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Does Facebook Praise Kill Self-Control?


One hateful Facebook comment might reduce you to tears, but a recent study found that the “likes” prompted by your status updates and photo posts might also have a negative impact, especially on your waistline and pocketbook.

Columbia Business School professor Keith Wilcox and University of Pittsburgh business professor Andrew Stephen studied people who use Facebook to stay in touch with their closest friends and found that the more likes and self-affirming comments they got, the more likely they were to reach for a cookie over a granola bar.
The study, titled “Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control,” was published in the Journal of Consumer Research and found that your self-esteem can soar while browsing your Facebook feed, but only if you have strong ties to your Facebook friends. If your feed is populated with updates and comments from people you’ve never met before, you won’t feel any better after reading their updates.

That boost in self-esteem can come with a price. For one experiment in the study, Wilcox and Stephen asked 84 study participants to either browse Facebook or read CNN.com for five minutes. Both groups then had to choose between a healthy granola bar or not-so-healthy chocolate chip cookie. The Facebook group was much more likely to go for the cookie, while the CNN group picked the granola bar.

The results surprised Wilcox, who knew from prior studies that spending time on social networks makes us feel better about ourselves. He expected those good feelings to help bolster self control, not diminish it. “People with high self-esteem typically have more self control, not less,” he says. “It seems the momentary increase in self control that the participants got from browsing Facebook for a few minutes creates a sense of entitlement to do what they want and, therefore, lower self control.”

The final experiment of the study found that those people who reported higher self-esteem and lower self control from browsing Facebook happen to have a higher body mass index and more credit card debt. Those with strong ties to their Facebook friends and who used the social network frequently had a higher BMI, were more likely to binge eat, and had several hundred dollars more in credit card debt than frequent users that barely know their Facebook friends and those that go on Facebook less often. Wilcox cautions that those findings do not necessarily mean that spending time on social networks causes any of those things.

These two business school professors did not draw any lines between the findings and how advertisers could exploit them, but you can be confident that one cookie company or another will take this golden opportunity to stuff your Facebook feed with more ads and your face with more cookies. After all, the cookie peddlers know you won’t be able to resist the temptation.







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