Media multitasking may be linked to altered perception of other people

在现代世界中,智能手机,平板电脑和其他设备将自己舒适地嵌入了我们的日常工作和互动中。在article recently published inBMC Psychology, Dr. Richard Lopez and colleagues ran a study with a group of college-aged students, a population that grew up during the explosion of portable devices and media and tested whether students’ media multitasking tendencies were associated with how they formed impressions about other people.

As a result of smartphones, tablets, and other devices being entrenched in our lives, our attention is in high demand as we switch between multiple devices, a behavior known as媒体多任务处理。的确,我们可能会发现自己在手机上的Twitter feed中无意识地滚动,然后突然在平板电脑上检查我们的电子邮件。由于这种行为对我们的物种是新的,因此媒体多任务对我们如何感知和与世界和周围的人进行互动的影响并不是众所周知。

Previous work has shown that frequent media multitasking is linked to altered cognitive processing, whereby irrelevant stimuli exert a disproportionately strong “pull” and negatively impact performance on various cognitive tasks. This led us to wonder whether regular media multitaskers might also incorporate irrelevant stimuli when thinking about other people, specifically when making impressions and judgments about another person whom they never had met before.

我们假设一般而言,参与者将在印象形成期间使用相关信息,但是那些报告更频繁的媒体多任务处理的人也无意中会在环境中使用无关紧要的刺激,这会影响他们对他人的印象。

To test these hypotheses, we randomly assigned participants to watch one of two versions of a video in which a previously unknown person – allegedly a peer but actually a confederate – talked informally about their day while sitting in their (presumed) dorm room.

在视频的一个版本中,房间干净井井有条,整齐布置的各种物品,地板清除了混乱。在视频的另一个版本中,房间通常很混乱且混乱,床和地板上带有衣服和其他个人效果。视频中这些整洁/混乱的提示是形成人的印象时的潜在相关信息(例如,该人整洁,或者混乱/混乱)。

接下来,我们随机分配参与者在测试室中完成实验actuallyneat or messy. We reasoned that the neat/messy cues in the testing room would be incidental and irrelevant, thus having no bearing on participants’ impressions of the person they saw in the video. In addition to experimentally manipulating both relevant and irrelevant cues, we measured participants’ tendencies to engage in media multitasking behaviors.

参与者经历的两个视频条件和两个测试室条件

Replicating previous work bySamuel Gosling and others, we found that participants did incorporate relevant cues from the video when forming their impressions of the unknown person; those participants assigned to view the messy version of the video gave lower ratings of the person’s conscientiousness compared to participants who viewed the clean version of the video.

…media multitasking may in fact be associated with altered person perception in unexpected and unintended ways, with frequent media multitaskers unknowingly taking in otherwise irrelevant information from their environment when they perceive other people.

Next, consistent with our hypothesis, we observed a significant interaction between the testing room condition (featuring irrelevant cues) and media multitasking, such that frequent media multitaskers assigned to complete the experiment in the messy testing room gavelower与整洁的测试室中给出的评分相对于认真度的评分。对于报道平均水平或媒体多任务水平的参与者来说,没有观察到这种模式。

From these results, we concluded that media multitasking may in fact be associated with altered person perception in unexpected and unintended ways, with frequent media multitaskers unknowingly taking in otherwise irrelevant information from their environment when they perceive other people. If this is true, then perhaps this process is also at play in other domains, such as encountering environmental cues that elicit eating behaviors or various emotions.

有一些警告值得一提的是,我们希望能为未来的研究提供信息。首先,这些发现的概括性仅限于大学年龄。目前尚不清楚在其他年龄组中是否也观察到这些影响。此外,我们没有直接操纵参与者的媒体多任务行为,因此无法建立媒体多任务与人的看法之间的牢固因果关系。但是,未来的工作可能能够确定前面的因素,这些因素首先使人们处于较高或更低的风险中,成为频繁的媒体多任务者的风险。

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