Are you on Facebook often, posting photos of your weekend out with friends, and adding more people to your network? Sounds like you have the perfect combination of online activity to lead to a long-lasting life, according to a new study.
What you do on Facebook may help predict how long you’ll live, according to a quirky new study.
Scientists out of the University of California San Francisco say they’ve documented, for the first time, how online social networks are tied to life longevity.
Turns out, a popular online social life equates to a longer, healthier real life, too.
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“Online social media could make us not just happier, but healthier as well. This study based on gold standard health data is the first of its kind, but it is just a small step in a direction we should be taking towards understanding how this new world online can affect the health of millions of people,” Dr. James Fowler, the study’s lead author, told Global News.
“In our other studies, we found that only close friends tend to transmit health behaviours between one another, but here it is the total number of all Facebook friends – which is a measure that includes both friends and acquaintances – that matters,” Fowler said.
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It’s hard to tell what’s at play though – healthy people could attract more friendships, or the total number of Facebook friends could be an index for the number of close friends we have, too.
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Here’s a look at seven findings about Facebook use and life longevity coming out of the novel study:
Better sign up: Those who are on Facebook live longer than those who aren’t, the research suggests. In a given year, an average Facebook user is 12 per cent less likely to die than their peer who doesn’t use the site. But this is the “crudest measure” coming out of the study, they say. So many elements could be at play here, from social to economic differences between users and non-users.
Don’t focus on how many ‘likes’ you get: While you may be checking how many people ‘like’ your latest Facebook status or photo album from a trip, the researchers found the popularity of your posts doesn’t correlate to better health. It may be a confidence-booster, according to previous studies, though.
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The bigger the friends list, the better: Of the users studied, those who had “average” or “large” social networks – in the top 30 to 50 per cent – lived longer than those in the lowest 10 per cent.
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…But make sure you’re the accepter of friend requests: When the researchers focused on the direction of friend requests, it was those who accepted them more often who lived the longest. This worried the team because public health officials often urge people to go out and make friends to improve their health. Turns out, sending friend requests appeared to have no effect on life longevity at all.
Party people: If you’re posting more photos from social events and get togethers, the researchers say this helped with documenting “greatest longevity.” The researchers zeroed in on photos, status updates, and wall posts to come to this finding. Turns out written wall posts and messages led to a non-linear pattern. But moderate levels of wall posts were the healthiest – they were tied to the lowest mortality.
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Don’t be an online hermit: On the other end of the spectrum are those who spend a lot of time online with “little evidence” of connecting with their friends. While most users didn’t fall into this trend, it was tied to negative repercussions.
How was the study conducted? The UCSF team collaborated with Facebook and Yale University for their research. They matched 12 million Facebook users in California with state health records. To keep privacy intact, once a match was made based on name and birthdate, the data was de-identified.
All of the people studied were born between 1945 and 1989 – their online activity was studied for six months and compared to the activity of non-users of similar age and gender. Almost 12,000 users died within the year usage data was collected.
Keep in mind, the study authors emphasize their research points to an “association” and doesn’t identify causation.
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Right now it’s too early to say if there is a causal relationship but the scientists want to do follow-up studies to better understand how social media usage affects life longevity.
Fowler said his team is “especially interested” in how social networks respond to the death of loved ones – an area of research in online networking that’s pretty much untouched terrain so far.
The full findings were published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
Follow @Carmen_Chai
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