Another Study Proves Facebook is Making You Jealous, Miserable

While Facebook accounts for some 73%* of human interaction on Earth right now, academics keep trying to prove it’s ruining everyone’s lives.

It seems every week there’s a new study about the negative impact of Facebook, mainly centering around its ability to provoke feelings of envy and inadequacy among those who don’t know how to pretend their lives are awesome using the service. The thinking often goes that given most people use Facebook to chronicle their high points rather than low ones, the resultant flood of overly positive imagery and status updates creates intense feelings of jealousy in many Facebook users.

Another study has been released making the same basic Facebook-is-a-jealousy-machine contentions, this time undertaken by sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge at Utah Valley University and encompassing 425 college students. Chou and Edge controlled for demographic factors like age, race, religious affiliation and relationship status, and then asked students how much they agreed or disagreed with statements about the fairness of life as well as their perceptions of the lives of others.

What Chou and Edge found was that the more time a student spent on Facebook, the less likely they were to be satisfied with their lives. In the study, they write:

“Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives. Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook “friends” agreed more that others had better lives.”

The study, which also observed that individuals who spent more time socializing in “real life” were less likely to report unhappiness, was published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.

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Tags: Facebook, Studies

About the Author

Kim LaCapria Kim LaCapria is a writer and editor based in New York. A longtime information junkie, she began blogging full-time at the Inquisitr in 2009. Prior to that, she worked as a marketing assistant in the cosmetics and skincare industry. In addition to her writing for fortytwotimes, she also writes for Medacity and The Inquisitr. Kim is also a contributor for SocialNewsDaily, Indyposted, and TotallyMoney. In the past, she contributed to Lipstick and Luxury and managed social media accounts and blogs for several small and mid-sized businesses.