Michigan state university published an article titled “excessive social media users demonstrate impaired decision making in the Iowa gambling task. In the article, they explain about excessive social media users behave similarly like cocaine or heroin addicts.
Research was measured by Bergan Facebook addiction scale and Iowa Gambling Task. IGT abstract below. “The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is commonly used to understand the processes involved in decision-making. Though the task was originally run without a computer, using a computerized version of the task has become typical. These computerized versions of the IGT are useful, because they can make the task more standardized across studies and allow for the task to be used in environments where a physical version of the task may be difficult or impossible to use (e.g., while collecting brain imaging data).”
And the result of those who use Facebook a lot was worse than those who doesn’t use Facebook much. They used to do IGT test to see the damage in frontal lobe in the brain and to see heroin addict’s brain, and in this research they saw the same result both facebook addict and drug addict.
The reason why they used Facebook as research platform is because FB is the most used platform in the world. However, Instagram or Twitter would be the same result.
Since social media became part of our life, it’s obvious that sns is changing our lifestyle even behavior in our everyday life. And it’s very hard to measure how sns affect on our health as a proven research since it takes long period of time to measure.
