digitally. The age range was broad, from 11 to 18, while representation at the older end was comparatively limited.
The online-behaviour measures were self-reported. Adolescents may misestimate conversation frequency or differ in how they interpret disclosure. Objective behavioural data, such as consented communication logs or longitudinal digital diaries, could test whether the same relationships appear in observed behaviour.
Most importantly, the design was cross-sectional. All variables were measured within the same general study period, so temporal order cannot be established. The findings therefore describe associations, not evidence that stronger Theory of Mind produces particular social-media habits or that those habits improve Theory of Mind.
The study also cannot support broad claims that social media is beneficial or harmful for adolescent social cognition. It examined individual differences in specific online behaviours, not mental-health outcomes or an intervention that changed social-media exposure.
A more precise way to think about adolescent digital life
The strongest contribution of the study may be conceptual rather than prescriptive. Digital interaction is social interaction. Young people do not enter online spaces without the cognitive abilities they use elsewhere, and the same number of minutes online can represent very different experiences for different adolescents.
Future longitudinal research could test whether Theory of Mind predicts later changes in online communication, whether digital interaction in turn changes social inference, or whether the relationship runs in both directions. Combining established social-cognitive tasks with objective measures of digital behaviour would also reduce reliance on self-report.
For now, the evidence supports a narrower conclusion. Among these 127 adolescents, stronger performance on a nonverbal Theory of Mind task was associated with talking and disclosing more online while simultaneously being less inclined to prefer online social interaction. The result is a reminder that how adolescents relate online may tell us more than how long they are online.
Source Information
Study: Online social interaction is associated with theory of mind in adolescence
Authors: Sepideh Yasiniyan, Elvis Kurtisi, Donia Tong, Serena Lecce and Victoria Talwar
Journal: Scientific Reports
Published: 27 September 2026
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-72783-6
Study design: Cross-sectional online assessment of 127 Canadian adolescents aged 11 to 18
Research Today note: The reported relationships are associations and should not be interpreted as evidence that Theory of Mind causes online behaviour or that online interaction causes stronger Theory of Mind.
