A new study suggests that social networking services such as Facebook
and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol. A
team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently
conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, 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.”
In total, 10,558 responses were recorded and a total of 7,827 “desire
episodes” were reported by participants. 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.
