Student Presenter(s): Joshuah Joseph, Ariah Dull, and Brianna Borbon
Faculty Mentor: Melissa Huey
School/College: School/College: Arts and Sciences, Manhattan

In the past decade, we have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of time young people in America spend online, especially on sites such as Instagram, Reddit and YouTube (Anderson and Auxier, 2021). As the use of technology in modern life progresses, so does the influence it has on our social lives and physical health. For instance, one of the issues associated with the increase in internet usage is its link to higher levels of depression and anxiety after prolonged use (Aboujaoude, 2017; Saikia, A. M., Das, J., Barman, P., & Bharali, M.D. 2019). College students are also more likely to come across ‘memes’, or units of cultural information spread by the internet and used as a way to quickly communicate ideas, beliefs, and opinions. Past research has found limited information on what can potentially be done to buffer the effects of high internet susceptibility, so we decided that one factor that could potentially serve as a buffer to high susceptibility to the internet is religiosity. The purpose of our proposed study is to compare internet susceptibility in two groups: 1. General Students; and 2. Students affiliated with a religious institution. The level of susceptibility in our study will be determined based on the extent the memes we have selected have impacted the participants using a survey. We hypothesize that students who score higher on a survey gauging religiosity will be less susceptible to the internet than those who are not strongly affiliated with religion.