Study: Tweeting harder to resist than smoking, drinking

While they are not considered vices, tweeting and checking emails may be habits that are harder to resist than smoking and drinking. This was the claim of researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires, according to a report on UK's The Guardian. A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School also suggested that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to cravings to use social and other media, the Guardian report said. "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 told the Guardian. He noted that with cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. "So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time," Hoffman said. The report said the team's experiment used BlackBerry smartphones to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg. It added the results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science. Experiment During the experiment, the participants were signaled seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days so they could message back whether:

• they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes
• what type it was
• the strength (up to irresistible)
• whether it conflicted with other desires
• whether they resisted or went along with it.

There were 10,558 responses and 7,827 "desire episodes" reported. Sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting "pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations," the Guardian report said. Also, the researchers found that as the day wore on, willpower became lower. In their paper, they said highest "self-control failure rates" were recorded with media. "Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money," the report quoted the researchers as saying. Tobacco, alcohol, coffee The academics, who included one each from Florida State University and Minnesota University, said the subjective reporting of desire was relatively low for tobacco, alcohol and coffee, apparently challenging "the stereotype of addiction as driven by irresistibly strong desires." "Resisting the desire to work when it conflicts with other goals such as socializing or leisure activities may be difficult because work can define people's identities, dictate many aspects of daily life, and invoke penalties if important duties are shirked," they said. "We made clear to participants that answering the BlackBerrys did not count. Also people really did not feel a desire to use them – they only beeped once in a while and, if anything, that was more annoying than pleasing, I guess. And there was nothing else they could use the devices for," Hofmann added. Würtzburg had been the testing ground because he had worked there as an assistant professor until recently. - KBK, GMA News