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| Photo: Robinson Meyer |
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| Photo: Jason Reed / Reuters
I sit down at the table, move my napkin to my lap, and put my phone on the table face-down. I am at a restaurant, I am relaxed, and I am about to start lying to myself. I’m not going to check my phone, I tell myself. (My companion’s phone has appeared face-down on the table, too.) I’m just going to have this right here in case something comes up.
Of course, something will not come up. But over the course of the next 90 minutes I will check my phone for texts, likes, and New York Times push
alerts at every pang of boredom, anxiety, relaxation, satiety,
frustration, or weariness. I will check it in the bathroom and when I
return from the bathroom. I don’t really enjoy this, but it is very
interesting, even if some indignant and submerged part of my psyche
moans that I am making myself dumber every time I look at it. As, in
fact, I am.
A smartphone can tax its user’s cognition simply by
sitting next to them on a table, or being anywhere in the same room with
them, suggests a study published recently in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
It finds that a smartphone can demand its user’s attention even when
the person isn’t using it or consciously thinking about it. Even if a
phone’s out of sight in a bag, even if it’s set to silent, even if it’s
powered off, its mere presence will reduce someone’s working memory and
problem-solving skills.
These effects are strongest for people who depend on their smartphones,
such as those who affirm a statement like, “I would have trouble getting
through a normal day without my cell phone.”
But few people also know they’re
paying this cognitive smartphone tax as it plays out. Few participants
in the study reported feeling distracted by their phone during the exam,
even if the data suggested their attention was not at full capacity.
“We
have limited attentional resources, and we use some of them to point
the rest of those resources in the right direction. Usually different
things are important in different contexts, but some things—like your
name—have a really privileged status,” says Adrian Ward, an author of
the study and a psychologist who researches consumer decision-making at
the University of Texas at Austin.
“This idea with smartphones is that it’s similarly relevant all of the time, and it gets this privileged attentional space. That’s not the default for other things,” Ward told me. “In a situation where you’re doing something other than, say, using your name, there’s a pretty good chance that whatever your phone represents is more likely to be relevant to you than whatever else is going on.”
In other words: If you grow dependent on your
smartphone, it becomes a magical device that silently shouts your name
at your brain at all times. (Now remember that this magical shouting
device is the most popular consumer product ever made. In the developed
world, almost everyone owns one of these magical shouting devices and
carries it around with them everywhere.)
In the study, Ward and his colleagues examined the performance of more than 500 undergraduates on two different common psychological tests of memory and attention. In the first experiment, some participants were told to set their phones to silent without vibration and either leave them in their bag or put them on their desk. Other participants were asked to leave all their possessions, including their cell phone, outside the testing room. In the second experiment, students were asked to leave their phones on their desk, in their bag, or out in the hall, just as in the first experiment. But some students were also asked to power their phone off, regardless of location. In both experiments, students who left their phones outside the room seemed to do best on the test. They also found the trials easier—though, in follow-up interviews, they did not attribute this to their smartphone’s absence or presence. Throughout the study, in fact, respondents rarely attributed their success or failure on a certain test to their smartphone, and they almost never reported thinking they were underperforming on the tests. Daniel Oppenheimer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, noted that this effect is well-documented for enticing objects that aren’t smartphones. He was not connected to this research, though his research has focused on other vagaries of digital life. Several years ago, he and his colleagues suggested that students remember far more of a lecture when they take notes by hand rather than with a laptop. |
Recommended Reading
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
"More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis."
This article has been adapted from Jean M. Twenge's forthcoming book, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us.
Source: The Atlantic and The Atlantic Channel (YouTube)
