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

CORVALLIS, Ore. – 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.

The scientists melded four indicators of spatial habits – route frequency, route automaticity, destination frequency and destination automaticity – with two measures of smartphone habits, app frequency and app automaticity, and found that smartphone habits are stronger in spaces chosen out of habit.

“That was true for social apps like Instagram, Reddit, Signal and TikTok, and also for non-social apps like Venmo or Asana,” Ross said. “Social app habits, though, were less tethered to location than non-social app habits.”

Regardless of type, apps used out of habit were used across spatial contexts and especially likely to be used in contexts selected based on habit. The study indicates the multiplicative potential of habitual processes in daily life, Ross said.

“Ultimately, although habits involve a lack of thinking, you can think about which habits you want to develop,” he said. “We’ve shown that phone habits are tied to spatial habits, and that has implications for how we develop or break habits. We may try to cultivate a good habit of staying abreast of the news by reading news articles on the bus, or we may try to break a bad habit of overusing TikTok by not using it in bed.”

Findings were published in Nature Scientific Reports.