How many text messages do you send in a day? According to a University of Winnipeg study, students who send more than 100+ texts per day are more inclined to value wealth and image over leading an ethical life.
A study from the University of Winnipeg found that students who text that much are 30 per cent less likely to feel strongly that leading an “ethical, principled life” was important to them, compared to those who text 50 times or less a day.
Psychology professors Paul Trapnell and Lisa Sinclair say frequent texters show higher values of ethnic prejudice as well, based on a separate lab study. Data was taken from one-hour online surveys from 2,300 psychology students over a span of three years, asked about their personality traits, life goals and texting habits.
Survey results concluded 30% of students texted over 200 times per day, with 12% admitting to sending over 300 texts per day. Now that’s a lot of procrastinating.
The study was created to test the “shallowing hypothesis” from the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, written by Nicholas Carr in 2010. The theory claims heavy use of texting and Twitter has changed our thought processes to become more superficial because these brief technologies produce rapid and somewhat shallow thinking.
“The values and traits most closely associated with texting frequency are surprisingly consistent with Carr’s conjecture that new information and social media technologies may be displacing and discouraging reflective thought,”
Even with these conclusions, both professors says there’s no reason to panic about our current generation turning out to be “morally shallow.”
Just recently the CWTA announced Canadians sent 71.5 billion text messages in the first nine months of 2012. How many times do you text per day?
[via CBC]
