Facebook and happiness
The Happiness Research Institutes’s study involved 1,095 Facebook users. The researchers had half of them, randomly chosen from the base group, stop using Facebook for one week, while the other half continued on with their normal Facebook usage.
Meik Wiking is the chief executive of the Happiness Research Institute (and presumably happy to be so) and he said they “focused on Facebook because it is the social media that most people use across age groups.” For their study, Mr. Wiking and his colleagues used Facebook users from Denmark.
Their study found that after one week 81 percent of those who kept using Facebook reported themselves as being “happy,” 75 percent said they enjoyed their lives and 20 percent said they were dissatisfied.
Of those that stopped using Facebook 88 percent reported themselves as being “happy,” 84 percent said they enjoyed their lives and just 12 percent described themselves as being unsatisfied with their lives.
Social life improves
There were a host of other results that suggested dumping Facebook would improve your happiness including 54 percent of Facebook users reporting being worried and 34 percent saying they were sad, with just 41 percent of non-users saying they were worried and 22 percent reporting being sad.
The study also found those who’d stopped using the giant social media site were more likely to say they had a rich social life. They also said their concentration had improved since abandoning Facebook, while those who continued using Facebook saw no improvement in concentration.
The Happiness Research Institute’s website notes it is “an independent think tank exploring why some societies are happier than others” and that they inform “decision makers of the causes and effects of human happiness and seek to bring subjective well-being to the core of the public policy debate.”
So — happy to know all that?
