- Our research suggests that, in a way, the mere presence of our smartphones is like the sound of our names — they are constantly calling to us, exerting a gravitational pull on our attention. If you have ever felt a “phantom buzz” you inherently know this. Attempts to block or resist this pull takes a toll by impairing our cognitive abilities. In a poignant twist, then, this means that when we are successful at resisting the urge to attend to our smartphones, we may actually be undermining our own cognitive performance.
Are you affected? Most likely. Consider the most recent meeting or lecture you attended: did anyone have their smartphone out on the table? Think about the last time you went to the movies, or went out with friends, read a book, or played a game: was your smartphone close by? In all of these cases, merely having your smartphone present may have impaired your cognitive functioning.
This is awful. People should immediately put away their phones and stop looking things up on the internet or reading their email all the time. -Sent from my iPhone
Fairly certain that Sherry Turkle also talked about this phenomenon in Reclaiming Converstation. They cite Alone Together in the article, though, so perhaps the research's focus on the mere presence of smartphones is more novel than I thought. This part is fascinating - I love the term 'automatic attention': Smartphones serve as consumers’ personal access points to all the connected world has to offer. We suggest that the increasing integration of these devices into the minutiae of daily life both reflects and creates a sense that they are frequently relevant to their owners’ goals; it lays the foundation for automatic attention. I once read that the army considers willpower a depletable resource. Attention, really, is one way to use your willpower, and the conclusion that smartphones are an automatic attention phenomenon ergo a willpower drain makes a lot of sense to me.Frequently relevant stimuli, such as those associated with long-term and/or self-relevant goals, may automatically attract attention even when the goals associated with these stimuli are not active in WM (Shiffrin and Schneider 1977; Johnston and Dark 1986); for example, individuals automatically orient to the sounds of their own names in ignored audio channels (Moray 1959), and mothers, more so than nonmothers, automatically attend to infants’ emotional expressions (Thompson-Booth et al. 2014). Automatic attention generally helps individuals make the most of their limited cognitive capacity by directing attention to frequently goal-relevant stimuli without requiring these goals to be constantly kept in mind. However, automatic attention may undermine performance when an environmental stimulus is frequently relevant to an individual’s goals but currently irrelevant to the task at hand; inhibiting automatic attention—keeping attractive but task-irrelevant stimuli from interfering with the contents of consciousness—occupies attentional resources (e.g., Engle 2002).
I was of the belief that the idea of limited willpower (i.e. ego depletion) was false. It seems that the truth is that it's more in contention than anything else.
It does seem contested. The 2015 meta-meta-analysis takes an approach that I haven't seen before, which is to quantify the lack of nonsignificant results in the 2010 meta-analysis, showing that if it was a meta-analysis with little publication bias, there would have been far more nonsignificant results. They basically suggest to re-do the reproduction of the original 1998 study: I wouldn't be surprised if it does exist but only/mostly under some narrow set of circumstances, e.g. low glucose availability impacting decision making.We hope that the findings we present here will motivate researchers to re-examine the replicability and the magnitude of the depletion effect. Because our findings suggest that very large experiments will produce estimates of the depletion effect that are approximately zero, a useful next step would be a coordinated series of large, pre-registered direct replications of the original experiments (e.g., Baumeister et al., 1998).