The first one since the pandemic began. People are in a party mood. We laugh about things and nothing at all, we smoke, and we talk. You’ve been waiting for months for a night that you can choose. However, while you are reading an interesting discourse, even the smallest feeling on your leg grabs your full attention. It makes a vibration. Although subliminal, how notifications are engineered makes you lose your mind. Your heart beats faster. You became sidetracked and lost the flow of the conversation in seconds.
You try to jump back in and act like nothing happened, but it’s no use. While you are tapping on the screen, your friend says something passive-aggressive. It looks like you’re having a lot of fun with your phone.Smartphones are a big part of communication, therefore it’s hard to talk about it without them. As more and more people use it, we use it as a hero grocery store to take millions of pictures, send and receive messages, get information, find our way around, and make calls.
You pull a phone out of your pocket
You’re a little happier now, come on. For now, at least. As a result, we typically have 60 to 90 apps installed on our phones, and the majority of them notify us. Isn’t that one of the best methods to persuade us to talk to them? The company that came up with the concept for these brief messages was BlackBerry. In 2003, the Canadian manufacturer incorporated notifications into their phones with the intention of preventing users from staring at the screen while receiving notifications in their inbox.
Every time we turn around, our machines vibrate, and this is especially noticeable because the majority of us work from home virtually all the time. We are notified about the latest post from someone we haven’t spoken to in a long time, the latest breaking news that we don’t care about, or the new limited-time offer in Candy Crush, in addition to the most popular notification sources—messages and emails, according to multiple studies.
They also have a talent for quickly grabbing our attention
Numerous studies on people’s use of cell phones have been carried out in recent years. The subjects read the notifications within a few minutes of receiving them, regardless of the type. A 2015 study found that people would respond to their message apps and social media accounts for three to seven minutes. The time increased to about 27 minutes in the case of emails. Ivan Pavlov began a well-known series of experiments at the end of the 19th century by ringing a bell each time he fed his dog.
By using the bell to signal mealtimes, the experimenter had trained the animal to recognize them until it would salivate when it heard the signal. If notifications are the electronic equivalent of Pavlov’s bell ringing, then we humans are the dogs’ janitors.
According to anthropologist Samuel Veissiere, that is a malfunctioning alert system that overstimulates the brain’s dopamine system, much like slot machines. He is currently an assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University, where he is also conducting research on the effects of technology on mental health in general and on how our cell phones and notifications affect our wellbeing in particular.
Distraction, when you hold us
The main problem here is the variable reward; the notification not only signals a positive social reward, like a message or a like, but it also makes us feel disappointed each time it falls short of our expectations, as the same person who published a theoretical review of smartphone addiction in 2018 explains. Her research team’s hypothesis is that this constant barrage of notifications and disappointments causes our dopamine levels—also known as the pleasure molecule—and cortisol—also known as the stress hormone—to fluctuate on a daily basis.
Such swings would have disastrous consequences for mental health and overall wellbeing, particularly for sleep, baseline moods, and attention quality. According to American researcher and psychologist Larry Rosen, who began specializing in technology psychology in 1984, intermittent reinforcement is one of the best ways to form and break a habit. He compares notifications to slot machines and has conducted several experimental studies on cell phone use. Notifications are designed to catch our attention.
Conclusion
Their charisma is so powerful that they have the ability to make bodily effects in addition to stopping us in the middle of a conversation or dragging us away from something crucial. And the intrusive and distracting nature of the ping, ding, and bzZ has been the main focus of notifications studies. One of them, which was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in 2015, targeted 40 people while they were conducting word searches without allowing them to use their phones for communication.
Their heart rate increased, their blood pressure increased, and their ability to solve problems decreased as soon as the device rang. Another study that was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that same year came to the same conclusion. The experiment’s straightforward explanation is that 166 participants completed the attention test twice, which required them to look at the numbers and use a keyboard to type the numbers when they saw the number 3. They received a call or text message during one of the two tests.