When Friends Became An 'Addiction'
The satirical study that exposes farcical research in Psychology
In the modern world of social media, it seems like we can find an addiction everywhere we go. “Facebook addiction”, “Scrolling addiction”, “Selfie Addiction”, “Porn Addiction” and the list goes on and on. The question one should ask is, are we really way more addicted to things today than we were in the past? Or are we mislabelling normal human behaviour as addiction?
That is exactly what a group of psychologists tried to answer with their research trying to assess how many people in the modern world are ‘addicted’ to their offline friends. The researchers thought that the landscape of social media has changed a lot and today, people go to these sites for normal social needs, to keep a check on their friends or to stay in touch with them which is very normal human behaviour.
The Review
The group of psychologists started looking into how the ‘addict’ was defined by the studies claiming a high prevalence of Facebook or Selfie addiction in the modern youth. The studies usually utilized a ‘polythetic scoring system’ in order to differentiate between addicts and non-addicts.
What is that?
Imagine you have a scale with each item having 5 options like a Likert scale from completely disagree to completely agree being the extremes and all other possibilities being the middle options. It would look something like this
I————————————middleoption————————————I
(one extreme) (other extreme)
If there are 10 questions in the scale, a score of 12 or more in total would make you an addict. That is, if you scored 3 or higher on 4 of the items, you would be classed as an addict.
The most common example of this is the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (Andearssen et. al. 2012) which has 6 questions and the scores range from 1-5.
The Procedure
The psychologists who performed the satirical study made a small change to the BFAS mentioned above for their study. They changed the wording of all the questions from “Facebook” to “ spending time with offline friends”. This is what the questionnaire looked like in the end.
I spend a lot of time thinking about spending time with friends
I have spent more time with friends than I initially intended
I often think about the times I've spent with friends
I have ignored my current/previous partner(s) or family members to spend time with friends
I feel bad if I, for different reasons, cannot spend time with friends
I have spent so much time with friends that it has had a negative impact on my job/studies
They didn’t just stop there. In order to ensure that the new questionnaire really was scientifically valid, they tested its reliability and validity. The new scale, named “Offline Friends Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ)” was in fact, a valid scientific measure.
But something feels wrong, doesn’t it?
Just think about it. If you say that you ‘sometimes’ feel bad about not being able to meet your friends, ‘sometimes’ think about the time you have spent with your friends, ‘sometimes’ felt an urge to spend time with your friends and ‘sometimes’ have had an aspect of your life negatively impacted due to spending time with your friends - Congratulations! You are addicted to friends!
The Result
As the researchers pointed out, it seems like the bar for calling someone an ‘addict’ is too low and using liberal scoring techniques and arbitrary cut-offs may lead to overblown numbers of addicts.
Even in this research, more than 550 of the 800 participants who filled this questionnaire crossed the cut-off for addiction. That is close to an addiction rate of 69%! Going by these numbers, the government needs to implement some strict measures to take care of this public health crisis. People are spending too much time with their friends! (Lockdown, anyone?)
Thankfully, no such thing is happening or will happen any time soon. It is quite clear that the tools Psychology is using right now to differentiate between social addiction is too broad and not accurate enough to be used so popularly. This can lead to farcical results of addiction studies where the end analysis shows addiction rates as high as 40%.
Addiction as a concept is itself very hard to define. We don’t say we are addicted to water, or life, or oxygen because these are the basic necessities required for living. In the same vein, we cannot consider spending time with friends to be an addiction since it is the fulfilment of a very basic social need that a gregarious animal, like Homo Sapiens, has.
We have to understand that social media is not what it used to be. It is now the primary means of communication between family and friends even if they are separated by thousands of kilometres and we need better tools to understand and analyze who is and who isn’t actually addicted to these platforms. Otherwise, we might end up pathologizing every single human being on the planet with one thing or the other.
The times have changed and so must psychology with them.
PS: You can read the article by the original researcher on this link and the original paper is available for perusal here.
Until next time,
Arjun Gupta