黑料吃瓜 study links TikTok scrolling to poor study focus
Just five minutes of scrolling the social app made college students less focused while reading long-form news, an 黑料吃瓜 study found.
A new study by a journalism graduate student at 黑料吃瓜 found that even a few minutes spent on TikTok before reading long-form content could impair concentration.
Using eye-tracking technology, Bridget Cole, who earned a master鈥檚 degree from , and a team of researchers observed how college students read news content after using TikTok. The study was informed by the scan-and-shift hypothesis, which suggests that frequent social media use encourages rapid attention shifts, making it harder to focus on sustained tasks like reading.
The study was inspired, in part, by personal experience.
鈥淎s a grad student, I found myself taking several breaks to scroll TikTok and it would take a while for me to prime myself back into homework and studying,鈥� Cole said. 鈥淚t required so much mental effort to get back into that brain space.鈥�
Cole figured she wasn鈥檛 alone, so she approached Arthur Santana, an 黑料吃瓜 associate journalism professor, and asked about expanding an existing research project on how people read news to include potential impacts of TikTok.
She wanted to know if scrolling through consecutive, short-form TikTok videos before reading would make the experimental group read quickly so they could move on to the next article. She also wanted to know if they, like her, would have to reread portions of long-form content multiple times.
The study involved 242 黑料吃瓜 students. Half of the group was asked to browse their TikTok feeds for five minutes before reading 10 online articles from outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. The other half read the articles without looking at TikTok.
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The results? Students who browsed TikTok were significantly less focused while reading news. They moved their eyes more quickly across text, supporting Cole鈥檚 hypothesis that consuming social media would lead to more scanning.
However, the results did not find that the TikTok group did a noticeable amount of backtracking while reading, and the team did not test the students鈥� ability to retain the information they had read.
Cole worked alongside Santana, Xiaohan Hu, an 黑料吃瓜 assistant journalism professor, and Toby Hopp, a professor of advertising, public relations and media design at the University of Colorado Boulder, on the study.
Their findings support previous research that suggests TikTok conditions the brain to expect quick rewards, and the focus needed to transition from watching 15-second TikTok videos to concentrating on long-form reading may be difficult to summon.
鈥淭hese findings add one more layer to the growing research in this area that shows that short-form videos, and the instant gratification that they bring, have an effect on the brain's ability to process information,鈥� Santana said. 鈥淭he cognitive leap of going from passively consuming TikTok to actively concentrating on a reading task may be too great.鈥�
The researchers said their findings have implications for TikTok users across all age groups, especially students who may be scrolling their feeds in between reading assignments.
鈥淭his research supports the idea that when trying to take a break from something like studying, we need to be mindful that consuming different short-form media can make it harder to readjust to reading large pieces of text,鈥� Cole said.
Self-reported levels of distractibility did not appear to influence results in the study. Participants who considered themselves more or less prone to distraction showed similar attention patterns after TikTok use.
The study acknowledges limitations, such as the algorithm-driven content TikTok users are fed, participant variability and the artificial lab environment.
