Facebook and Twitter more desirable than sex or cigarettes!

Checking social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter is much more tempting than sex and cigarettes, a study has revealed.

Researchers at Chicago University's Booth Business School used BlackBerrys to record reports about participants' willpower and desires over 7 days.

The online poll of 250 participants in Germany showed that the craving to interact through tweets, photos, and comments was stronger than sex and cigarettes, the Daily Mail reported.

According to the Guardian, participants were signalled seven times a day over 14 hours over seven consecutive days.

This meant that the participants were required to message back and inform if they were experiencing a desire to check their accounts at that moment or had experienced one within the last half hour.

The participants, then had to identify what the desire was and how strong it was, whether it conflicted with their other desires and what decision they made - to accept it or not.

Wilhelm Hofmann, the study's lead author, explained that as social media is more readily accessible and a lot cheaper than other stimulants, they are harder to turn down.

"Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not cost much to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist," Hofmann as said.

The findings are going to be published in the journal Psychological Science.

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