A team of scientists from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, designed a study to find out if short-form videos are frying our brains, and the answer they got was yes. Very much so. And it looks like they’re created to be this way.
More specifically, they looked at how spending time on TikTok affects our prospective memory—our ability to remember to do the things we planned for the future.
To investigate this, the researchers got 60 college-aged social media users in a lab and gave them a two-part computer task: 1) Strings of letters appeared on the screen one by one, and participants needed to decide if they were real words or not; 2) The participants were also told to remember a set of special words, and if any of those appeared, they had to press a button.
In the middle of the experiment, however, they were interrupted and given a 10-minute break. The participants were then randomly divided into four groups:
- Rest: These folks took a break “with no input.” They were instructed not to look at their phones or any other screen.
- Twitter: Participants were instructed to scroll through their own Twitter feed, which consists of short texts and occasional photos. The feed switches contexts rapidly, but usually doesn’t contain highly engaging video content.
- YouTube: People were shown a pre-prepared playlist consisting of 10-minute videos from a range of topics, including entertainment and education (e.g., TED Talks). The group had to choose the video that was most interesting to them and watch it throughout the entire break, meaning no context shifts.
- TikTok: These participants were instructed to watch videos on their own feed, which is highly engaging and switches contexts rapidly.
Then came the second half of “work.”
Image credits: pexels.com/@cottonbro
The results of the first part of the task were consistent. Both pre- and post-interruption, all groups scored around 95–98%.
But the picture was very different when it came to the second part. The YouTube group performed the same before and after, and those who rested and scrolled Twitter even did slightly better after their time off.
The most noticeable difference, however, was observed in TikTokers. Pre-interruption, they were scoring 80% on the second part of the task, but after, the figure dropped to an abysmal 49%. Put differently, if TikTok and resting had the same effect, a difference this large would occur 0.2% of the time, which is extremely unlikely.
To understand why this happened, the researchers looked at other data they collected. After using TikTok, participants processed information much slower, exhibited more uncertainty, took longer before making a decision, and lowered their decision threshold.
“Social media apps started to employ different design strategies, e.g., video autoplay, pull-to-refresh, infinite scrolling, and recommendations, to maximize user engagement and attention capture,” the authors of the study wrote. “These designs create an immediate reward loop by showing content personalized to the user’s subjective preference and interest, based on prior browsing histories and tagged video classification.”
“The fast pace of switching between topics […] and their often emotional content makes the social media distractor increase attentional disengagement, and therefore impairs our capacity to timely and accurately resume the task at hand.”
Since prospective memory is a crucial aspect of daily life and is susceptible to interruption, the researchers argue that when social media impacts our cognitive performance in the real world in such a huge way, it could be classified as a dark pattern—a deceptive design that tricks users into doing things they didn’t intend, like making unwanted purchases, signing up for subscriptions, or sharing extra personal data, ultimately benefiting the company at their expense.
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