Twitter harder to quit than smoking

Würzburg, Germany: Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.

They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings to use social and other media.

A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würzburg is the first to monitor such responses outside a laboratory.

The results will be published in the journal Psychological Science.