From social media addiction to information literacy: unravelling the underlying mechanism of critical thinking and cognitive flexibility

This study aims to investigate the relationship between social media addiction (in a non-clinical sense) and information literacy (access, evaluation, and use), with a focus on the mediating roles of critical thinking and cognitive flexibility among university students. This study employed a correlational research design. Data were collected from 1,669 university students studying at seven universities in Türkiye, selected using convenience sampling. 1,104 (66.1%) of the sample group are female, while the remaining 565 (33.9%) are male students. Regression-based and bootstrap methods were used to determine the sequential multiple mediation effect of critical thinking and cognitive flexibility between social media addiction and information literacy. The study’s results indicated a moderate negative relationship between social media addiction and information literacy. This suggests that increased social media usage harms levels of information literacy. Furthermore, critical thinking and cognitive flexibility partially mediated this relationship. This emphasises that social media addiction has negative cognitive effects on individuals’ ability to evaluate and process information. The results are consistent with previous studies and highlight the potential adverse effects of excessive social media addiction on critical thinking and cognitive flexibility. The findings indicate that increased social media addiction undermines information literacy by weakening higher-order cognitive processes, and the proposed model explains approximately 39% of the variance.