Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
MARCH 17, 2007, WAS
Saint Patrick’s Day. In Salt Lake City, a seventeen-year-old girl named Lauren Mulkey had freshly returned from a family vacation in Florida. In the early evening, she put on a bright yellow halter top to show off her tan, jeans, and big green hoop earrings, and set out with friends to celebrate the Irish holiday.
The last thing she heard was a warning. “I told her: Be careful of drunk drivers,” says her mother, Linda.
At midnight, now March 18, she was returning home, sober. Coming the other direction was Theodore Jorgensen, nineteen. At a thoroughfare near the University of Utah, he drove through a red light.
He did not see Lauren’s Mercedes SUV passing through the intersection, perpendicular to him. He smashed into the driver’s side of the car. It flipped. Lauren died almost instantly from massive head wounds. According to prosecutors, Jorgensen had been on the phone prior to the accident.
Lauren’s mother, Linda, says: “I never thought to warn her about the phone.”
I
N A SMALL WINDOWLESS
room in Fraser Hall at the University of Kansas, a junior named Maggie Biberstein sits in a contraption that resembles a driving video game at an arcade. There are brake and accelerator pedals at her feet. She grips a steering wheel. She looks at a screen on the wall on which is projected a highway scene, the setting she is supposed to steer a virtual car through.
This driving simulator is telling Dr. Atchley and his collaborators something about Maggie’s relationship to technology.
Maggie’s job is to drive the car and focus on the road. But she’s also supposed to keep an ear out for her phone, in case a text comes in. That’s not uncommon for her.
“I sometimes text while I drive,” she says a bit sheepishly. She wears jeans and a green sweater over a blue shirt. She grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, where she got her first phone when she was sixteen. She tries not to use her phone when she studies, but it’s hard to ignore. The device is so important for social uses; she’s heavily involved in her sorority, Alpha Delta Pi, where, for instance, she recently helped write a musical.
What is the value of social connection? How does it impact the lure of the phone? And when it comes to social connection, What is the value of immediate gratification?
IN A PRIOR GROUNDBREAKING
experiment published in 2012, Dr. Atchley and a colleague explored these questions. Dr. Atchley used a basic premise: He theorized that if technology was like an addictive substance, say, alcohol, then users would find the information delivered on a device as irresistible as alcoholics do booze.
In the first part of the experiment, thirty-five students were asked about how they value money and how they value information.
In the case of money, the subjects were asked if they would prefer to take a small amount of money, say, $5, versus waiting a period of time to get more money, say, $100. The students were asked about other time periods, too, and other amounts of money, enabling the researchers to assess how the students value money over time. Put another way: How urgent is their desire for money?
In the second part of the experiment, the researchers asked similar questions, but this time they focused on the value of information. For instance, students were told they’ve received a text from their significant other. They were promised they could get $5 if they responded immediately, or $100 if they waited an hour to respond. There were other intermediate options, such as respond in five minutes or thirty minutes with corresponding rewards.
This kind of science has been termed “neuroeconomics,” a subset of which is known as “delay discounting.” It is a way of understanding decision making on various issues—say, when a person responds to a text—by using economic, or monetary measures and influences.
What the researchers found was that students thought a value of a text fell much more quickly than did the value of money. On average, $100 lost about 25 percent of its value if a student had to wait 12 days to get paid, and it lost 50 percent of the value if students had to wait 142 days to get paid, on average. Despite some erosion, money retained value over relatively long periods.
Not so with a text. In the case of a text, the information lost one-quarter of its value in ten minutes and half its value in five hours. Information loses a lot of value in a short period of time. Money retains its value over time.
The results stand to reason, Dr. Atchley explains. “If a friend texts and says, ‘I’ll be at a party later,’ and you don’t pick up the text until tomorrow, you may as well not have bothered to pick up the phone.”
In a second phase of the experiment, the researchers added a twist: Would the value of information be discounted even further—be even more urgent—depending on who it was from?
What they found was there was a decided increase in the sense of urgency when the text came from a significant other, as opposed to a friend or more distant acquaintance. Specifically, when the text came from a boyfriend or wife, for instance, the value of texting back fell 25 percent after just twenty-five minutes, compared to three hours for a “friend,” or ten hours for an acquaintance. The dry vernacular of the science paper read: “The current data shows the need to text now may simply reflect the need to engage in a behavior that only has value in the short term.”
There was another critical conclusion from the experiment. The college students made what Dr. Atchley calls a “rational” assessment of the value of the information. They didn’t just have a knee-jerk reaction to immediately respond to the text. If they had done that, Dr. Atchley thought, their relationship to crucial social information would begin to look more like that of an alcoholic to booze. In that relationship, the alcoholic places urgent value on, say, getting one beer today, even if he can get a twelve-pack if he waits a week.
The college students, by contrast, were willing to wait a bit, and they were prepared to wait more or less time depending on who the text was from. That is a rational response, Dr. Atchley thought, not the response of an addict.
Maybe, he thought, technology creates more of a compulsion than an addiction. He needed to dig deeper to understand where the lure of technology fit on this continuum.
IN ANOTHER EXPERIMENT AIMED
at refining the answers, Dr. Atchley is working with scientists at the Imaging Center in Kansas City. There, they are comparing the brains of smokers to those of Internet addicts. When a smoker anticipates a cigarette, does his brain look the same as when a Facebook user anticipates getting a status update?
And in yet another experiment, his team is asking a question related to distracted driving. What is more powerful: the lure of the social information or the demands of the road?
That’s what Maggie is doing in the lab today. It’s just one little building block, but they’re about to be surprised by the result.
IN THE ROOM NEXT
to where Maggie sits in the driving simulator is a small room with three computer screens and one television monitor. These are receiving a feed from a camera that’s recording what Maggie is doing.
Watching is Chelsie Hadlock, a researcher in Dr. Atchley’s lab. As she observes Maggie, she uses one of the computers in the room to send Maggie occasional texts. There are two kinds of texts: one involves driving directions that Maggie must take to get to a party; the other are related to social information about the party and who will be there.
The researcher taps out:
Michelle keeps asking when you’re going to get here.
Maggie taps back:
I think I’ll be there soon. How do I get there?
The researcher texts how to get to the party, what street to turn left on, and how many blocks Maggie must go. Maggie drives on through the simulator, finishing the highway portion, heading into an urban environment.
The researcher texts:
Gendry is getting wasted. Why aren’t you here yet?
The simulation is not intended to measure how well Maggie texts and drives, though the researchers confirm that she and other participants are horrible at it. Crash risk soars. Something else happens, too, perhaps less expected; the social information seems to pave over the value of the driving information.
At the end of the simulation, Maggie takes a quiz. What does she remember about the drive? What she recalls are the names and details of the lives of all the fictional characters from the party: Michelle and Gendry and Michael.
What she misses in the quiz: everything else. The driving directions, the number of intersections she passed, the buildings she passed.
GETTING INFORMATION OF VALUE
seems to explain some of the powerful lure of technology. Here, it is possible to see the way in which our devices play so beautifully to our two basic attention systems: top-down and bottom-up. Our top-down, goal-directed system wants to keep in touch, make connections, form relationships, forge partnerships. Our devices are masterful at allowing that. And the goals get reinforced, or so it seems, by the buzz of an incoming call or text, alerting us to a new development in the narrative of our lives. It is the bottom-up system at work.
But there’s another way in which our devices, perhaps less expectedly, cater to our deepest neurological wiring. It has to do with the value of
sharing
information, not just receiving it. Turns out, we also get important neurochemical releases when we disclose personal information, something enabled greatly by email, texts, or status updates on various sites.
In a study published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in 2012, researchers from Harvard University used MRI scans to look inside the brain and ask: What happens when we disclose information?
What they found was that the reward areas of the brain light up when people share. “Here, we suggest that humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary awards such as food and sex.”
Reinforcing that finding is research by Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, who found through survey studies that people are happier at work when they use Facebook more. Not more engaged with their job, but happier. That comes in part from posting stuff, sharing.
The researchers added another layer to that finding by looking at whether the reward circuitry in the brain was more or less excited when the person was disclosing the information not in a vacuum or in private—say, by writing the information onto a piece of paper (a diary, if you will)—but when the disclosure was certain to be seen by someone, particularly a friend or family member. To measure this, the researchers conducted a version of the neuroeconomics experiments that Dr. Atchley (and many others) had used, in this case trying to put a relative monetary value on disclosing something in private versus disclosing to another person.
“Although participants were willing to forgo money merely to introspect about the self and doing so was sufficient to engage brain regions associated with the rewarding outcomes,
these effects were magnified by knowledge that one’s thoughts would be communicated to another person
, suggesting that individuals find opportunities to disclose their own thoughts to others to be especially rewarding,” the researchers wrote (italics added).
They concluded: The “motivation to disclose our internal thoughts and knowledge to others may serve to sustain the behaviors that underlie the extreme sociality of our species.”
PART OF THE REASON
why it’s not so easy to understand the powerful lure of technology—is it addictive? the cause of extreme compulsion? or simply habit forming?—has to do with the complexity of the technology itself. Various mechanisms are at work. Some have to do with the nature of the information the devices deliver—the value, say, of personal information or the value of good news versus bad news. Some are more purely mechanical, having to do with
how
the information is delivered.
For instance, the speed at which a device delivers information can dictate how drawn we are to it. Another mechanical piece has to do with the way our brains get stimulated by the mere act of touching the device and, in doing so, causing something to happen. Touch the keyboard and a letter appears. Touch the screen and an email opens or a gun shoots in a video game. This step is separate from, and arguably more primitive than, the receiving of information; before we get information, we are getting some stimulation through an act of stimulus response.
An additional factor that can dictate how compulsively we use our devices has to do with individual personality and predilection. Some people appear more susceptible than others.
Different researchers are exploring the different mechanisms, and they are doing so using a growing set of tools. Some research focuses on behavior, like the stuff Dr. Atchley does. Some involves imaging, Dr. Atchley does that, too, but it is more the domain of scientists like Dr. Gazzaley. And there’s another way of looking at these various mechanisms. It entails looking at neurochemicals triggered when people play video games or use the Internet. The tools to measure such activity are evolving, too. And they show that the use of certain kinds of interactive media stimulate neurological patterns similar to those produced by the use of addictive drugs.
To learn more, Dr. Atchley suggests I talk to an Internet addiction specialist named David Greenfield. He has looked closely at the chemical relationship between drugs and technology. And he knows whereof he speaks, having struggled with drug use himself.
M
ARY SURRATT RAN THE
boardinghouse where John Wilkes Booth planned the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Evidence of her guilt was conflicting, but she was found guilty of conspiracy in the president’s murder and sentenced to hang.