Response-Time Expectation

What it is

It is a social norm rather than a technical one, which is why it survives a change of settings: the obligation lives in what the other person expects, not in the alert. Much checking is driven less by curiosity than by the fear of seeming slow, so every incoming message becomes a small debt. A consultant who answers a client at dinner is managing a reputation rather than an emergency, and the client who notices the speed learns to expect it. Both sides have now raised the price of silence.

In effect

Ohly and Bastin randomly assigned 247 people either to disable notifications as far as possible across every device for one working day or to leave their settings alone. They predicted that people high in telepressure, and people high in fear of missing out, would compensate with more internal interruptions once the alerts were gone. Neither moderation held. Interruption frequency fell sharply, deliberate self-checking rose at no measured cost, and the involuntary pull to go and look did not rise by anything the study could detect.

What it does not say

It does not say the norm causes the harm attached to it. The telepressure evidence is largely self-report and cross-sectional, so it establishes the norm and its correlates and no more. And the absent compensation is a thinner result than it sounds: one working day, a German convenience sample recruited through personal networks with more than half of it students, and internal interruption measured on a single question. That is the only randomised test of the question we could locate, and nobody has run it with behavioural measurement.

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