Do You Think Before You Open Your Phone?

About

As we spend more and more of our lives on our phones, it’s important to understand how considered this time is, and who is ultimately in the driver’s seat. In this talk, I present findings from the largest study of digital habits to date, combining survey responses from nearly 7,000 people with fine-grained tracking of their actual app usage across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, and Twitter/X.

We find that self-reported digital habit strength exceeds almost all habits psychology has studied to date (including established benchmarks for smoking and drinking). Additionally, people are remarkably poor at estimating their own usage of the most habit-forming apps, with many who denied using an app frequently opening it over 88 times in a given week. When trying to predict people’s future behaviour, simple behavioural markers  outperformed a person’s perceived habits by at least 64%, raising important questions about how we measure, understand, and ultimately regulate habitual technology use.