A new study has just given all of us the best excuse not to put down our cell phones. Researchers at the University of California-San Diego concluded that being social online has been found to decrease the risk of mortality.
While many have scoffed at online interaction and stated that it was inferior to face-to-face interaction, this new study revealed that people who used Facebook had a 12 percent lower chance of dying in a given year than a non-Facebook user. Also, the risk of death from diseases like dementia and diabetes was much lower among Facebook users, according to UCSD News.
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The first author of the study, William Hobbs, worked on the research as a doctoral student in political science at UC San Diego. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at North eastern University.
“Interacting online seems to be healthy when the online activity is moderate and complements interactions offline,” Hobbs said. “It is only on the extreme end, spending a lot of time online with little evidence of being connected to people otherwise, that we see a negative association.”
What the researchers did was to take 12 million social media profiles and compare them against California Department of Public Health vital records. For the people who do you use Facebook, the researchers checked out the numbers of friends, numbers of photos and status updates, and number of sent messages to see who lived longer.
“The association between longevity and social networks was identified by Lisa Berkman in 1979 and has been replicated hundreds of times since,” senior author James Fowler said. “In fact, a recent meta-analysis suggests the connection may be very strong. Social relationships seem to be as predictive of lifespan as smoking, and more predictive than obesity and physical inactivity. We’re adding to that conversation by showing that online relationships are associated with longevity, too.”
According to the study, “People with average or large social networks, in the top 50 to 30 percent, lived longer than those in the lowest 10 – a finding consistent with classic studies of offline relationships and longevity.”
UC San Diego posted on their Facebook page: “A study of 12 million Facebook users suggests that using Facebook is associated with living longer—when it serves to maintain and enhance your real-world social ties. The study, conducted by UC San Diego professor of political science James Fowler and then doctoral student William Hobbs, found that Facebook users who accepted the most friendships lived the longest. Hobbs is now a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University.”
Check out the full study here.
Do you agree with this study? Do you think Facebook will increase your lifespan?
