A new US study confirmed that people who use social media heavily actually display some of the behavioral hallmarks of cocaine or heroin addicts.
Researchers at Michigan State University conducted a study on the impact of the excessive use of social media on the users' capability to take right decisions.
The study, dubbed "Excessive social media users demonstrate impaired decision making", was published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, the German news agency reported.
The study asked 71 participants to first rate their own Facebook usage with a measure known as the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale. The researchers also used IGT, a classic research tool that evaluates impaired decision making.
The study showed that participants who self-reported as excessive Facebook users actually performed worse than their peers on the IGT, which has been used to study everything from patients with frontal lobe brain injuries to heroin addicts, but using it as a measure to examine social media addicts is novel.
According to the Tech Crunch website, the study is narrow, but interesting, and offers a few paths for follow-up research.
The researchers recognized that in an ideal study, researchers could actually observe participants’ social media usage and sort them into categories of high or low social media usage based on behavior rather than a survey they fill out.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
