Resolving to Spend Less Time on Your Smartphone? Understanding Your Travel Habits Can Help

hubie writes:

Resolving to spend less time on your smartphone? Understanding your travel habits can help:

If you open a banking app, play a mobile game or scroll through a news feed every day while riding the bus, your commuting routine is probably bolstering your smartphone habit, according to new research that shows phone tendencies are stronger in locations chosen automatically.

As you ponder this year's potential New Year's resolutions, understanding your habits and what reinforces them is key to helping ensure your autopilot doesn't steer you in directions that conflict with your values and goals, said Oregon State University's Morgan Quinn Ross, who led the study.

"Habits are a direct driver of behavior, those activities we do frequently and without thinking," said Ross, assistant professor of communication in the OSU College of Liberal Arts. "Because they automate our cognition, habitual processes can make day-to-day life easier to navigate - but they can also ultimately make things harder on us. For better or worse, our habits have powerful implications for how we engage with the world around us."

Ross notes that past research has shown that "mobility choices" - where we go and how we get there - are largely a factor of habit, as are the ways and frequency in which we use our smartphones. Much less studied, however, is how those habits might feed off each other.

"The interaction between mobility choice habits and smartphone habits is ideally suited for analyzing interactive habitual processes in daily life," he said. "Unlike most habits, smartphone habits can come into play pretty much wherever you are."

Ross and collaborators at the Ohio State University, the University of Iowa and the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan employed a specially designed app to collect millions of data points from 419 study participants over a two-week period.

The app tracked participants' travel routes, destinations and smartphone use, and also checked in with participants to see how automatically chosen their routes and destinations were. In addition, participants were surveyed about whether they used certain apps without thinking.

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