Social networks make people distrustful

Social networking is tightly woven into our lives. It allowed us to erase the boundaries of space and to communicate with family and friends in any part of the world. But every year there is increasing evidence that social networks affect us badly. Fabio Sabatini and Francesco Sarracino from the University of Rome in Italy conducted a study with the participation of over 50 thousand people. They were asked to answer questions like "How satisfied are You with your life as a whole nowadays?", "How often do you meet with friends?" or "How much do You trust people in live communication and online?". In addition, the researchers conducted a massive survey of users of Facebook and Twitter and collected information on how every person uses the Internet. For the expression of life satisfaction used a scale from 0 – extremely dissatisfied to 10 – completely satisfied. At the end of the study, the researchers found that interaction face to face is more trusted than communication through social networks, and spent the next parallel: the more people trust, the welfare is higher. It is the loss of trust can affect subjective well-being. Sabatini and Sarracino commented on the statistics: "We believe that online messengers play a positive role in subjective well-being, because affect physical relationships, while the use of social networking sites is associated with lower social trust. The overall effect of networking on individual welfare is negative". The researchers also concluded that moderate use of social networks significantly improves people's well-being.

Source: estet-portal.com