Psychologists at the University of Winnipeg recently completed a three year study whose results indicate that—and I'm paraphrasing slightly here—heavy texters and tweeters are just horrible, shitty people.

The researchers surveyed 2,300 of their students to test the so-called "shallowness hypothesis," which conjectures that

ultra-brief social media like texting and twitter privilege rapid, relatively shallow thought, consequently very frequent daily use of such media should be associated with cognitive and moral 'shallowness.'

The answer to that hypothesis was duh, people. Duh:

Higher texting frequency was associated with lesser importance of moral, aesthetic, and spiritual goals, and greater importance of wealth and image...[and with] higher explicit outgroup prejudice toward a broad range of social outgroups.

Note that last part: The study found that the more you text, the likelier you are to be a bigot toward indigenous groups, Asians, Middle Easterners, blacks, the obese, and the disabled.

How is this possible? Apparently frequent texter/tweeters display "low interest and engagement in reflective thought," while "reflective persons may not be as interested as others in frequent texting."

One's worldview could be stunted by confining one's communicational life experiences to interactions with a small affinity group via a narrow medium? Zounds!

Buck up, though. First, this doesn't tell us anything that Amanda Bynes, Jose Canseco, Russell Crowe, and Kanye West haven't already proven. Second, by the researchers' standards, you're probably not a really frequent texter:

Approximately 30 percent of students reported texting 200 plus times a day. 12 percent reported texting 300 plus times per day. Those who texted frequently also tended to be significantly less reflective than those who texted less often.

Good news. But then, if habitual texting can turn 2,300 Canadian kids into douchecanoes, imagine how fucked Americans truly are. [h/t Discovery News]

[Image via Bigstockphoto]