Study: Does Twitter make you dumber?

Now to be fair, the researchers didn’t say it made you dumber, they actually said it negatively impacted learning, which I guess could make you dumber.

Anyway, that was the conclusion of a study conducted by researchers from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy. In their study, they compared the results of 1,500 high school students, half of whom used Twitter to study a 1904 novel, The Late Mattia Pasca, with the other half who used a traditional classroom setting style of teaching.

The Hill reported on the results:

The study found that students who used Twitter saw performance on the test reduced by about 25 percent to 40 percent of a standard deviation from the average result.

Researchers found the decline was most notable among higher-achieving students, including women, native Italians and those who scored higher on a baseline test.

READ: Study finds Twitter has a negative effect on learning

One of the researchers, Professor Gian Paolo Barbetta, told the Washington Post:

“It’s quite detrimental. I can’t say whether something is changing in the mind, but I can say that something is definitely changing in the behavior and the performance.”

READ: Twitter is eroding your intelligence. Now there’s data to prove it.

This is not the first study to note the negative impact of Social Media on society. The Guardian reported in 2017:

Four of the five most popular forms of social media harm young people’s mental health, with Instagram the most damaging, according to research by two health organisations.

Instagram has the most negative impact on young people’s mental wellbeing, a survey of almost 1,500 14- to 24-year-olds found, and the health groups accused it of deepening young people’s feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.

The survey, published on Friday, concluded that Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter are also harmful.