How Facebook and Twitter can boost your ego and make you more impulsive in just five minutes

• Policy-makers need to consider the impacts, warn researchers
• Inability to concentrate found to be one of the effects
• Browsing social networks for just five minutes can cause loss of control
  

By Lewis Smith

Published: 05:47 EDT, 15 January 2013 | Updated: 07:22 EDT, 15 January 2013

Facebook and other social network sites can cause users to lose control and may lead to violence, obesity and debt.

Browsing for just five minutes on social networks can boost user’s self-belief so much that they become more impulsive.

Effects can include an increase in binge-eating, loss of concentration and lack of application, a study showed.

Browsing Facebook for just five minutes can increase impulsive behaviour, the study found.

Researchers are also concerned that the loss of control prompted by using Facebook could lead to social problems such as aggression and violence.

‘Given that self-control is important for maintaining social order and personal well-being, this subtle effect could have widespread impact,’ the study from the US warned.

‘This is particularly true for adolescents and young adults who are the heaviest users of social networks and have grown up using social networks as a normal part of their daily lives.’

Dr Andrew Stephen, of the University of Pittsburgh, and Dr Keith Wilcox of Columbia University in New York, carried out the study with more than 1,000 Facebook users and said it was the first time it has been demonstrated that facebook and other social networking sites lead to loss of control.

They urged policy-makers to investigate social network use to better understand how people behave after using Facebook and other sites.

‘We have demonstrated that using today's most popular social network, Facebook, may have a detrimental effect on people's self-control,’ said Dr Stephen.

Research identified an increase in binge-eating as one of the effects of using social network sites.

The researchers found that the key to behavioral changes after using social networking sites is the way they boost a user’s feeling of self-worth.

For people who send and receive posts from a number of friends with whom they have ‘strong ties’ even using a site for a short period of time was observed to increase self-esteem.

This is thought to happen because the social conventions that prevent boasting in face to face meetings are weakened when posting online, the researchers argued.

Users are also likely to focus on presenting positive images of themselves which are reinforced by supportive responses.

Having had their self-esteem boosted, the study showed, the self-control of users was weakened and resulted in different types of behaviour.

Volunteers taking part in one test were instructed to either spend a few minutes browsing social network sites or to look through CNN.com and TMZ.com.

Participants were then asked to choose between a healthy snack or a chocolate chip cookie and it was found that those using social network sites were more likely to opt for the unhealthy option.

‘Social network use enhanced self-esteem, making them more likely to make an unhealthy food choice compared to those who did not browse Facebook,’ the academics reported in a paper - Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control - published online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

A similar test in which volunteers were asked to solve anagrams after going online showed that the Facebook users were more likely to lose concentration and give up on the puzzles.

Researchers also asked volunteers a series of questions to establish their Body Mass Index (BMI), how many credit cards they had and what their levels of debt were.

 ‘The results suggest that greater social network use is associated with a higher body-mass index, increased binge eating, a lower credit score, and higher levels of credit-card debt for individuals with strong ties to their social network,’ the researchers found.

‘This research advances our knowledge of social networks by demonstrating that social networks can have significant effects on consumer judgment and decision-making, even in tasks that are unrelated to social network use or more general social behavior.’

They added: ‘Our research demonstrates that social network use may also have a detrimental effect on well-being by leading certain people to exhibit lower self-control.

‘It would be worthwhile for researchers and policy makers to further explore social network use in order to better understand which consumers may be particularly vulnerable to suffering negative psychological or social consequences.'