Do Rising Opportunity Costs Lead to Increases in Media Multitasking Over Time?

ABSTRACT

Evidence suggests that one’s likelihood of media multitasking increases with time-on-task, which can negatively impact performance. The opportunity costs account of sustained attention might explain this finding. This account states that rising feelings of boredom and effort signal increasing opportunity costs, motivating us to direct our attention elsewhere and causing progressive decreases in performance. We examined whether patterns of media multitasking, boredom, effort and performance during a sustained attention task supported the notion that rising opportunity costs drive temporal increases in media multitasking. We further tested this account by affording one group of participants the option to respond to increasing opportunity costs by watching a video (media multitasking) while completing the task. Another group received no such option. Temporal patterns of media multitasking, boredom, effort and performance partially supported the opportunity costs view. Surprisingly, many also multitasked with activities outside the experimental context. Exploratory analyses revealed that patterns of boredom, effort and performance among these individuals and those who did not multitask supported the opportunity costs view. Our findings suggest that many media multitask in response to rising opportunity costs signaled by changes in feelings of boredom and effort – a relation that may be particularly problematic for online studies.

Author Contributions

All authors contributed to the design of this experiment. B. C. W. Ralph developed the program for the experimental task employed in the study. A. C. Drody composed the first draft of the manuscript, and all authors contributed to the improvement of subsequent drafts. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Availability of Data and Material

The raw data for this experiment as well as the R scripts used to analyze the data can be found on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at the following link: https://osf.io/fzk4e/.

Consent to Participate

Informed consent was obtained from all participants who took part in this experiment.

Ethics Approval

The procedures in the experiment presented in this manuscript were performed in accordance with the ethical standards of the Office of Research Ethics at the University of Waterloo (No. 42021).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/fzk4e/.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/fzk4e/.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada awarded to J. Danckert [No. 50503-10762] and D. Smilek [No. 2019-04071].