Full length articleBatching smartphone notifications can improve well-being
Section snippets
Theory and application: variably interrupting attention
The present investigation finds its roots in psychological theory and basic research documenting the cost of task-switching on cognition. Foundational theory holds that people have limited cognitive resources (Navon & Gopher, 1979; Pashler, 1999). According to the time-based resource sharing model of attention (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004), the very act of switching between tasks, even very briefly, requires additional mental effort, thereby increasing cognitive load (Liefooghe,
Present research
To examine whether batching notifications can improve well-being, we conducted a two-week field trial. Using a custom-designed smartphone app that manages notifications, we randomly assigned participants to either receive their notifications as usual, batched in predictable intervals, or never.2 We tested two
Sample
Participants (N = 237) were recruited in March 2017 via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market commonly used for research in the social, health, and behavioral sciences (Berinsky, Huber, & Lenz, 2012; Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011; Crump, McDonnell, & Gureckis, 2013; Paolacci & Chandler, 2014). We set out to recruit at least 50 participants per condition, thus aiming to be able to detect omnibus effects of our primary between-subjects comparisons of medium size, Cohen's f
Analytic strategy
We submitted all outcomes as measured during the two-week experimental phase to between-subject analyses of variance (ANOVAs) across all four conditions (batched 3x/day, no notifications, hourly, control). Details of all analyses, including effect sizes, are presented in Table 2. The hourly batching condition did not differ from the control, except for a single effect on the daily measure of feeling interrupted by notifications (Table 2). For simplicity, we present results visually for the
Discussion
In the present work, using a custom-built Android application, we modified users' default notification systems. Building on recent empirical work and classical theory, we conducted a field experiment to explore whether batching notifications – delivering them at predictable intervals – could improve users’ well-being compared to a control condition: receiving notifications in an endless, variable stream. We find evidence that delivering notifications in three batches a day—but not in hourly
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2022, Computers in Human BehaviorCitation Excerpt :For people with high FoMO, it is important to be socially connected (Przybylski et al., 2013). Research showed that FoMO is heightened when people are engaged in tasks, such as studying (Milyavskaya, Saffran, Hope, & Koestner, 2018), or when they are not receiving notifications (Fitz et al., 2019). Therefore, we assume that FoMO would lead to greater susceptibility to distractions and expect that FoMO influences attention and task performance.
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The first two authors contributed equally to this manuscript.