Study finds same personality traits between social media and drug addicts

People who use excessive social media are likely to show the same bad-decision making characteristics as those made by drug addicts and pathological gamblers, according to a new research.

A new study conducted by Michigan State University recently found a link between social media addicts and drug addicts that they both posses impaired decision making traits. The study is the first one to examine relationship between these type of decision making abilities and social media.

The team asked 71 participants to take part in a survey that measured their psychological dependence on Facebook. The volunteers were then required to take part in the Iowa Gambling Task – method used by psychologists to assess decision making and risky behavior. Tasks involved detecting outcome patterns in decks of cards to choose the best possible deck, wrote Telegraph.

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Researchers then discovered that the worse people performed by choosing from bad decks, the more excessively they were likely to use social media. Those who did better at the task were less social media dependent. These results matched those results with substance abusers.

“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 behavior as it relates to excessive social media users, so we investigated this possible parallel between excessive social media users and substance abusers,” expressed lead author Dar Meshi.

“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,” he added.

Furthermore, many studies have previously found links between excessive social media usage and poor sleep, mental health and relationships. Some social media sites such as YouTube and Instagram have even introduced features to help users manage their time on social media, as per Independent.

“Around one-third of humans on the planet are using social media, and some of these people are displaying maladaptive, excessive use of these sites. Our findings will hopefully motivate the field to take social media overuse seriously,” said Meshi, publishing their study in Journal of Behaviour Addictions.