I am not big on texting, but begrudgingly acknowledge its benefits. If I send or receive 40 text messages a week it is a booming period for me. As such, I am in the fully justifiable position of making fun of those of you have your noses permanently embedded in your phone or handheld device, oblivious to the world around you, forever tapping out and reading abbreviated missives from your BFF.
So imagine my surprise when I read about a recent study that shows “heavy texters” are more inclined to be both shallow and racist.
OMG, gf! grrrr
I am not sure what led researchers down this path, but I completely get the shallow part. One look at the vacuous gaze of a text monkey in full throttle can tell you everything you need to know. These people don’t read (beyond their txt msgs), they rarely interact with any human beings, and would rather text the person standing next to them versus actually speak to them. They don’t even speak to their employers. I once heard an HR representative lament that their Gen Y employees actually “text in sick” instead of call.
I would fix that in a nanosecond with this response: Dude, UR fired. ROFLMAO
What I don’t get is the racist component. I am not even sure what would compel researchers to ask such a question. Apparently this was a study involving 2,300 psychology students at the University of Winnipeg, who were observed for three years.
Researchers found that students who “sent more than 100 text messages per day were reportedly 30 percent less likely to concern themselves with living ethical lives.” Students who sent less than 50 text messages a day were “far more likely to care about living principled lives.”
Now apparently, these students were also asked to rate their approval levels of different groups of minorities – and the dominant textheads gave more negative ratings to different demographics than those who did not.
Now, here is my question. There were 2,300 psychology students in this study, each asked to rate their approval of various minorities. Am I correctly assuming that there were no minorities in this school? I find that hard to believe. It’s Canada, for God’s sake; a country with such open borders and liberal immigration laws that EVERYONE is now a minority. Unless this study was conducted at the Adolph Hitler Aryan Nation School of Psychology and Megalomania I seriously question the metrics on which this study may have been based.
But I’ve been wrong about things before…..
Ultimately, researchers, who admittedly may know far more about this than I, believe it is “the brevity of modern forms of communication” that may be contributing to this phenomenon.
They say “Ultra-brief social media like texting and Twitter encourages rapid, relatively shallow thought and consequently very frequent daily use of such media should be associated with cognitive and moral shallowness.”
I can’t really argue with that logic. Besides, it just gives me extra fuel for the justification of making fun of text addicts in the first place. It’s a shame they won’t be capable of comprehending my condescension. Too many words.