Phone is not the only culprit for human distraction, says study

It is time to declare taxes, so you sit on your computer to solve them, but then you have to send a text message to your partner to get details about mortgage interest. This message turns into a quick verification in the email, some social media rolings, and then online purchases on a liquidation in your favorite store-before you realize it has passed an hour without progress.

As easy it is to blame smartphones for the time spent on distractions, people are distracted by or without them, according to a new study published on Friday (28) in the newspaper Frontiers in Computer Science.

“Although users, unsurprisingly, get more involved with the smartphone when it is easily accessible, the amount of time spent on work and non -work activities and the fragmentation of their work days do not depend on the accessibility of the smartphone,” said study author Dr. Maxi Heitmayer, senior psychology professor at the University of the Arts London and visiting researcher and researcher at London School of School of Economics and Political Science.

To conduct the survey, Heitmayer has caused a group of 22 people to participate in two 5 -hour computer sessions on the computer: one with smartphones nearby and the other with the phones out of immediate reach. People tended to use the phone much more when it was within reach-but when they couldn’t get it, they used computers to distract themselves from work, according to the research.

The study is small, so it is difficult to draw major conclusions to the general population, said Dr. Noah Castelo, professor of consumer behavior at the University of Alberta. He was not involved in the research.

But the results suggest that just forbidding telephones in classrooms or workplaces may not necessarily solve the problem of distraction and focusing on habits and behaviors around technologies can be the best step to solve for better attention, heitmayer said.

Distractions happen

Most of the people Heitmayer says say they don’t like how to use the phone or how long spends in it – and that makes sense.

Smartphones are designed to keep you interested, even when you want to be doing something else, he observed.

“There is a battle open for the attention that is happening in your pocket. I think these are the best tools we invented, but there is also the software that reaps our attention,” he said.

But Phones are not always the only problem . The world is full of distractions, and we will often look for them, Heitmayer said.

“These interruptions, 89% of the time, are actually the people themselves. It’s not the phone vibrating, lighting or doing a sound. It’s you thinking, ‘Ah, I lost something.’ And then people check it out,” he added, citing a study he conducted in 2021.

Not having attention in one thing all the time makes sense to survival. Monitoring the group and being aware of social dynamics has been useful and normal for humans evolutionarily, Heitmayer said.

“We are not robots and we will not sit in front of the computer – at least most of us – and focus on hours and hours and hours. It looks like this appetite for distraction,” he said.

Pause and change attention may be useful for a more productive day of work, but if you are not aware of how the smartphone may be capturing your attention when you take it, you may waste time without realizing it.

Do not have the phone within reach

If you really want to spend less time on the phone, the best measure to take may be to keep it out of reach, according to the new research.

When participants had the phone within reach, they spent almost twice the time of it than when they had to get up and take it.

“Out of reach means you have to lift your ass. If you can stretch, somehow, it would still be within reach. And then people would still use the device,” said Heitmayer.

After working with the phone out of reach, participants said there were more times when they wanted to get it, but it was far away.

The way phones keep him hooked is different from addiction, he said Heitmayer: When you are addicted to a substance or gambling, there is a feeling that the longer you stay without the thing you are addicted, the more you need it.

“With the phone, it’s exactly the opposite,” he said. When you have more, you use it more; And the more you use it, the more time you stay in it. On the other hand, when you don’t have it, you get involved in something else – like an outdoor walk or a conversation with a friend – and find out that you forgot it.

How to deal with your phone habits

Using your phone in a healthy way can be complicated. It is not surprising that Dr. Paul Pavlou, dean of Miami Herbert Business School of the University of Miami, discovered in a 2021 survey that Students with unlimited access to smartphones performed worse than when their phones were banned in the classroom .

But participating students did significantly better when they were instructed to use the phones to help with learning.

“Technology will be there, and I think it is better to enjoy it as best as possible,” said Pavlou, who was not involved in the new study.

This opinion is also Heitmayer’s point of view: “We have this device -centered narrative:” We are addicted to the phone, and the phone is the problem, and therefore someone else must take care of it for me. “

“It’s much harder, of course, accept, ‘ok, in fact, it’s my habits with this [dispositivo] that are a problem. ‘”

Limiting your screen time can be useful for getting you spending your leisure time the way you really want, said castle.

His February study found that blocking the internet from people’s phones made them spend more time doing things like exercises, socializing in person, looking for hobbies and reading books.

For better use of the phone, it is important to become more literate about how attention is being captured, said Heitmayer.

For students, there is education in digital literacy about online predators, blows to obtain their information and identification of misinformation, but not much about learning to recognize when an application is designed to keep it involved beyond its own interest, he added.

This content was originally published on a telephone is not the only culprit for human distraction, says a study on CNN Brazil.

Source: CNN Brasil