A study concluded that while looking at you own profile does give you a self-esteem boost, it may be negatively affecting your brain in other ways, The Atlantic reported.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied 150 undergraduate students. The team had the participants spend five minutes looking through either their own Facebook profile, or somebody's that they didn't know.
The participants then did an exercise that was meant to measure their self-esteem. The exercise measured how quickly they associated themselves with each item on a list of both positive and negative qualities.
After the first exercise they participated in what they were told was a separate experiment. The students were asked to count down from 1,978 in intervals of seven, they were asked to do so as fast as possible over a period of two minutes.
The researchers concluded from the study that the students who looked at their own profile received a self-esteem boost, but they weren't as successful in the counting exercise. While the students who looked at their own profiles weren't less likely to get the correct answers, they often didn't make it through as much of the counting as participants who looked at a strangers profile.
The difference was fairly substantial, students who looked at their own profiles were about 15 percent slower in the counting exercise, and made it through less rounds than others.
The study concluded that when the participants looked at their own profile it made them feel good about themselves, so they were less likely to feel as if they needed to prove themselves in other ways. Students who had gotten a self-esteem boost did not try as hard on the math test, most likely because they didn't need to do well to make themselves feel accomplished.
A second possible explanation was that the students had trouble concentrating because they were distracted by the online world. They may have been thinking about their Facebook profiles instead of focusing on the task that they were asked to complete.
