"A study of 205 adults found that their desires for sleep and sex were the strongest, but the desire for media and work were the hardest to resist. Surprisingly, participants expressed relatively weak levels of desire for tobacco and alcohol. This implies that it is more difficult to resist checking Facebook or e-mail than smoking a cigarette, taking a nap, or satiating sexual desires. Of course it’s more difficult. But the difficulty has almost nothing to do with the power of the internal desire and everything to do with the external situation, as The Society Pages (a sociology front organization) should well know. In a classroom, a restaurant, a church, on the street, in an elevator – just about anywhere – you can quietly glance down at your smartphone and check your e-mail or Facebook page. But to indulge in smoking, sleeping, and “satiating sexual desires,” you have to be willing to violate some serious norms and even laws. It’s not about which desires are difficult to resist. It’s about which desires are easy to indulge. The study tells us not about the strength of psychological desires but the strength of social norms. You can whip out your Blackberry, and nobody blinks. But people might react more strongly if you whipped out, you know, your Marlboros. The more accurate headline might be Checking Twitter at Starbucks OK, Having Sex There, Not So Much, Study Finds But that headline is not going to get nearly as much attention."

- Psychology (! ! !) or Sociology (zzz)

(Source: sociolab)