You're standing in line at the grocery store or waiting for an elevator. You have no more than a minute to kill. And yet, before you've even processed what you're doing, you've pulled out your phone and have begun to mindlessly scroll through TikTok or Instagram.
Sound familiar? It does to Adrian Ward, an associate professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin who studies people's relationships to technology. "It's not even an urge," he said. "There's no intention." In his experience, checking your phone is often automatic.
Research suggests plenty of people do the same thing. Maxi Heitmayer, a teaching fellow who studies human-computer interaction at the London School of Economics and Political Science, found in a small 2022 experiment that only 11 percent of people’s smartphone checks were in response to a notification. The other 89 percent of the time, they checked their phones totally unprompted, often without thinking through why they were doing it.
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