Social media addicts ‘have similar character traits’ as drug addicts
Individuals who excessively use social media exhibit the identical unhealthy decision-making traits as drug addicts and pathological gamblers, in keeping with a brand new examine.
Researchers at Michigan State College (MSU) discovered a connection between excessive social media use and the dangerous determination making generally present in different varieties of habit.
It’s the first examine to look at the connection between most of these decision-making capabilities and social media, and as soon as once more attracts consideration to social media’s influence on psychological well being.
“Around one-third of humans on the planet are using social media, and some of these people are displaying maladaptive, excessive use of these site. Our findings will hopefully motivate the field to take social media overuse seriously,” mentioned Dar Meshi, lead creator and assistant professor at MSU, after the examine was revealed within the Journal of Behaviour Addictions.
“Decision making is oftentimes compromised in individuals with substance use disorders. They sometimes fail to learn from their mistakes and continue down a path of negative outcomes. But no one previously looked at this behaviour as it relates to excessive social media users, so we investigated this possible parallel between excessive social media users and substance abusers. While we didn’t test for the cause of poor decision-making, we tested for its correlation with problematic social media use.”
Most lately, Instagram launched a Your Exercise dashboard to permit individuals to set every day limits on how a lot time is spent on the app.
“With so many people around the world using social media, it’s critical for us to understand its use,” Prof Meshi mentioned. “I believe that social media has tremendous benefits for individuals, but there’s also a dark side when people can’t pull themselves away. We need to better understand this drive so we can determine if excessive social media use should be considered an addiction.”