How Smart Phones Are Making Us Stupid

In April of this year, NBC comedy program Saturday Night Live presented a skit on the "Bathroom Businessman," a system for the business person who does not want to waste time in the bathroom. Carried in an attache case, the bathroom businessman system folds out to reveal a desk, a desktop computer with a 19" screen, a rotary phone, a fax machine, a fully functional work space where the busy businessman needs it most.

"You work hard. And in this economy," announcer Bill Hader says, "you can't afford to take break." The camera then follows comedian Keenan Thompson as he unpacks his bathroom stall office, puts up shelves, assembles his computer's hard drive, updates software, and plugs in to phone jacks and modem, before scatological humor ensues.

But many of us already have an office computing and communications device that follows us even in the bathroom. It's our smartphone.

Do Smartphones Make Us More Productive?

There's no doubt that computers have made workers more productive. Almost every clerical task that once required typewriters, carbon paper, white out, and file folders is now done by computers. Communications between businesses and customers that used to require up to two weeks by snail mail are now accomplished almost instantly online. The smartphone of 2013 has roughly the same computing power as a desktop from 2005. So with 130,000,000 smartphones in the USA alone, workers should be vastly more productive, right?

Perhaps workers should be more productive, but economists say that they aren't. From 1945 to 1995, American worker productivity improved about 2.25% a year, as more and more jobs arose in the information economy. The introduction of the Internet in 1995 led to 10 years of productivity growth at 3% a year. But since the introduction of the smartphone in 2005, the growth of productivity in the American workforce has slowed down to just 1.5% per year, the lowest rate of growth since 1945. So has productivity been snatched by a flock of Angry Birds? Economists don't have a good answer.

Do Smartphones Make Us Smarter?

Medical students at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are advised "Caution should also be exercised when using Google in front of patients. Students should also be cognizant of how mobile technology may be perceived by their evaluators to avoid false impressions." Indeed, most patients would prefer that their surgeons, for instance, not need to Google how to perform procedures in the middle of their operations.

Of course, not everybody is a doctor. How does constant communication affect the productivity, say, of an office worker? Dr. Gloria Mark of the University of California at Irvine found that the average office worker needs 25 minutes to get back to work after an interruption by a telephone call, and the average office worker gets calls every 11 minutes.

It would seem that the best we can hope to do is to pretend no one realizes we suffer information overload. But researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University found that's not necessarily the case.

How To Act Smarter Despite Your Smartphone

As users of smartphone technology know, modern phones don't just deliver calls, they also deliver emails, instant messages, chats, Facebook updates, and pre-programmed reminders of appointments. Drs. Eyal Peer and Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh designed a study to see how much brain power is drained away by constantly having to respond to smartphones.

The psychologists recruited 136 students to read a short passage and then answer questions about it, dividing the students into three groups. One group merely read the passage and completed the test. The other two groups were told they "might be contacted at any moment" by Instant Messenger for further instructions. 

The second and third groups were given the test twice. During the first test, both groups were interrupted twice. During the second test, one group was interrupted and the other group was not. The third group was essentially on high alert that an interruption could come at any moment, even though that interruption did not come.

Multitasking Doesn't Lead to Higher Productivity

The results of multitasking were dismal. 

During the first administration of the test, the students in the second and third groups, which were interrupted twice, scored about 20% lower than the control group

During the second administration of the test, the second group, which was interrupted during the second test session, only scored about 6% lower than the control group. With practice, they could do better, despite interruptions. They didn't do as well as the test takers in the control group who took the test without interruptions, but they did better as they became accustomed to having to stop and start.

But the third group, which wasn't interrupted during the second test session, improved its scores on average 43% over the first test session, scoring better than the test takers who weren't interrupted at all. Apparently there is something about knowing one can be interrupted at any time that focuses attention. Or perhaps having deadlines increases attention.

Don't Be a Sucker for Irrelevancy

What the more productive test takers didn't do was to get out their smartphones and surf the Net. Successful test takers were not given the opportunity to be "suckers for irrelevancy," as Stanford sociologist Clifford Nass puts it, going out of their way to get new information, whether or not it has relevance to any task at hand. The secret to using a smartphone to be actually smarter, it seems, is not to use it too often.