The effect of SMS notifications on time preferences

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2021.101818Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We test the effect of SMS notifications on time preference (delay discounting).

  • Exposure to SMS notifications increase the tendency to favor the present.

  • SMS notifications also affected impulsiveness and stress.

  • Impulsiveness and stress were not found to be mediators between SMS notifications and time preference.

  • We suggest that SMS notifications increased the demand on cognitive processes.

Abstract

In this paper we use the SMS instant messaging application to examine the effect of notifications on time preferences. To do so, we conducted a laboratory experiment with three different groups. Participants in the first (second) treatment group received SMS messages with a high (low) degree of frequency. The third group was a control group that did not receive any SMS messages. The results show that, with exposure to SMS notifications, regardless of their frequency, the tendency to favor the present increases. They also indicate that SMS notifications affect impulsiveness and stress. However, the influence of impulsiveness and stress were not the factors that activated the change in time preferences. In addition to the contribution to the literature on smartphones and human behavior, our results have real-life implications regarding how we make decisions when we are interrupted by notifications from our mobile devices.

Introduction

The twenty-first century is characterized by the proliferation of mobile devices with advanced technological features (Cheever, Rosen, Carrier, & Chavez, 2014. Smartphones provide various features that improve our lives and make them easier (Wei, 2008). Despite the advantages of using smartphones (Srivastava, 2005), excessive use can cause psychological and behavioral problems such as stress, anxiety, depression, loss of concentration, sleep disturbance, addiction, annoyance and nomophobia1 (De-Sola Gutiérrez, Rodríguez de Fonseca, & Rubio, 2016; Jenkins, Anderson, Vance, Kirwan, & Eargle, 2016; Samaha & Hawi, 2016; Sapacz, Rockman, & Clark, 2016; Thomée, Härenstam, & Hagberg, 2011). Users of smartphones must deal with disruptions frequently, even when their phones are set to vibrate. This behavior leads to an increase in the number of interruptions to which people are exposed. Interruption is “an externally generated, randomly occurring, discrete event that breaks continuity of cognitive focus on a primary task" (Corragio, 1990, p. 19) and typically "requires immediate attention" and "insists on action" (Covey, 1989; pp. 150–152). This definition implies that another person or event creates the interruption and that the timing of the interruption is beyond the control of the individual. Fletcher, Potter, & Telford, 2018 suggested that one of the factors involved in interruptions are distractions, which are cognitive reactions to an external stimulus such as background music or flickering lights.

Interruptions, in general, influence people's psychological stress (e.g., Greiner, Ragland, Krause, Syme, & Fisher, 1997). They also increase the amount of time needed to complete the primary task. As a result, the pressure to finish the task increases, leading to increased stress (Kühnel, Sonnentag, & Bledow, 2012). Time pressures can also lead to the need for additional effort, which also increases stress (Mark, Gudith, & Klocke, 2008). This is also true when dealing with cumulative interruptions (Baethge, Rigotti, & Roe, 2015). The extensive use of smartphones increases users’ stress (Konok, Pogány, & Miklósi, 2017; Wang, Wang, Gaskin, & Wang, 2015) for biological and psychological reasons (Thomée et al., 2011). Compulsive use of smartphones is related to a form of stress (Lee, Chang, Lin, & Cheng, 2014) known as episodic stress (Bailey & Bhagat, 1987), which occurs when we experience acute stress too frequently. It often affects those who feel they have both self-imposed pressures and external demands vying for their attention. Interruptions from notifications also increase stress. For example, Galluch, Grover, and Thatcher (2015) found that high and moderate levels of interruptions from ICTs (i.e. information and communication technologies) increased stress (see also Ragu-Nathan, Tarafdar, Ragu-Nathan, & Tu, 2008). A recent study by Fitz et al. (2019), which tested the impact of batching notifications (i.e., delivering them at predictable intervals) on stress and well-being, indicated that they had the opposite effect. Participants who received batched notifications felt better than those who had episodic interruptions. They were able to pay attention to their work better, were more productive, and had less stress. In addition, the visual notification that a message had been read (i.e. the blue checkmark in the WhatsApp application) increased the social pressure on them to respond quickly (Hoyle, Das, Kapadia, Lee, & Vaniea, 2017).

Stress affects economic and financial decisions (for a review see Starcke & Brand, 2012) including risky decision making (Mather, Gorlick, & Lighthall, 2009; Porcelli & Delgado, 2009), risk preferences (Cahlíková & Cingl, 2017; Kandasamy et al., 2014) and in particular, time preferences. The last one is also known as inter-temporal decisions, which is the individual's tendency to favor the future or the present when making choices. One of the measures of time preferences is the subjective discount rate (SDR), which is the rate between a delayed outcome people are willing to accept at a future time and the current outcome they are willing to postpone. The discount rate increases with the increase in the tendency to favor the present.

Various factors affect time preferences. Examples include time delays, the amount of money involved (Benhabib, Bisin, & Schotter, 2010; Green & Myerson, 2004; Myerson, Green, Hanson, Holt, & Estle, 2003), socio-demographic factors (Lahav, Rosenboim, & Shavit, 2015; (Lahav, Shavit and Benzion, 2015)Mahajna, Benzion, Bogaire, & Shavit, 2008; Rosenboim, Shavit, & Shoham, 2010; Shavit, Lahav, & Benzion, 2013) and cognitive load (Israel, Rosenboim, & Shavit, 2020). Time preferences affect decision making in many areas such as consumption (Goodman, Malkoc, & Rosenboim, 2019; Lahav, Shavit, & Benzion, 2016), health (Ikeda, Kang, & Ohtake, 2010; Richards & Hamilton, 2012) and financial behavior (Choi, Laibson, & Madrian, 2011; Finke & Huston, 2013; Hurwitz, Lahav, & Mugerman, 2021; Lahav, Shavit, & Benzion, 2018). Some studies have shown that time preferences can change due to psychological effects, such as priming manipulations (Israel, Rosenboim, & Shavit, 2014; Peters & Büchel, 2010; Shavit, Rosenboim, & Shani, 2014). Lempert, Porcelli, Delgado, and Tricomi (2012) demonstrated that under stressful conditions such as delivering a speech that was to be recorded, the participants' discounting rates were the highest compared to situations with less perceived stress. In situations without stress, there were no differences in the perceived stress level. Lempert et al. (2012) suggested that the differences in the evaluation of the stress level might lead to different responses to the inter-temporal choices. They also reported that higher delay discounting levels were associated with a larger cortisol2 response to the acute stress. Similarly, in a within-subjects experiment using a standard acute psychosocial stress test of making a speech and a mental arithmetic task, Kimura et al. (2013) demonstrated that under stressful conditions only those participants who showed a change in cortisol levels reported higher discount rates. Haushofer, Jang, and Lynham (2015) tested whether different types of stressors (social, physical and economic) affect delay discounting differently. They found that while both social and physical stressors had no influence on discounting, the economic stressor increased the participants' delay-discounting rates.3

The cumulative response to stressors may also alter people's self-control and inhibition of impulses. For example, smoking and unhealthy eating, which are related to impulsive behavior (McKay, Percy, & Cole, 2013), increase during stressful times (e.g., Abrantes et al., 2008; Shi, Hooten, & Warner, 2011). In addition, stress increases self-reports of impulsivity (Schreiber, Grant, & Odlaug, 2012), and reduces self-control, measured in behavioral inhibition (see a review; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). Kushlev, Proulx, and Dunn (2016) showed that in the general population, interruptions from alerts and notifications increase stress, evident in more inattention and hyperactivity, which are associated with impulsivity (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013). Under high levels of stress we become more impulsive, and, as a result, exhibit greater delay discounting (Kimura et al., 2013; Malesza, 2019).

In this paper we used the SMS instant messaging application to activate the effect of notifications on time preferences by sending text messages to which the participants in a lab experiment were asked to respond. The case of SMS notifications is a unique case of interruption in which the individual's attention is disconnected but the individual remains involved with the primary task. We conducted a between-subjects experiment that included three groups. Participants in the first (second) treatment group received SMS messages with a high (low) degree of frequency. The third group was a control group that did not receive any SMS messages. We asked the participants to complete a questionnaire and used their answers to the time preference questions to calculate their subjective discount rate. We also used their answers to measure control variables such as risk attitude, impulsiveness and stress. The results show that with exposure to SMS notifications, regardless of their frequency, the tendency to favor the present and the subjective discount rates increases. Moreover, although the SMS notifications affect impulsiveness and stress, they are not the factors that activate the change in time preferences. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that examines the effect of interruptions from SMS notifications on economic decision making, specifically, inter-temporal decisions. In addition to the contribution to the literature on smartphones and human behavior, the results also have real-life implications regarding how we make decisions when we are interrupted by notifications from our mobile devices.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next two sections present the experimental design and the results. In the last section, we discuss the results and make concluding remarks.

Section snippets

2.1. Participants

The participants were 188 undergraduate students.4 They participated for course credit and were randomly assigned to three groups.

Group 1 (high frequency SMS notification group): 64 participants (28 males and 36 females; average age of 24.7), who received SMS notifications with messages once every minute during the experiment (hereinafter: the high SMS group)

Group 2 (low frequency

The effect of SMS interruptions on time preferences

We measured the participants’ monetary time preferences by calculating the annual subjective discount rate (SDR) for each participant using Eq. (1) as follows:SDR=(DtP01)*twhere Dt, is the delayed outcome the participants are willing to accept at time t and PO is the current outcome they are willing to postpone. The value t represents the sub-periods in annual terms (one month t = 12; six months t = 2; 24 months t = 0.5).

Table 1 shows the average (S.D.) annual SDR for each group and for each

Discussion

The current study is the first that examines the effect of interruptions from SMS notifications on economic decision-making, focusing on inter-temporal decisions regarding time preferences. Participants who were interrupted by frequent SMS notifications reported higher discount rates, regardless of the frequency of the notifications. This result underscores the fact that even small interruptions can distract us when we make important financial decisions that involve inter-temporal choices. In

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no conflict of interest.

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