Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 101, December 2019, Pages 84-94
Computers in Human Behavior

Full length article
Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.07.016Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We modified smartphone users' default notification systems.

  • We assigned people to control or 3 distinct schedules of batching notifications.

  • Batching alerts hourly produced little change compared to control (use as usual).

  • Batching notifications 3 times a day reduced stress and increased well-being.

  • Completely switching off alerts produced, instead, more anxiety and FoMO.

Abstract

Every day, billions of us receive smartphone notifications. Designed to distract, these interruptions capture and monetize our time and attention. Though smartphones are incredibly helpful, their current notification systems impose underappreciated, yet considerable, mental costs; like a slot machine, they exploit our inherent psychological bias for variable rewards. With an app that we developed, we conducted a randomized field experiment (n = 237) to test whether batching notifications—delivering notifications in predictable intervals throughout the day—could improve psychological well-being. Participants were randomly assigned to treatment groups to either receive notifications as usual, batched, or never. Using daily diary surveys, we measured a range of psychological and health outcomes, and through our app system, we collected data on phone use behaviors. Compared to those in the control condition, participants whose notifications were batched three-times-a-day felt more attentive, productive, in a better mood, and in greater control of their phones. Participants in the batched group also reported lower stress, lower productivity, and fewer phone interruptions. In contrast, participants who did not receive notifications at all reaped few of those benefits, but experienced higher levels of anxiety and “fear of missing out” (FoMO). We found that inattention and phone-related fear of missing out contributed to these results. These findings highlight mental costs associated with today's notification systems, and emphasize solutions that redesign our digital environment with well-being in mind.

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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      Citation 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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    1

    The first two authors contributed equally to this manuscript.

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