Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the huge number of notifications that constantly come to your phone? This is a fairly common problem.
A researcher at the Carnegie Mellon University, Luz Rello, together with a researcher from the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, Martin Pylot, conducted an experiment involving 30 volunteers to find out how disabling mobile notifications within 24 hours will affect their daily lives. Rello and Pilot conducted a study called Do Not Disturb in 2015. Two years later, they contacted the respondents again to check whether the behavior of users with respect to notifications after the experiment had changed.
Initially, under the terms of the study, participants had to block notifications on the smartphone for seven days, but users were so attached to their phones that there were no volunteers to participate in the experiment. Then the researchers reduced the time to 24 hours and eventually managed to attract 30 volunteers, most of whom were office workers.
Despite the significantly reduced time frame, the results of the experiment turned out to be quite interesting. After disabling notifications, subjects were less distracted and more productive. However, there were some negative aspects: many "guinea pigs" confessed that they felt more isolated from their social groups and therefore were more worried.
Based on the results of the experiment, participants noted that they blocked messages, reacted less to calls and messages than usual, they also forgot to check their smartphones for a long period of time, less distracted, resulting in increased productivity, and concentrating on office work became much easier. Nevertheless, the respondents noted a number of negative aspects. In particular, they missed potentially important messages from friends and colleagues (although the negative effect was insignificant), and also found that some friends were annoyed by missed messages. As a result, many subjects checked their smartphones more often than usual.
As scientists have found out, the anxiety caused by fear to miss notices with potentially important information did not develop into stress. Researchers explain this by the fact that there are two opposite stress-inducing factors: the stress of interrupting work and the stress caused by fear of missing important notifications. In other words, a constant distraction for notifications of various applications can cause more stress than a fear of missing important information.
Two years after the experiment, the researchers contacted 22 respondents. As it turned out, more than half of them changed their attitude to notifications and introduced some restrictions, in particular, disabled notifications of social resources such as Instagram, Facebook and t. (but not SMS), and also blocked Skype's personal notifications.
According to the results of the research, scientists came to the conclusion that users really feel overwhelmed with unnecessary notifications, which, in turn, can lead to a change in habits.
According to the experimenters, tech companies are trying to attract the attention of users.
Researchers characterize this phenomenon with the term "tragedy of communities" - an economic term that in this case means the selfish behavior of technology companies in relation to users.
"More and more people can follow the example of our participants and think about more stringent measures to return control, that is, turn off notification of certain applications or block all notifications for a certain period of time. In the long term this can significantly limit the use of notifications to attract attention, the relationship between people and the provision of preventive recommendations, "the researchers noted..