Twitter harder to resist than sex
PEOPLE may experience strong urges for sex and sleep over the course of the day, but the urge to check Twitter and other social media sites is actually more difficult to resist, according to a new study scheduled for publication in the Journal of Psychological Science.
For the study, researchers gave BlackBerrys to 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85 in the German city of Wurtzburg and monitored them for seven consecutive days, according to the Guardian.
Seven times per day, participants were asked to send a message describing the type and strength of urges they had experienced within the last 30 minutes.
Researchers evaluated the responses -- all 10,588 of them -- and discovered they were more likely to give into the urge to check social media sites like Twitter, especially as willpower dwindled over the course of the day.
In contrast to prevailing beliefs that people experience irresistibly strong desires for tobacco, alcohol and coffee, most participants reported feeling relative low urges for those substances, head researcher Wilhelm Hofmann told the Guardian.
Read the full story at the Huffington Post.
