A new survey shows that the average Facebook user gets lower grades than those who avoid the social networking site.

The survey, which was conducted among students at Ohio State University and Ohio Dominican University, found those who spend time on Facebook yield GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while their non-networking counterparts earn between a 3.5 and 4.0, on average.

When the survey was presented at the annual meeting for the American Education Research Association last month, co-author Aryn Karpinski stressed that the survey does not suggest Facebook directly causes lower grades, merely that there is a correlation between the two.

“I feel this constant need to check my Facebook and to just stay online for hours chatting with people,” said Angela Lankford, an English major from Va. “You think you can still talk to people while you are doing your homework at the same time, but you’re really not concentrating.”

Alan Farnes, an ancient near eastern studies major from Arizona, said he doesn’t let Facebook get in the way of his studies and that it all comes down to personal responsibility.

“Any time you make your life unbalanced and don’t have your priorities straight, then negative things can happen,” Farnes said. “Like a negative effect on grades.”

Karpinski’s study isn’t the first to suggest a link between Facebook and dwindling intellectual abilities.

In February, Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, warned that social networking sites ate causing shorter attention spans and providing instant gratification to users.

Greenfield said sites like Facebook are “infantilizing the brain into the state of small children.”

Gary Smalls, a neuroscientist from UCLA, recently released a book that suggests online social network users generally have a decreased ability to read facial expressions and catch on to subtle emotional gestures.

mckaycoppins@yahoo.com

Copyright Brigham Young University 5 May 2009