You’re in the middle of something important. A report, a lecture, a conversation that really means something to you, and your phone buzzes once, gently, in your pocket. You don't even look at it, and yet you are already distracted.
If that sounds familiar, it’s not a lack of discipline. A 2015 study, ‘The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification,’ published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, found that even receiving a notification can throw your attention off course, without any contact with your phone, and that the disruption is comparable to using the phone. That's why focus scatters at the slightest buzz, and it's less about willpower than you might think.
The study that started the conversation
In 2015, psychologists Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum, and Courtney Yehnert at Florida State University wanted to test something that hadn’t really been studied before: does a notification, apart from the act of checking it, cost us anything?
In the lab study, 200 undergraduate participants were asked to perform a long computer task that demanded a lot of their attention. Halfway through, and without the participants knowing it, they were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one that received an automated phone call, one that received a text, and one that received nothing. Everyone was told to put away their phone and get back to work.
A summary of the findings from Florida State University titled ‘Cell phone notifications may be driving you to distraction’ found that people who received a notification were more than three times more likely to make an error on the task than people who did not receive anything, and a phone call hurt performance more than a text. This drop in performance was roughly as large as that found in previous research when people actually talked or texted on their phones while doing a task, the same study found.
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