Think about the following question: Are you addicted to your friends?

This might sound like a strange question, but this is a question that we asked — satirically, we should add — in a study that we released via a preprint yesterday.

The origins of this research reach back around 12–18 months, with a chance conversation about the classification of a range of behavioral ‘addictions’ including, among others, Facebook addiction, smartphone addiction, and (at the time, also satirically) selfie addiction. We were looking at some of this research and wondering whether these things actually represented ‘addiction’, or if some people just take normal social interactions to an extreme.

It was then that we started looking at how ‘addict’ was classified. In essence, previous studies had been using a ‘polythetic’ scoring system to label individuals in their samples as ‘addicts’. According to Andreassen et al. (2012), this means that an individual would score at the mid-point or above (i.e., ‘neither agree nor disagree or higher) on at least half of the items on an addiction questionnaire. For reference, here is the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale:

On this scale, if you were to say that ten or more of these statements had ‘sometimes’ in the past year, you would be classified as being a ‘Facebook addict’.

This didn’t sit well with us. It felt like scales into ‘problematic social media use’ were applying overly liberal scoring techniques, possibly leading to normal behavior being seen as problematic. We thought that ‘problematic’ Facebook use, for example, could simply be a manifestation of a normal human need for social contact and interaction.

So we started to plan…