As addictive as nicotine and sex may be, they now take a backseat to likes, pokes, mentions, and retweets, as a new study shows that checking social networks like Facebook and Twitter is actually more tempting than sex and cigarettes are.

Researchers at Chicago University’s Booth Business School used BlackBerrys to log reports about participants’ willpower and desires over seven days.

The online poll of 250 participants in Germany revealed that the need to socially interact via tweets, comments, and likes was stronger than the need to indulge in sex and smokes.

Over seven consecutive days participants were signalled seven times a day over 14 hours, according to the Guardian. 

This means that the participants were required to report urges they had at the time or had experienced within the last 30 minutes.

Has our social interaction become so far gone from the real world that we would rather indicate we like photos of sexually attractive people than actually engage in sexual activity with them?

Maybe this will help curb the world’s overpopulation problem. Regardless, it’s pretty pathetic.

Stephen Willard | Elite.