Twitter is harder to resist than sleep, says study

Jonathan Warren

Author: Jonathan Warren

28.03.2024

News

96106082New research has found that people are more likely to give into the urge to check their emails or tweet on the social networking site Twitter than go to sleep in their double bed when they're tired. A team of researchers examined the Blackberry behaviour of 205 individuals, between the ages of 18 and 85, as they went about their daily lives. The sample was taken from in and around the German city of Würtzburg. The participants were signalled seven times a day over the space of 14 hours for a week and recorded the levels of their desire to communicate via these methods, and whether they resisted this desire or not. The results, which are soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science, showed a total of 10,558 responses and 7,827 "desire episodes" and suggested that the high availability and low cost of engaging in media are in part to blame. Wilhelm Hofmann, of Chicago University's Booth Business School and lead author of the study, told the Guardian (published February 3rd): "Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success".