The study, conducted by researchers from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and published openly in the journal Emotion, Space and Society, examined users’ relationships with the social network, compared it to other social networks such as TikTok and Instagram, and looked at the strategies it uses to successfully capture users’ attention and guide their behavior.
According to Ana Galvez, co-author of the study, researcher and member of the Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences at the UOC, BeReal is “an example of the successful use of psychological power,” a concept that encompasses the way social media exerts control over our attention and desires.
“In the context of social media, [psychological power] is used to manipulate users’ behavior and exploit their cognitive and emotional processes almost automatically, without allowing for any critical reflection,” added Francisco Tirado, an associate professor of social psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and co-author of the study.
How BeReal encourages users
BeReal sends a daily message to the user, who has two minutes to take a photo using the device’s two cameras – front and rear – and show what they are doing and how they are feeling at that moment. The platform aims to encourage users to share their real-life circumstances to move away from overly prepared and posed images on Instagram or TikTok.
Unlike other platforms, BeReal is not designed for users to spend a lot of time browsing or scrolling. Instead, they can just connect to it and see what other users are doing after posting the images they’ve been offered.
“This approach, coupled with the ability to get an immediate social response with RealMojis [emojis created from real photos of the user], creates a social reward cycle that hooks users without requiring too much time,” Galvez says.
The fact that interaction with the app is limited to just a few minutes a day creates a sense of urgency and exclusivity, which the study authors believe is crucial to grabbing users’ attention.
The app uses “nudges” to guide user behavior, including a daily notification that invites them to share an authentic moment from their day and visual elements that encourage them to interact with the platform.
“Over time, these constant nudges turn engagement with the platform into a habit: the user begins to interact with it, using it or thinking about it, almost unconsciously,” said Joan Rovira, a professor in the UAB Department of Social Psychology, a lecturer in the UCU Organizational Psychology course, and lead author of the study. Once this habit is formed, the interaction happens almost automatically when the user receives a nudge.
The ultimate goal of the app, according to Rovira, is to collect user data to sell it for commercial and advertising purposes. “On different days, at different times, and in different situations, thanks to geolocation and the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, the app receives data on what you do, when you feel a certain emotion, how you react to other people’s posts, and where you are at any given time during the day – this is valuable information that can be used to send people targeted ads.”
Auto-ethnographic experiment
The authors used an autoethnographic methodology to conduct this study. Rovira created a profile on BeReal and interacted with it from January to July 2023. Throughout the day, he made notes in a notebook about his entire experience with the app. This field notebook became the basis for studying how the app is designed and works. In the future, the authors plan to continue the experiment with a cohort of volunteers of both genders and different ages “to see the differences between generations.”
