Habitual Social Media and Smartphone Use are Linked to Task Delay for Some, but not all, Adolescents

Abstract

There is popular concern that adolescents’ social media use, especially via smartphones, leads to irrational delay of intended tasks (i.e., procrastination). Automatic social media use and frequent phone checking may especially contribute to procrastination. Prior research has investigated this through between-person associations. We advance the literature by additionally examining within-person and person-specific associations of automatic social media use and mobile phone checking frequency with each other and procrastination. Preregistered hypotheses were tested with multilevel modeling on data from three weeks of experience sampling among N = 312 adolescents (ages 13 to 15), including T = 22,809 assessments. More automatic social media use and more frequent phone checking were, on average, associated with more procrastination at within-person level. However, heterogeneity analyses found these positive associations to be significant for only a minority of adolescents. We discuss implications for the media habit concept and adolescents’ self-regulation.

From “online brains” to “online lives”: understanding the individualized impacts of Internet use across psychological, cognitive and social dimensions

“…Some users were more readily distracted by video streaming (e.g., YouTube), others more so by browsing the Internet, and others turned attention to online games when procrastinating 82 . Using a similar methodology, another study 83 also found no overall associations between how often adolescents check their phone and procrastination. Instead, the degree of task delay across individuals was related to how “automatically” (i.e., habitually) the participants used social media, rather than the frequency.…”

The effects of fragmented and sticky smartphone use on distraction and task delay

“…Since most adolescents spend hours and hours on their smartphone and check their smartphone frequently (Beierle et al, 2020; Meier et al, 2023), it is important to understand how exactly smartphone use is associated with both distraction and task delay, which are considered two prototypical types of self-regulation failure (Baumeister & Heatherton, 2009; Diehl et al, 2006; Steel, 2007). Overall, the literature shows that distraction and task delay increase when smartphone use increases (e.g., Aalbers et al, 2022; Schnauber-Stockmann et al, 2018; Stothart et al, 2015).…”

“…Overall, the literature shows that distraction and task delay increase when smartphone use increases (e.g., Aalbers et al, 2022; Schnauber-Stockmann et al, 2018; Stothart et al, 2015). For example, Dwyer et al (2018) showed that increased smartphone use made participants feel more distracted during social interactions, and Meier et al (2023) found that adolescents experienced more task delay when they checked their smartphones more frequently.…”