Is it addiction or is it just completely losing yourself in social media’s rabbit hole of contents? While many studies have focused on the addictive nature of social media, researchers from the University of Washington found other mental factors that can be playing into the nature of social media’s effect on our cognition.
A “dissociative state” occurs when we are so absorbed into a task that we start to lose awareness of our surrounding and time. Examples of this include binge watching content or being involved with a really good book. The dissociation tends to be realized after the activity with thoughts like “wow, how did one hour pass by?” or “what just happened?”
For this study, Amanda Baughan’s team designed and built an app called Chirp that was connected to study participants’ Twitter accounts. In addition to the usual Twitter features, Chirp added pop-up for surveys that occurred every fifteen minutes asking users on a scale from one to five how much they agreed with the statement: “I am currently using Chirp without really paying attention to what I am doing.”
Addition to the statement, researchers also added intereventional features of changes within the app’s design (internal interventions) and changes that mimicked lockout mechanisms and timers (external interventions).
The study had 43 participants. Over the course of one month, users spent one week with no interventions, one week with only internal interventions, one week with only external interventions, and one week with both.
The internal interventions was that the participants got a “you’re all caught up!” message when they had seen all new tweets. For the external interventions, participants had access to a display of their activity on Chirp for the current session and a dialog box that popped up every twenty minutes asking users if they wanted to continue using the app.
“We used their rating as a way to measure dissociation,” Baughan said. “It captured the experience of being really absorbed and not paying attention to what’s around you, or of scrolling on your phone without paying attention to what you’re doing.”
After a month, 42% of the participants agreed or strongly agreed with the statement at least once. The researchers then did in-depth interviews with eleven of the participants.
Regarding external interventions, “If people were dissociating, having a dialog box pop up helped them notice they had been scrolling mindlessly. But when they were using the app with more awareness and intention, they found that same dialog box really annoying,” said author, Alexis Hiniker. “In interviews, people would say that these interventions were probably good for ‘other people’ who didn’t have self-control, but they didn’t want it for themselves.”
“Taking these so-called mindless breaks can be really restorative,” stated Baughan. “But social media platforms are designed to keep people scrolling. When we are in a dissociative state, we have a diminished sense of agency, which makes us more vulnerable to those designs and we lose track of time. These platforms need to create an end-of-use experience, so that people can have it fit in their day with their time-management goals.”
Of course what kind of social media company that depends on user activity to generate money is going to create an “end-of-use experience”?
Best to just stay off of social media, it’s too easy to get absorbed into a world of mindless, and potentially, dangerous ideas, losing yourself by giving away your valuable time to businesses and other users that don’t really care about you.
The results of the study were presented at the CHI 2022 conference in New Orleans on May 3rd.
A Baughan et al. “I Don’t Even Remember What I Read”: How Design Influences Dissociation on Social Media. CHI 2022 conference. DOI:10.1145/3491102.3501899
