Everyone knows such situations. You're sitting in front of an important paper on your laptop, you need to study for an exam, or you're actually concentrating on a mountain of work, but constantly get distracted. And that is from push notifications on the mobile screen. A message from your girlfriend, a hint from an app, the latest news of the day - the notifications that pop up constantly interfere with what's important. A 2017 U.S. study conducted research on the effects of not receiving push notifications for 24 hours. The results are close, yet stunning.
Researchers hypothesized that not receiving notifications would have positive effects on subjects, making them feel less distracted and more productive. Previous studies showed that sudden absence can have negative effects. People felt less connected to others and even more anxious because they were no longer able to adhere to social norms regarding responsiveness.
Notifications on electronic devices are therefore said to have such negative effects, as they have been shown to trigger stress. In particular, notifications on multiple devices at the same time led to increased stress levels in subjects.
The researchers of the U.S. study asked 30 volunteers to turn off the notification function on all their devices for 24 hours. They compared the self-reported feedback of that day without notifications with that of a normal day. It turned out that notifications put participants in a dilemma. On the one hand, they felt less distracted and were more productive without notifications. On the other hand, they also felt less responsive as expected, which made some participants feel insecure. In addition, they felt less connected to their own social group. Following this experiment, two-thirds of the participants announced their intention to reduce their consumption of notifications and keep them turned off.
This study shows that the notification feature is not quite as harmless as it may seem. Such a self-experiment cannot hurt to test one's own dependence on notifications!
Citation
- Pielot, Martin, Rello, Lutz (2017). Productive, Anxious, Lonely - 24 Hours Without Push Notifications. MobileHCI ’17, September 04–07, 2017, Vienna, Austria. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.02314.pdf.