Being around a lazy person could make you sluggish too!

New Delhi: Laziness is a vice that has come hand-in-hand with the onset of progressing technology. A digitized world, instead of being seen as an advantage, has been given the guise of convenience, seeing as how it has pushed people across the globe to adopt a sluggish lifestyle.

Lack of activity and energy is one of the drawbacks of being technologically advanced and laziness is a huge consequence.

Unfortunately, a study has gone a step ahead and shown that laziness has a disease-like nature by saying that it is actually contagious and can spread from person to person!

If you have lazy friends or coworkers, then it would possibly be a wise decision to avoid being with them too much if you don't want that attitude rubbing off on you.

As per the study, people tend to imitate behaviours of laziness, impatience and prudence, which are personality traits that guide how people make decisions that involve taking a risk, delaying an action and making an effort, said Jean Daunizeau, from the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) in France.

Prudence is a preference for avoiding risk, and impatience is a preference for options that involve little delay and a strong desire for a payoff now rather than later.

Lazy people are those who determine that the potential rewards are not worth the effort.

In the study, the researchers recruited 56 healthy people. To measure the participants' attitudes toward risk, delay and effort, they were given a series of tasks.

Participants were asked to choose between a 90 per cent chance of winning a small payoff in three days or a higher payoff in three months with lower odds.

They were then asked to guess "someone else's" decisions on a similar task, and after making a selection, they were then told which choice this "other" participant had made.

However, the "someone else" was in fact a computerised model developed by the researchers.

During the final phase of the experiment, the participants repeated the first task, in which they were asked to make their own decisions, 'Live Science' reported.

The researchers found that after the participants observed the prudent, impatient or lazy attitudes of "others" on the task, their own choices about putting in effort, waiting during a delay or taking a risk drifted toward that of others.

In other words, the participants started acting more like the computer-generated study participants.

The study was published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

(With PTI inputs)