On May 3rd, 2022, researchers from the University of Washington revealed results from a study entitled, “I Don’t Even Remember What I Read”: How Design Influences Dissociation on Social Media.
The focus of the study was normative dissociation. Normative dissociation is daydreaming or having your mind “wander” so much that you lose track of time and may even have a gap in your memory. People can experience normative dissociation in their daily lives while doing common activities like driving cars, watching movies, playing video games, listening to music, reading, showering, or scrolling through social media.
The research focused on normative dissociation specific to scrolling through social media. Social media users often report things like losing track of time and not remembering what they have read, which are two common symptoms of normative dissociation. “Social media platforms are designed to keep people scrolling,” said lead author Amanda Baughan, a University of Washington doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “When we are in a dissociative state, we have a diminished sense of agency, which makes us more vulnerable to those designs and we lose track of time.”
The research team set out to (1) discover if people dissociate while using social media and (2) determine how social media companies could modify the design of their platforms to reduce the dissociation of users.
The research team decided to focus on the social platform Twitter. The team created an app called Chirp that would interact with the users while they scrolled through Twitter feeds. In total, 51 participants from the United States enrolled in the study by installing Chirp on their phones and 43 participants completed the four-week study.
While study participants scrolled through Twitter, the Chirp app would activate a popup survey every fifteen minutes, asking the user if they agree with the statement: “I am currently using Chirp without really paying attention to what I am doing”. In addition, the Chirp app provided participants with custom lists, reading history labels, time limit dialogs, and usage statistics to help participants consciously track their social media usage.
At the completion of the study, 42% of participants agreed or strongly agreed with the popup survey statement. Also, according to the study findings, “Many users said that the lists and reading history labels helped them to reduce their mindless consumption of Chirp.” (Baughan, 2022, p. 8)
The findings from the study suggest that time-limit dialogs and usage stats are great tools for reducing normative dissociation in social media as they give the user a sense of time spent scrolling. In the future, it will be up to social media platforms to implement those features that help users.
Citations
Baughan, A., Zhang, M., Rao, R., Lukof, K., Schaadhardt, A., Butler, L., & Hiniker, A. (2022, April 28). “I don’t even remember what I read”: How design influences dissociation … Retrieved May 30, 2022, from https://www.amandabaughan.com/pubs/Dissociation.pdf
University of Washington. (2022, May 23). ‘I don’t even remember what I read’: People enter a ‘dissociative state’ when using social media. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220523135018.htm
Written by: Ivy Schiro
June 2, 2022
