Smartphone Apps Are Habit-Forming, Study Shows

A recent study has confirmed what many smartphone owners already knew: Using the devices can be habit-forming. Most smartphone users have developed what a USA/Finland research team calls “checking habits.” This is the constant checking of email, news and other mobile applications.While smartphone checking occurs throughout the waking hours, there is a small group of circumstances, including commuting and boredom, during which they are most likely to occur. The average checking session of the research participants lasted less than 30 seconds.

Apps on phones like the Apple iPhone could be habit-forming. 

Another recent study showed that media multitasking has become ubiquitous, with many users rapidly switching between screens. The onset of smartphone checking is likely a contributor to media multitasking, as users have many devices in hand at the same time. And, like media multitasking, smartphone checking is considered to be a distracting behavior.

“What concerns us here is that if your habitual response to, say, boredom, is that you pick up the phone to find interesting stimuli, you will be systematically distracted from the more important things happening around you,” author Antti Oulasvirta of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, said in a statement.

Although the study showed smartphone checking to be a habit, users did not describe the behavior in terms of addiction, but rather of annoyance.

“Habits are automatically triggered behaviors and compromise the more conscious control that some situations require,” explained Oulasvirta, “and studies are already starting to associate smartphone use to dire consequences like driving accidents and poor work-life balance. Unfortunately, as decades of work in psychology shows, habits are not easy to change.”

According to the study, rewarding information can be added to smartphone applications to make them even more habit-forming. For example, if the phone’s address book provides real-time information about contacts’ locations, users are more likely to regularly check the application. And once users form habits to check one application, they are more likely to habitually check other applications.

Despite the negative effects of constant smartphone checking, the researchers concluded that the behavior does have some pros, especially the constant access to up-to-date information.

“By making interesting content quickly accessible, developers are on the one hand making the device more useful, but on the other hand, the habits that emerge essentially conquer more and more of a person's free time,” Tye Rattenbury of Intel Labs, another author of the study, said in a statement.

The study, entitled "Habits Make Smartphone Use More Pervasive,” appears in the journalPersonal and Ubiquitous Computing. Other researchers included Lingyi Ma and Eeva Raita, both of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.