Sam Gilson

Why people walk looking at their phones

I started wondering about this while walking from the parking deck to a lecture hall last summer, when I was instructor of record for discrete mathematics. I was reading class email and reviewing my notes as I walked. I was also an hour early, with an empty lecture hall waiting and nothing that needed doing in the next ten minutes. I caught myself at it and could not explain it. I was almost certainly doing a worse job of reading than I would have done sitting down, because part of my attention was on where my feet were going.

The walk from the parking deck to the lecture hall, drawn as one wide scene. A figure walks the dashed path with their head tilted down to a phone, reading class email. The lecture hall at the far end is labelled as empty for another hour. Two trees and a bird are passed unattended.
The walk from the parking deck to the lecture hall, drawn as one wide scene. A figure walks the dashed path with their head tilted down to a phone, reading class email. The lecture hall at the far end is labelled as empty for another hour. Two trees and a bird are passed unattended.
The easy answer is that my legs were on autopilot. I had walked that route enough times that my head was free to do something else. That answer is true and I do not like what follows from it, which is the suggestion that any freed attention should be filled with work. I do not want to live that way, and I do not think it explains why people walk looking at their phones when they are not working.

What follows is a line of thinking, not a result. I have not checked it against the literature, and parts of it may already be answered or already contradicted there.

Where ICAP stops being the tool I need

ICAP's four kinds of engagement drawn as rising steps: passive, active, constructive, interactive, with height standing for how much a person learns. Below them a second axis runs the other way, drawn as bars that shorten to the right, for how easy each kind is to start and stay in. The walker with the phone stands on the passive step, which is the shortest and the easiest.
ICAP's four kinds of engagement drawn as rising steps: passive, active, constructive, interactive, with height standing for how much a person learns. Below them a second axis runs the other way, drawn as bars that shorten to the right, for how easy each kind is to start and stay in. The walker with the phone stands on the passive step, which is the shortest and the easiest.

Chi and Wylie's ICAP framework sorts engagement into passive, active, constructive and interactive, and says the learning gains rise along that order 1. Scrolling an app is close to pure passive. You are taking things in without putting anything back.

By that account, scrolling while walking is the engagement least likely to teach you anything, and that is a fine prediction. The reason it does not settle my question is that ICAP is about how much you learn. It says nothing about how engaging something feels while you are doing it, or about how much you want to keep going. Passive engagement looks like the easiest kind to start and the easiest to stay in, and that is a different axis from how much you learn.

So I want a second thing alongside ICAP, which is why a person reaches for the easy kind at all.

Context is what makes a familiar walk interesting

The same route drawn twice. In the upper panel, the walk on most days, with the same trees and building each time and a second figure labelled as the man I pass most days. In the lower panel, the same scenery exactly, with that figure replaced by a dashed empty outline and a police car with its lights on standing where nothing usually is.
The same route drawn twice. In the upper panel, the walk on most days, with the same trees and building each time and a second figure labelled as the man I pass most days. In the lower panel, the same scenery exactly, with that figure replaced by a dashed empty outline and a police car with its lights on standing where nothing usually is.

Walking the same route repeatedly builds an expectation of how the walk goes. Once that expectation exists, you notice what departs from it. There is a man I pass most days; on the day he is not there, I notice he is not there and wonder where he went.

On that same walk in the summer I passed a police car with its lights on, which on a near-empty campus is strange enough to hold my attention. On the way back I saw a man in handcuffs against a wall with three or four cars around him. Whatever else that was, it was as engaging as anything an app has shown me. I am wary of using it as an example, because people carry real history with the police and I do not want the illustration to do work the argument has not earned. But it is the clearest case I have of a familiar route producing something I could not look away from.

Scrolling does not accumulate that way. Each item differs enough from the last that no expectation forms, so there is nothing for a departure to depart from. The context gets replaced before it can build. You can argue that an app supplies more unfamiliar input per minute than my walk does, and I think that is true. It supplies less of the thing that makes a small anomaly worth noticing.

This gives me a reading of "chronically online" that I like better than the usual one. Someone who is in a forum constantly has built exactly this kind of context, and gets the same noticing from it. They can tell when a regular poster is behaving oddly and wonder what happened to their account. That is the walk feeling, built in a digital space.

A guess about self-generated engagement, and the reason to distrust it

Two halves divided by a vertical line. On the left, a box labelled what I was shown feeds an arrow down to a walker holding a phone, who works from it. On the right, a walker with no phone sends an arrow up to a box labelled something I made up. A wavy line at the far right is labelled as other people, the objection the post ends on.
Two halves divided by a vertical line. On the left, a box labelled what I was shown feeds an arrow down to a walker holding a phone, who works from it. On the right, a walker with no phone sends an arrow up to a box labelled something I made up. A wavy line at the far right is labelled as other people, the objection the post ends on.

Walking without a phone leaves you as the only source of anything to think about. You start from yourself. Walking with one, the phone supplies the starting point and you work from what you were shown.

My guess is that starting from yourself is a skill, and an unevenly distributed one. I have a bias here that I should state plainly: I backpack, so I have spent a lot of hours walking with no input but the trail, and I am comfortable keeping myself occupied with whatever is in front of me. That makes me a poor judge of how hard it is for someone who has not had that practice.

The analogy I keep reaching for is locus of control 2. Mine used to be firmly external. When a senior engineer at Microsoft told me a task was the priority, that instruction was the motivation, and I would drop whatever I was doing. Now I am more likely to decide the task matters and then do it, which often ends in the same action from a different place. Walking with a phone looks like an external locus for engagement: the interest has to be handed to you. Generating it yourself looks internal, and I think I prefer that, though preferring it is not evidence.

Here is where my own argument gives me trouble. Humans are extraordinarily social, and most of what any of us does is built from what other people are doing, varied by our own experience. If that is right, then a person constructing their entertainment alone on a walk is doing something less social than the person reading what their friends posted, and I have been quietly treating the solitary version as the healthier one without having argued for it.

I am leaving that unresolved. The next step is a literature review that looks for work supporting this and work contradicting it, and I would expect attention research and media studies to have said something about the context point already.

Driving is a different problem and I have left it alone. My guess there is that people reach for the phone to resolve uncertainty about where they are going, and that the relief of knowing outweighs a danger they are not feeling at the time. I do not have the insight to take that further.

References

  1. Chi and Wylie (2014). The ICAP Framework: Linking Cognitive Engagement to Active Learning Outcomes. Educational Psychologist 49(4), 219-243.
  2. Rotter (1966). Generalized Expectancies for Internal Versus External Control of Reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 80(1), 1-28.

Tagged attention · learning-sciences · media

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