Ben OsborneA study conducted by Utah Valley University has found that for Facebook users, being confronted daily by a constant flow of images of your friends smiling and updating their statuses with news on what exciting lives they are living could actually be making us unhappier.
During the study sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge interviewed 425 undergraduate students about their feelings of happiness and that of their friends. Participants were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “Life is fair” and “many of my friends have a better life than me”.
The study found that ”the more hours people spent on Facebook, the stronger was their agreement that others were happier” than themselves. This was particularly true for those who have many Facebook ‘friends’ that they don’t actually know very well outside of Facebook.
The longer the participants in the study had been using Facebook the higher the chance that they would ”significantly” agree with the statement that “life is unfair”, and those who spent more time socialising with friends off line were far more likely to believe that life wasn’t so bad, and as a consequence feel happier.
This is perhaps bad news for many who spend more time on Facebook, and the effect of feeling that others are happier than you can lead to unhappiness and even depression in some cases, the study found.
The fact that many people only post the positives in their lives on Facebook (a somewhat debatable point – or maybe that’s just my friends?), means that many people are making judgements on the lives of others, which is in fact based on limited and biased information, in what is known as correspondence bias.
The constant news feed updates describing how much fun people we barely know are having is really a falsehood, and judging our own complex lives against other peoples based upon tiny snippets of information streaming down the lefthand side of our screens seems not to be the best idea. It appears from the results of this study that were we to see the full picture of other people’s lives we would most likely see the same anxieties that reside within us staring right back.
Status anxiety and feelings of inadequacy compared to others can have very destructive consequences and the study seems to point to Facebook contributing to these feelings for many, so is it time for less Facebook and more real life? Or shall we just post this on Facebook, check our news feed and see how much fun everyone had last night?
Let us know what you think…
Facebook makes me want to kill myself.
Seriously though, maybe if people genuinely cared for their friends and where pleased to see them make the most of lives facebook wouldn't have this effect? This study says more about 'acquaintance as online friendship' and the rather envious/jealous nature of a competitive western social lifestyle, people think too much about what they may be missing out on rather than what would make them meaningfully happy. If they spent less time on facebook looking at what everyone else is doing and more time trying to find the things which could enhance their own lives this wouldn't be subject matter for University research!
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