Researchers from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business have determined the urge to check your social media pages is among the strongest temptations in modern society.
Conducted using 205 18 to 85 year olds in Germany, participants were given a Blackberry mobile device and asked to let the researchers know every 30 minutes if they had desires to do a various amount of activities like check their social media pages, and to mentally document other urges like smoking, drinking, and sleeping.
The researchers found resisting temptations to use pages like Twitter, Facebook and other social media was harder to resist than smoking, drinking alcohol and even sleeping. The study also found that even though urges for sex and sleeping were stronger for people than temptations to check social media, resisting social media was a much harder task to achieve.
Work was also found to be hard to resist.
“Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail,” said Wilhelm Hofmann, lead author of the study. “In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money.
“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."