Report Science proves Facebook is a major downer

tom_mai78101

The Helper Connoisseur / Ex-MineCraft Host
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Humans like being around other humans. We are extraordinarily social animals. In fact, we are so social, that simply interacting with other people has been shown to be use similar brain areas as those involved with the processing of very basic rewards such as food, suggesting that interacting with people tends to make us feel good.

However, it doesn’t take much reflection to notice that the way people interact with each other has radically changed in recent years. Much of our contact happens not face-to-face, but rather while staring at screen-based digital representations of each other, with Facebook being the most prominent example. This raises a very fundamental question – how does online interaction with other people differ from interacting with people in person?

One possible way these two interaction styles might differ is through how rewarding we find them to be. Does interacting with Facebook make us feel good as does interacting with people in real life? A recent paper suggests that the answer is “probably not.” In fact, the data from this paper suggest that the more we interact with Facebook, the worse we tend to feel.

Researchers recruited participants from around a college campus. The participants initially completed a set of questionnaires, including one measuring their overall satisfaction with life. Following this, participants were sent text messages 5 times a day for two weeks. For each text, participants were asked to respond to several questions, including how good they felt at that moment, as well as how much they had used Facebook, and how much they had experienced direct interaction with others, since the last text. At the end of the two weeks, participants completed a second round of questionnaires. Here, the researchers once again measured participants’ overall satisfaction with life.

Read more here.
 

Accname

2D-Graphics enthusiast
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Maybe its the other way around? Maybe people who are in general less satisfied use facebook to try and get in contact with other people?
How could this "study" prove anything?
 

KaerfNomekop

Swim, fishies. Swim through the veil of steel.
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Maybe its the other way around? Maybe people who are in general less satisfied use facebook to try and get in contact with other people?
How could this "study" prove anything?
The biggest caveat: this is a correlational study. Without an experiment in which one manipulates how frequently individuals use Facebook, it isn’t possible to be sure of the causal relationship.
 

Varine

And as the moon rises, we shall prepare for war
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Just take some uppers and it becomes a regular conversation then.
 
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