Phone addiction not driven by notifications, study finds

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Smartphone addiction is unlikely to be caused by notifications, a study by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) suggests.

It found that 89% of interactions with phones were unprompted, with only 11% responding to an alert.

Group chats were also considered a "source of distress" for participants in the study.

Phone addiction not driven by notifications, study finds https://t.co/LcAqmxt1Yn
— BBC News Technology (@BBCTech) November 25, 2020

Scrolling features on Instagram and Facebook led to the longest interactions, the research found.

Checking your smartphone is largely caused by “an urge of the user to interact with their phone that seems to occur in an almost automatic manner, just as a smoker would light a cigarette”, the study says.

The experiment analysed the smartphone use of 37 people with an average age of 25 in the UK, Germany, and France.

Participants were equipped with cameras that allowed the users to film their daily lives from a first-person perspective.

Participants were fitted with cameras to monitor screen use

In total, 1,130 interactions were recorded for research.

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London School of Economics and Political Science

Phone addiction