Social media distraction: How distracting are visual social media cues and what influences users' distractibility?

Abstract

Social media cues can distract people from working on intended tasks. Accordingly, in the context of social media, this study examines what influences a person’s distractibility, specifically whether social media cues are more distracting than neutral cues. Across three experiments (N = 246), we measured user distractibility with the filter task paradigm, a measure of the ability to filter out distractions. The results showed that social media cues are not more visually distracting than complex neutral cues, but they are more distracting than simple neutral cues. In addition, distractibility increases with an increase in the number of distractors. Overall, the findings show that individual differences (i.e. self-control, impulsivity, FoMO, problematic social media use) did not impact distractibility (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 found that state cyberostracism influenced distractibility, whereby socially excluded participants were more distracted than those who felt included. State fear of missing out (FoMO) did not influence distractibility (Experiment 3). This study contributes to the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of social media distraction by finding that social media cues are not more distracting than other neutral, more complex cues. This might be due to the high task demand under which we measured distractibility in our experiments. Future work is needed to find out more about differences in social media distraction and influencing factors of user’s distractibility.

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