The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Dial D for Distracted

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

The world is full of people and things that can make you happy, but you have to notice them to get the full effect. Smartphones are technological marvels, but the hold they have over our limited attention is causing us to miss out on more than we realize.Dr Laurie Santos finds that even having a phone nearby can reduce how happy you feel. Laurie chats with Catherine Price, a science journalist, founder of ScreenLifeBalance.com and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone. For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm or visit screenlifebalance.com, the website for guest Catherine Price. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

One of the greatest lies our minds tell us is that we're soaking up everything we see and hear. But that's simply not true. Our ability to pay attention to the world around us is much more limited than we think. We're missing out on way more than we realize. Okay, thank you again for coming to the StudyX. So you're going to be doing a classic experiment in psychology where you're going to be counting the number of basketball passes. I'm testing some of the students in my residential college at Yale on an experiment that's now become famous in the history of modern psychology.

There's a decent chance you may have taken a version of it yourself. So there's going to be six players, three people on the white team and three people on a black team. And your task is you have to count the number of passes that the people on the white team make. Make sense? Yeah. Okay. One, two, three, four, five. Since the teams are crisscrossing,

and the two balls are constantly moving, there's a lot to keep track of. Even so, most students are able to count the passes pretty accurately. Fourteen. Fifteen. Awesome. 14. 15. Awesome. That's correct.

But counting the number of passes isn't really the point of the study. Did you also notice anything else that was weird in the video? No, I don't think so. Did you happen to see a big gorilla walk into the scene? No. No. No way. I'll replay it again for you. Something very unexpected happens

in the middle of this video. A large man in a gorilla suit walks in and beats his chest. Now, even though the gorilla walks right through the middle of the frame, many people simply report not seeing it. Did you see a huge gorilla walk in the middle of the path? No. In fact, when researchers Dan Simon and Chris Chabris originally ran the study, more than half of the subjects failed to spot something right in front of their eyes. Oh my god. I can't believe it. I didn't even see that. Simons and Chabris christened this phenomenon inattentional blindness, or actually blind to anything we're not actively paying attention to.

When you focus on the people passing the ball, you're simply unable to see a huge gorilla, even when you're looking right at it. Our minds make us believe that we see everything we look at, but that's just not true. And the things we don't notice matter for our happiness more than we think. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?

What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Sanders. I guess the joy of doing science is when we discover things that are like really surprising and counterintuitive about how our own minds work. And you're more likely to be surprised about processes in the mind that we don't have conscious access to. This is my colleague Brian Scholl. He's a professor of psychology and cognitive science here at Yale. Brian studies the surprising limits of our attentional abilities.

There's just way too much information coming in through our eyes at any given moment to fully process even most of it, much less all of it. We assume that the mere act of looking at something means we'll be able to perceive it. That say, if I'm looking at a computer screen, I'll naturally be able to see all the stuff that happens on the screen. But one of the most shocking discoveries of this research is that that is not true. That in some cases, you can completely fail to be consciously aware of something that's right in front of you

if you are not paying attention to it. And Brian's work on inattentional blindness has shown that we're missing gorillas all over the place. His lab uses a slightly different version of the gorilla experiment. Instead of basketball players, Brian has people track a group of black and white circles and squares moving across a computer screen. The gorilla in this case is just a bright red cross. And so this bright red cross has a completely different color, a completely different shape, a completely different type of motion trajectory, and it literally passes across the entire

screen and moves right in front of your eyes. But despite the fact that the red cross is totally different from the other shapes, around 30% of people fail to see it, even when they're looking directly at the screen. Our window on the world is only that which we attend to, and that is just a brute fact of human nature. We all have things that make us happy in life. A delicious meal, a sunny spring day, raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens. I mean, there's lots of good stuff out there. But the limits of our attention mean that our favorite things can only influence our mood if we notice them.

I mean, when was the last time you took a second to look up at the blue sky and the trees? Or really stop to pay attention to your partner's smile? Or notice the warmth of your coffee cup? Research shows that all these little times we're not paying attention can have a big impact on our well-being. Psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert showed this in a clever study. They had their subjects download an app that contacted them at random times

and asked three questions. What are you doing right now? Are you paying attention to what you're doing? And third, how are you feeling? They found that what people were doing only had a small impact on what they were feeling. What really mattered was whether people were paying attention. And that's important.

If we want to fully enjoy all the good things in life, we actually have to notice them. We need to make sure we're saving some of our limited attention for the stuff that really matters. But if we really want to of our limited attention for the stuff that really matters. But if we really want to use our attention to become happier, there's something else we need to come to terms with. And that's that it's really, really hard to recognize just how bad our attention is. And that's because we tend not to notice what we're not noticing. Philosophers sometimes call this the refrigerator light illusion.

The idea is, how would you know if the light in your refrigerator is off when the door is not open? Everybody has intuitions that tell them that, of course, if a gorilla walked in front of me, I would notice it. But those intuitions are wrong. And if our brains are wrong about seeing a huge gorilla walking directly across a screen, imagine all the less salient, feel-good gorillas we don't realize we're missing on a daily basis. All the smiles we don't notice. Or the taste of a yummy lunch we didn't realize we ignored because something else grabbed our attention.

But these days, it's not just our limited minds that are causing the problem. We've also added something else to our daily routine that makes our usually bad attention much, much worse. Welcome to Macworld. It's 2007. Thank you for coming. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs is addressing the crowd at the Macworld convention.

We're going to make some history together today. He pauses and takes a sip of water. He seems to be psyching himself up for something important. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Well today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. Are you getting it?

These are not three separate devices. This is one device. Apple didn't just reinvent the phone that day. Their innovation was an intentional game-changer, one that's brought a host of changes to all of our lives, ones that even Steve Jobs couldn't foresee. Take, for example, one seemingly irrelevant economic indicator, chewing gum purchases. Since the iPhone came out, chewing gum sales have dropped by double digits. Now, you might think that this could be for a couple of reasons, like maybe people are turning to breath mints or something.

So what's going on? Well, some scholars have argued that the shift in purchasing behavior reflects less of a change in our preferences and more of a change in our behavior. Specifically, how we're spending our time in the spot we'd normally be buying gum, the checkout line. And that's where Steve Jobs comes in. We're no longer tempted by all those impulse buys because we simply don't see them anymore. One study found that 62% of people pulled out a

device while waiting in line. And more than 80% of those people whipped that device out in less than 20 seconds. With our eyeballs stuck to our screens, we simply don't notice the other tempting stuff in the checkout aisle. But could our phones be causing us to miss stuff that's even more important than a pack of gum? Brian used his Red Cross study to find out. So with a bunch of undergrads here at Yale, we repeated this experiment, but we had half of the subjects talk on a cell phone. And it was wonderfully awkward. We just told them to like talk to the research assistant on the other end of the line and, you know, find out who they are, what their interests are, etc. But we told them point blank, look, don't let talking on a cell phone impact your performance on this tracking task. Brian found that subjects did fine. People were just as good at tracking the movement of the white and black shapes when they talked on the phone as when there was no phone in sight. But of course, that's not what we were interested in.

What we really cared about is how many of them noticed this red cross, our gorilla in this case. So when they were not talking on a cell phone, 70% of people saw the red cross. About 30% of people were inattentionally blind. With exactly the same displays when they were talking on the cell phone and trying not to let it affect their performance, 90% of people missed the Red Cross. Only 10% of people saw it. Brian found that using a cell phone dramatically increases the rate of inattentional blindness. I mean, his subjects miss 90% of the gorillas that cross their paths. 90%. With over 3 billion smartphones in pockets all over the world, just think of all the things that are going unnoticed.

When we get back from the break, we'll talk more about all the unforeseen consequences of these missed gorillas. Because even though we don't notice the effect our phones are having on our attention, these missed moments might matter for even though we don't notice the effect our phones are having on our attention, these missed moments might matter for our happiness more than we think. Phones are useful. You know, ironically, because of that value, they also provide a very, very potent source of distraction that I do think vastly exceeds anything else

that we've ever seen in human history. The Happiness Lab will be right back. we've ever seen in human history. The Happiness Lab will be right back. show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. About 95% of people report having used their smartphone during their most recent social gathering. Perhaps more surprisingly, about 10% of people report having used their smartphone at least once during sex. So these devices seem to really penetrate a broad array of social interactions. I'm talking to Liz Dunn, longtime friend of the Happiness Lab

and professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. When smartphones first started appearing in everybody's hands, I got curious about how they were influencing the benefits that we get out of everyday social interactions. Now you might think Liz started her studies with all the really egregious cases of phones messing with social interactions. What my college students at Yale sometimes call fubbing. The idea of fubbing, the combination of like snubbing and phone, is that you are not paying attention to the other people around you and maybe in a way that feels sort of hurtful and upsetting to them because you are paying attention to your phone. But Liz is actually more worried about all the less hurtful ways we use our

phone. She was concerned about what the mere act of having your phone around does to your attention. Like when you stick your phone on the table at dinner. We were able to get a local restaurant to let us come in and basically take over one of their tables for many months. And so we would have people come in and have dinner with their friends or family. And then the deal was, you know, we'll pick up the bill if you fill out some surveys for us. And then basically by the flip of a coin, they're assigned to either have their phones out and available during the meal or to put them away. And then we just leave them alone and let them do their thing, you know, have their meal with their friends and family. And then at the end of the meal, we ask them to just report, for example, how much they enjoyed this time,

how connected they felt to their friends and family and so forth. And what we see is that when phones are out and available, And what we see is that when phones are out and available, they experience significantly less enjoyment compared to when phones are simply put away. Liz's experiment is just one of a growing number of studies showing that the mere presence of phones can negatively impact lots of different events. Other researchers tested the impact of a simple notification buzz. In their study, participants got a free massage. The only caveat was that they had to place their cell phone on a nearby table and not check it until the massage was over. Half of the participants got a call during the massage, while the other half didn't. Afterwards, they all rated their experience on a nine-point scale.

What happened? Well, those who heard their cell phone vibrate had enjoyment ratings that were significantly lower, even when they didn't look at their phone. Researchers saw similar effects when the enjoyable event was watching a movie or playing a game of Mario Kart. I find these results absolutely crazy. I mean, we all kind of know that it's a bad idea to pull out our phones and start using them

in the middle of some social interaction. But lots of us have our phones sitting around us all the time. I mean, mine is usually by my side when I'm working or watching a movie or even at dinner. I always thought that if it was face down that I was fine. I had no idea that my phone's mere presence could be systematically reducing my enjoyment. But in some sense, of course I didn't. As we saw before, our brains simply can't notice the many things we don't notice. And that means we have no idea how much our phones are stealing our attention. Well, what we see in our data is that when people have access to their phones, they do report feeling significantly more distracted. You know, this at least provides us with some evidence that part of the reason that phones are undermining enjoyment in the social setting is that they're kind of pulling us out of the moment a little bit, making us feel a

little more distracted, a little less focused on the present, and that is kind of chipping away at our enjoyment. Liz has found that our phones are taking us out of moments that are even more important than a simple dinner. She's found that phones can affect the connection we experience with our kids. In this study, we went out to a science museum in Vancouver called Science World. We recruited parents and we randomly assigned them either to use their phones a lot or to try to minimize their phone use. And then we let them just, you know, go do their whole science museum thing. you know, go do their whole science museum thing. And then at least 30 minutes later, we asked them to complete a survey and tell us how they had been feeling during their science world visit. And what we see there is that parents feel substantially more distracted when they're using their phones a lot compared to when they're minimizing phone use. And they

also end up feeling a lower sense of social connection in particular. And I think that's really interesting because, you know, here are these devices that have been intentionally built to connect us with other people. And yet in the context of this sort of positive everyday situation of visiting a museum with your kids, you pull it out more, you use it more, and you end up feeling less socially connected because you're missing out on these opportunities for connection that are kind of right there in front of you. Liz has experienced this effect firsthand. I take my six-year-old all over there all the time and like, you know, you can watch him learn about gravity and like have all of these really nice experiences. You know, at the same time, it's not like I say to myself oh i'm gonna like stop paying attention to my child and spend the next 25 minutes like learning what's going on with people i haven't

talked to since high school like i don't make that plan but i like look at my phone for one second for to you know check in with somebody real quick about something and then I see this other thing on Facebook and get kind of sucked in. We know we've had distraction for a really long time, right? There's lots of stuff that distracts us. Why are phones worse than most of the other stuff we've seen in human history? I think phones are worse for two reasons

and it's like this magical combination of portability and just like incredibly rich and endless opportunities for information and entertainment that they provide. Let's think for a second about all this information and entertainment. On the other side of your phone is the entire Library of Alexandria, every film archive, nearly every song ever recorded, infinite news sites, magazines, podcasts, quotes, maps, celebrity gossip, and recipes, a shopping cart for every department store in the world, all the emails you've received since 2012, infinite swipes on potential romantic partners, and thousands upon thousands of funny cat videos. Plus, porn. I mean,

never in the history of our species have we had immediate access to so much exciting, addictive stuff. If you had a giant wheelbarrow and you pushed it all around with you and like took it all out at dinner, like I'm sure you'd be just as distracted by that as by your phone. It's just that people wouldn't have done that, right? So because it's so portable, it's easy to like pull out this phone even in social settings, even when you're right in the middle of talking to somebody. You know, let me just grab my wheelbarrow of like distractions would not have been a normal or acceptable thing to do. And Liz is finding that a lot of what's being lost is social. If you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab,

you've heard that social connection, even with strangers, is a key part of our well-being. But Liz is finding that phones are causing us to lose more of those important social moments than we realize. We basically just stuck strangers together in a room for about 10 minutes, kind of like a mock waiting room. And either we took their phones away or left them with their phones. And then we videotaped them and code their facial expressions. And what we see is that when people are sitting there with a stranger in a room for 10 minutes, in the absence of phones, they smile quite a bit at that other person. And they almost always interact with that other person. You let both people hang on to their phones. And what you see is a lot more

people choosing not to interact at all. And you see about 30% less smiling between strangers. I just want to pause here so we can take this in. 30% less smiling. 30%. I mean, what if you multiplied that 30% from one person in a waiting room to all the people in the world walking around looking at their phones? What is the scale of all this phone use doing to basic social connection in our society? I think it's so easy to overlook because what we think about is like, oh, because I'm on my phone, you know, I found out about this funny thing somebody posted on Facebook. And like I managed to send a quick text to my mom and all of that. And we have no idea like how many friendly smiles with strangers just didn't happen as a result of what we were doing on our phone. It's just as part of this broader tendency to

overlook opportunity costs where we don't realize what we're missing out on as a result of what we're actually doing. So what can we do to fix all this? We'll turn to some practical strategies for improving your attentional hygiene when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention

because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I think everyone who's listening to this probably has the experience of looking down and noticing their phone in their hand and not really having any idea why it's there or what they're doing on it or why they're in Instagram at that moment. I'm talking to the person the New York Times called the Maria Kondo of brains. I am

Catherine Price. I'm a freelance science journalist and the author of How to Break Up with Your Phone. Before Catherine wrote an entire manifesto about taming our smartphone addiction, she too was seduced by all the amazing things our phones do for us. I had been involved in a home renovation project and had been spending a lot of time on eBay. There's no question that smartphones have revolutionized shopping, but Catherine was about to come face-to-face with the price we paid for that revolution. I had had a baby around that time, and I had a number of evenings where I would be with her in the middle of the night, and I'd notice that she was looking at me, and I would be looking down at my phone. And more specifically, I was often looking at doorknobs

on eBay, which was like particularly ridiculous because by that point we finished the renovation project and I didn't need to be doing that at all. But anyway, when I noticed this happening, I kind of had this out-of-body experience where I saw the scene as if it would appear to an outsider. And it really disturbed me, this vision of this baby looking up at her mother and her mother looking down at this glowing screen. And I also remembered from something from my science journalism past, which is that baby's eyes can only focus about two feet in front of their faces. And that's specifically so that they can bond emotionally with the person who's holding

them. So I found that to be deeply disturbing as well, is that she's got this evolutionary design that's there to facilitate our connection. So I found that to be deeply disturbing as well, is that she's got this evolutionary design that's there to facilitate our connection. And here I am looking at eBay. So that's the moment when I realized, ooh, I really want to work on my own relationship. Catherine started working on that relationship

with some common sense phone hacks, like shutting off her notifications and making her phone more boring looking by turning the display to grayscale. She even went one step further to delete the apps she found especially tempting. Think about the ones that you feel compulsively drawn to and then you kind of enjoy, but then you feel gross afterwards. That's the easiest way to tell is just tune into your own emotions before, during, and after using them. And you basically want to have your home screen only contain tools.

You don't want temptations. And for that, I really do recommend people approach this with the spirit of experimentation, recognizing you can always reinstall things and readjust your settings back to where they were. But see what it's like to just delete some of your most problematic apps from your phone for a day. See what it feels like. But Catherine argues that the most effective strategy for fixing our relationship with our phones involves some advice that many of us haven't heard. She thinks we need to cultivate a completely new attitude towards our phone use, one of mindfulness. We need to take the time to notice how our phones are making us feel. Now, we've talked about the power of mindfulness in other episodes on this podcast.

And that's because there's tons of research showing that becoming more mindful generally can be a big booster shot for well-being. But Catherine contends that we can use the same strategy to develop a healthier relationship with our devices, one that can protect our fragile attention. It's a lot easier to change a habit if deep down inside of you, you just don't want to engage with the habit anymore. And there were a fascinating series of studies done by this guy, Judson Brewer, where he basically trained a group of smokers in a mindfulness-based technique where they were basically just supposed to notice what it was like to smoke a cigarette, to notice what a craving felt like. Don't fight it, just kind of notice. Notice what happens if you do indulge in it. Notice how it feels if you don't. Notice how long it lasts if you just kind of observe it. Notice how it feels if you don't. Notice how long it lasts if you just

kind of observe it. And he found that the mindfulness-based group quit at twice the rate of the control group. And then in the long run, they were five times as successful in sticking with the quitting. And when he spoke to the participants about what had happened, he heard these really interesting comments from people along the lines of, you know, one woman said, I really had never tasted a cigarette before. And once I tasted it and really experienced it, I realized I thought this is disgusting and I don't want to be a smoker. Like a smoker trying to really taste a cigarette, Catherine decided to examine why her phone had such a powerful hold on her.

There's interesting reasons that we reach for our phones. They're like little security blankets. And the more you understand your motivations, what your brain is after when you reach for your phone, the easier it will be to come up with alternatives to present your brain with so that you can choose to do something else instead. To help us become a bit more mindful, Catherine recommends using the acronym WWW, which stands for What For? Why Now, what else? What for? What did you pick up your phone for? Did you actually have any purpose? No judgment. I mean, there's no right answer here. Just why did you pick it up? Then the why now is the emotional or the situational question. What was the trigger that caused you to do it in the second? Were you feeling socially anxious? Is it just a habitual thing?

And then the last question is, what else? So what else could you do in that moment? What do you actually want to spend more time and attention on? What are some things that you used to enjoy when you were a kid that you supposedly don't have time for now, or that you want to learn, but you don't have time for? Catherine cautions that this process might take a while. She even recommends doing a personal experiment like this for at least 30 days. You actually have to take some time to retrain your quote-unquote muscle of attention so that you can get it strong again. But Catherine has seen firsthand that putting in the work to regain your attention is worth it. Attention is like money. I mean, it's finite and people are constantly trying to get it from you. And I would say that our attention and time are even more valuable than money. Because

even if someone does convince you to buy some stupid thing, you can make more money. You won't get that money back, but you can still get more money. You can't get any more time and you can't get any more of your attention back. So we should be very, very careful with how and where and when we spend it. In the last few years, Catherine has perfected her own attentional spending by completely transforming her relationship with her phone. Nowadays, she keeps her devices shut off and far away through most of her family's social life. But the biggest improvement to Catherine's happiness came from repeatedly asking herself that last www question. What else could she be doing rather than spending time on her phone?

After some soul-searching, Catherine realized that she'd rather be devoting her limited attention to music. She'd played the piano since she was a child, but never had time to practice. And she'd always wanted to learn other instruments, too. but never had time to practice. And she'd always wanted to learn other instruments too. Having freed up all the time and attention she wasted on her phone, she could finally commit to this personal goal. I started taking this adult guitar class. It was like BYOB.

We got together Wednesday nights and learned chords. I just started taking percussion. Last night was my first class, so now I'm doing guitar and percussion. I've started playing music with some of the people from my class out of class. And I finally feel after living in Philadelphia for eight years that I have a community. I mean, this has happened in like the past six months and it's all through music. And the reintroduction of music into my life is a direct result of re-examining my relationship with my phone. For me, this has been a really amazing experience. with my phone. For me, this has been a really amazing experience. I never could have anticipated how many ways my life would change as a result of this project. And I feel like concentrating

on my phone and putting so much focus on my relationship with it really has made me a better mother, made me a better partner, made me a better friend, you know, you name it. And I'm so grateful for that. Making this episode has caused me to take a good hard look at what I'm spending my attention on. As my friends can probably tell you, I've always been a little addicted to my phone. But I didn't realize until now just how much it was sapping my attention and my joy, even when I'm not really using it. And so, inspired by Catherine's advice, I've started to try to become more mindful about why I'm turning to my phone. And I've started to think more about all the opportunity costs of my phone use.

What happiness guerrillas am I missing without even realizing it? What else could I be paying attention to instead? I've started to notice that using my phone in public prevents me from the short moments of connection that often make my day. A quick hello or catch up on the street that I would have squandered because I was staring at my email. Or that deep chat with my husband

that I'd be more involved with if my iPhone wasn't unconsciously tempting me from the other side of the table. Or the taste of my morning coffee, which I often ignore in favor of a quick social media click. I hope this episode has caused you to think a bit more about all the gorillas you might be missing in life without even realizing it, so you can start using your phone only for the things that are really worth your attention, the stuff that

actually brings you joy, like calling a good friend or the occasional cat video, or even clicking on your favorite podcast app to hear the next episode of The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Naughton also helped with production. Joseph Fridman checked our fax, and our editing was done by Sophie Crane-McKibben. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.

The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want.

And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.