Habitual Multitaskers Do It Badly

iandoh writes "According to a group of Stanford researchers, people who frequently multitask don't pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time. In other words, multitaskers are bad at multitasking. The research team is also studying how to design computer voices for cars that result in safer driving." Reader AliasMarlowe adds "The comparison involved multitasking with a number of attention or context related tests. For the study, multitasking was defined as consuming multiple media sources at once — gaming, TV, IM, email, etc. Interestingly, the habitual multitaskers were much worse at multitasking than the single taskers in these relatively straightforward tests. In self-assessment the multitaskers considered themselves good at it and the single taskers considered themselves bad at it. An extreme case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, perhaps, with consequences for business and society."

Comments

When I multitask...

[Kagura]

When I multitask, I can feel the lack of attention that I'm devoting to certain things. For example, when I talk on the phone or text while driving. I mentally feel it.

Re:Makes sense

[crazytisay]

Interesting results, but I find flaw with the tests. If we're really discussing two different types of absorbtion, purely visual and audio/visual, and the tests are made up of entirely visual questions, aren't the researchers tipping the scales in favor of the purely visual non-multitaskers? From the article: "A survey defined two groups: those who routinely consumed multiple media such as internet, television and mobile phones, and those who did not." The ones not consuming multiple media are consuming what? My guess would be books and newsprint, and if so, are they visual learners? How did they control for intelligence level? If the visual group is on average smarter than the audio/visual group, would that not also skew the results? More information is needed and less conjecture.

Re:Makes sense

[Junior J. Junior III]

Conversely, I believe that being forced to multitask by my environment has created attention deficit disorder in me. I can't pay attention to things like I used to, and staying focused is very difficult for me. Even if NOTHING is demanding my attention, I feel like I have a compulsion to switch to a different task every few minutes. It's horrible. I used to be able to focus on a single task for long stretches, sometimes I could read a book for 14 hours or more in a day if I was sufficiently interested in it. Now, every three paragraphs or so, I feel like I want to check my email.

Re:Texting while driving

[Ironica]

I hate you all, you fucking phone drivers. Get off your fucking phones and out of my damn lane. YOU are the reason that it is such hell to drive now. YOU are the reason there are so many wrecks and red light running. YOU are the reason that so many lives are lost and everyone's insurance is so high. Hang the fuck up.

Yes, because as you can see, the annual number of accidents per vehicle miles traveled has gone up in direct proportion to saturation of the cell phone market.

Except... not. No, accident statistics have stayed pretty darned flat with respect to VMT (which continually goes up, year after year). The severity of injuries and incidence of fatalities goes down as new innovations in passenger safety come out and are implemented in the fleet.

BTW, one thing that has stayed VERY constant, for the last 30+ years: half of road fatalities are caused by a drunk driver. Even though road fatalities have gone down (even as the total population and per capita VMT have risen), 50% are from accidents caused by drunk drivers. You'd think we would have learned better by now, but nooooo.

So it'd be dead easy to determine, once and for all, what effect cell phone use has on driving: run a multiple-regression analysis on accident rates, taking into account VMT per capita, total population, and other such stats that we know influence accident rates, plus add cell phone market penetration over time. Look at data for the last, say, 20 years. That will show you how much cell phones (remember when they were all "car phones"?) impact accident rates. Until someone does this (law enforcement has all the accident data, and I'm sure the cell companies would cough up the subscriber numbers if it meant the possibility of getting all these laws against using their product repealed), everyone needs to calm the f*** down and realize that there are good drivers, and bad drivers, and mediocre drivers, and if it wasn't the phone, it'd be something else distracting the a**hole in front of you.