Social Networks and Email More Dangerous Than Cigarettes and Alcohol
by Genna – GEV.com
According to a study created by Booth Business School from the University of Chicago, on a group of 205 people with ages between 18 and 85, social networks and email are more dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.
The purpose of the study was to find the passions and temptations of the people daily. To find out the answer, the solution was for the people to write the temptations they were supposed to each day or the ones they lived without external factors.
The results show that besides sleeping and wasting time, Tweeting was right up there, checking the inbox and verifying what’s going on on social networks like Facebook. What is even more worrying is that these activities were above smoking and alcohol.
What is also interesting is the fact that people is more inclined to do tasks like this at work than to drink a beer.
Trying to find a logic in this trend, Wilhelm Hoffman, one of the researchers, said : ” The desire to access online social networks can be harder to beat because it is extremely accessible to be online and each time you have the feeling that, regardless how much you want to resist, it does not cost a lot to be online. In case of smoking and alcohol, the financial costs on the long term are higher” he said.
To conclude, although access to email ,Twitter and Social networks on the long term does not have devastating effects, frequent access to these things has the potential of “stealing” a lot of our time. Regarding the performance to resist to these temptations, the same study highlighted a decrease in resistance during the day.
