Between Facebook and Sex, Facebook Wins

You do it in the morning in bed, at night on the couch, and occasionally at work. Turns out, it’s one of the hardest activities to resist. It’s not smoking a cigarette or having sex; it’s getting online to check your Facebook or e-mail. A new study shows that resisting the urges to update your status or send a tweet can be harder to resist than the desire to get it on.

Wilhelm Hofmann, assistant professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, conducted a study of 205 participants in Germany 18 years and older on how easy it is to resist common desires. Each person was given a BlackBerry phone and told to alert the researchers every 30 minutes if they had specific desires to sleep, eat, have sex, smoke, drink, or surf the web.

The No. 1 desire reported was eating, followed by sleeping, and drinking non-alcoholic drinks. In fourth place was using some form of media, which made up 8.1 percent of all desires reported. The most commonly reported media activities were watching TV and surfing the internet. More specifically, in the “surfing the internet” category, 71 percent of participants had the urge to check their e-mail and 65 percent had the desire to use Facebook, Twitter or other social media. Having was sex a distant ninth.

The proportions of desires reported by student and non-student participants Image: Wilhelm Hofmann

When participants tried to resist their desires, particularly checking Facebook, they failed 42 percent of the time. In contrast, only 11 percent of people trying to resist sex failed (which is to say, almost 90 percent of the time someone resisted the urge, sex was a no-go). Those resisting the compulsion to eat failed 22 percent of the time, and participants that resisted using tobacco had a 17 percent failure rate. Sadly, only resisting the urge to work trumped checking social media, with a 43 percent failure rate.

“Media desires were quite frequent and, most important, particularly hard to control (when people indicated that they had actually wanted to do so),” says Hofmann. “These findings may be one important piece in the puzzle of problematic media use as they show that people had a particularly hard time resisting the call of media, perhaps because due to the constant availability of media.”

That we are relenting to our Facebook and Twitter obsessions while in bed has a lot to do with all those smartphones, laptops, and tablets near our pillows, says Coye Chesire, an associate professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, whose research focuses on the role of trust and cooperation in online interactions. “That curiosity inherent in social networks, where there is always something new happening, combined with being able to take that Android device or iPhone into your bed is hard to resist,” Chesire says. “It’s instant gratification, but I think it has been surprising to see that as access to our social networks has become so mobile, how much time people are spending on things like Facebook and Twitter.”

That said, Chesire would like to believe that weighing sex with a partner and checking Facebook updates are not in the same realm. Find activities that people crave, that are socially acceptable to engage in while in public 24/7, and run a comparison of them, he says. Having sex or tweeting out a baseball score? “I’d like to believe they are apples and oranges,” Chesire says.