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These techniques, when used to manipulate us rather than support us, need to be fought. Unfortunately, some psychological techniques are used to manipulate our attention to maximize a company's profit, including behavioral primes, distracting alerts, gamification techniques, autoplay videos, and click-bait posts. The incentives of the attention economy place a high premium on getting, and keeping, a user's attention. With this approach, we see one important warning sign of the connected state: Companies that provide media content for cellphones are using psychology and strategic communication research to get us to spend as much time on them as possible. Instead, we believe that it's much more important to consider what the phone is being used for. But to assume that our constant state of connection with the phone constitutes an addiction is to miss the point. Physical connection and interaction are human needs. There clearly is - turning phones off during social gatherings, paying attention to the people we are with, and having time alone and unplugged to recharge are all important. This is not to say that there is no value in disconnecting. We should not throw out decades of research from psychology and communication just because technology is involved, especially when these literatures suggest that the phone can facilitate important social and psychological needs. This is precisely what using the phone, with its access to vast amounts of social media, can provide. There is also plenty of evidence that we have social brains that have evolved and become highly tuned to seeking out social information. Psychology has provided decades of evidence that social connection is incredibly important for well-being and that a desire for information and entertainment are core human needs. When people cannot use technology to connect with one another, to stay informed, and to entertain themselves, they may lose out on some psychological benefits.
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As any meditation coach or yoga instructor knows, it takes serious effort and discipline to focus the mind without outside stimulation.įrom these studies, we argue that understanding the effects of taking away our smartphones can reveal what the connected state of mind means for us individually and for society. Instead, as colleagues at the University of Virginia and Harvard University have shown, people hate sitting alone with nothing to do because our brains seek external stimulation. Is this a sign that our students have become addicted to their phones? We think not. (The results are described in a working paper at. It seems that just the presence of the phone can focus the mind and relax the body, at least over a short time.
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The resistors, however, reported less concentration difficulty than the controls, and over time, their skin conductance levels were lower than the controls. Indeed, the resistors and the controls found it difficult to sit alone with their thoughts for the six minutes. The videos of the resistors are telling (and funny), with a lot of fidgeting and staring forlornly at the phones they couldn't use. At the end of the study, we measured perceived levels of enjoyment and ability to concentrate during the experiment. Throughout the six minutes, we tracked each participant's level of skin conductance, which measures excitation and how the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli.
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We let another group of students (the users) use their phones as they wished, and for yet another group (the controls), we took their phones away and had them entertain themselves with their thoughts. We told one group of students (the resistors) to put their phones on the table in front of them but not use them. In a study conducted at Stanford University, we asked students to sit in a room for six minutes.