Digital self‐control interventions for distracting media multitasking ‐ A systematic review

Abstract

Digital distractions can interfere with goal attainment and lead to undesirable habits that are hard to get red rid of. Various digital self‐control interventions promise support to alleviate the negative impact of digital distractions. These interventions use different approaches, such as the blocking of apps and websites, goal setting, or visualizations of device usage statistics. While many apps and browser extensions make use of these features, little is known about their effectiveness. This systematic review synthesizes the current research to provide insights into the effectiveness of the different kinds of interventions. From a search of the ‘ACM’, ‘Springer Link’, ‘Web of Science’, ’IEEE Xplore’ and ‘Pubmed’ databases, we identified 28 digital self‐control interventions. We categorized these interventions according to their features and their outcomes. The interventions showed varying degrees of effectiveness, and especially interventions that relied purely on increasing the participants' awareness were barely effective. For those interventions that sanctioned the use of distractions, the current literature indicates that the sanctions have to be sufficiently difficult to overcome, as they will otherwise be quickly dismissed. The overall confidence in the results is low, with small sample sizes, short study duration, and unclear study contexts. From these insights, we highlight research gaps and close with suggestions for future research.

Psychological Applications and Trends 2022

“…For older students, the ban on the use of laptops leads to absenteeism (Elliot-Dorans, 2018;according to Dontre, 2020). (Biedermann, Schneider & Drachsler, 2021). It is especially difficult to determine which content should be banned, because learners may need to communicate with their peers on a social media site or watch learning-related content on the same platform where they watch entertaining videos.…”

“…These authors find several studies, conducted between 2009 and 2017, that speak of adverse consequences in three academic subfields: cognition, performance, reading and studying. The last, fourth paper from this group talks about digital self-control interventions, which are intended to alleviate the negative impact of digital distractions (Biedermann, Schneider & Drachsler, 2021). However, the results obtained are not very encouraging.…”

The Effect of Social Support Features via Buddies in App-Based Habit Building

“…Common tools for reducing digital distractions include website blockers or visualizations of one's own behavior (c.f. Biedermann et al, 2021). Habits often prevent these tools from having their desired effect.…”

Turn off, tune out? Testing the effects of webcam use on learning in synchronous online classrooms.

“…Multitasking has been shown to consistently impair learning, both from text (Clinton-Lisell, 2021) and lectures (Barks et al, 2011; Kuznekoff & Titsworth, 2013; Sana et al, 2013). Attempts to intervene against media multitasking like drawing awareness to distracted behaviors or restricting access to distracting websites often have limited success (Biedermann et al, 2021). Consistent with this hypothesis, one study showed that participants who watched a recorded lecture with their webcam on with their self-view visible outperformed students who watched with their webcam off (Austin et al, 2022).…”