Facebook and Twitter addiction: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDFeb 7 2012

A new study reveals that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol.

The researchers from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Würzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices.

Participants in the week-long study were polled via BlackBerry smartphones seven times per day and asked to report when they experienced a desire within the past 30 minutes, and whether or not the succumbed to that desire. They were also asked to gauge each desire on a scale from mild to “irresistible.” Wilhelm Hofmann, who led the study added, “We made clear to participants that answering the BlackBerrys did not count. Also people really did not feel a desire to use them – they only beeped once in a while and, if anything, that was more annoying than pleasing, I guess. And there was nothing else they could use the devices for.”

In total, 10,558 responses were recorded and a total of 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported by participants. The people in the study were between the ages of 18 and 85. The results of the team’s study will soon be published in the Psychological Science journal, however preliminary data provided to The Guardian suggests the highest rate of “self-control failures” were tied to social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, Google's G+, Linkedin and Groupon.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Hofmann. Hofmann suggests people may fail to resist social media so much because there is no obvious or immediate downside to checking services like Twitter or Facebook. He does warn that these services can ultimately be a huge drain on users’ time, however.

“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann said. ”With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”

Perhaps the most interesting conclusion from the study is that things like tobacco, coffee and alcohol had relatively low addiction rates, as did sports inclinations, sexual urges and the urge to spend money.

Researchers added, “Resisting the desire to work when it conflicts with other goals such as socializing or leisure activities may be difficult because work can define people's identities, dictate many aspects of daily life, and invoke penalties if important duties are shirked.”