Results from a new scientific study suggest that accepting more friends on Facebook may be linked to longevity.
The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by scientists affiliated with the University of California at San Diego who were interested in the effects of social relationships on human health.
“We’ve known for a long time [...] that offline social networks [were] related to longer life,” said lead author William Hobbs. “But we didn’t know if that extended to online interactions too,” he said, according to the LA Times.
To test the extent of the effects of online social activity, the researchers took a pool of 12 million Facebook users, and checked how many had passed away two years later.
They found that, although there seemed to be no correlation between the number of friend requests sent and longevity, those who accepted the most friends were 34% less likely to die.
Michael Macy, a computational computer scientist at Cornell University, concluded from the results that the commonly-held notion that actively “making friends” with others is healthy may not be correct.
“I still think we’re going to be able to find ways to use this new online world to make us healthier; this is telling us that’s not the place to look,” he said. “You don’t start by telling people, go make more friends, or by doing things that help people to reach out to new people,” he said, according to LA Times.
It appears, then, that people may have to find another reason to make friends besides longevity.