Interrupting Interruptions: A Digital Experiment on Social Media and Performance
[NOT A PEER-REVIEWED STUDY. An SSRN working paper, still unpublished eight years on. ABSTRACT READ IN FULL AT SOURCE at the SSRN landing page; THE 40-PAGE PDF WAS NOT OPENED, so nothing beyond the abstract may be attributed to it] Marotta, V., & Acquisti, A. (2018). 'Interrupting Interruptions: A Digital Experiment on Social Media and Performance.' SSRN working paper 3283951, dated 13 August 2018, posted 7 December 2018, last revised 11 December 2018, 40 pages. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3283951. First author Veronica Marotta, then University of Minnesota Carlson School; Acquisti second, Carnegie Mellon. THE ONLY RANDOMISED STUDY WITH A REAL OUTPUT MEASURE FOUND ANYWHERE IN THIS FILE, AND IT IS A WORKING PAPER AND MUST BE CITED AS ONE. A randomised field experiment on crowd-sourcing platform workers using their own economic incentives, with performance captured across a variety of tasks, two treatments against a control: an exogenous condition where an app blocked selected online services for fixed periods, and an endogenous condition where participants chose. THE RESULT: in the exogenous condition, curtailing access to certain online services significantly raised performance, with participants completing about 35% more tasks per hour and earning about 26% more per hour. FOUR LIMITS, ALL LOAD-BEARING. First, it remains unpublished eight years on; Chen and Chan's 2026 reference list still cites it as 'Preprint, submitted December 7', and no journal version was found. Second, the population is online piece-rate crowdworkers on short tasks, which is the easiest possible case for the claim. Third, the heterogeneity ran against the prescription: the paper reports that the performance gain from the app was smaller for heavy social media users, who were also more likely to feel greater frustration and technological anxiety during the study. Fourth, and this is the autonomy problem made empirical: in the endogenous condition only about 36% of participants used the app for a meaningful amount of time, and as a group they did not on average show a significant change in performance, with a positive effect only among those who did use it. When people were free to protect their own attention, most did not, and protection only worked when it was imposed.
[NOT A PEER-REVIEWED STUDY. An SSRN working paper, still unpublished eight years on. ABSTRACT READ IN FULL AT SOURCE at the SSRN landing page; THE 40-PAGE PDF WAS NOT OPENED, so nothing beyond the abstract may be attributed to it] Marotta, V., & Acquisti, A. (2018). 'Interrupting Interruptions: A Digital Experiment on Social Media and Performance.' SSRN working paper 3283951, dated 13 August 2018, posted 7 December 2018, last revised 11 December 2018, 40 pages. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3283951. First author Veronica Marotta, then University of Minnesota Carlson School; Acquisti second, Carnegie Mellon. THE ONLY RANDOMISED STUDY WITH A REAL OUTPUT MEASURE FOUND ANYWHERE IN THIS FILE, AND IT IS A WORKING PAPER AND MUST BE CITED AS ONE. A randomised field experiment on crowd-sourcing platform workers using their own economic incentives, with performance captured across a variety of tasks, two treatments against a control: an exogenous condition where an app blocked selected online services for fixed periods, and an endogenous condition where participants chose. THE RESULT: in the exogenous condition, curtailing access to certain online services significantly raised performance, with participants completing about 35% more tasks per hour and earning about 26% more per hour. FOUR LIMITS, ALL LOAD-BEARING. First, it remains unpublished eight years on; Chen and Chan's 2026 reference list still cites it as 'Preprint, submitted December 7', and no journal version was found. Second, the population is online piece-rate crowdworkers on short tasks, which is the easiest possible case for the claim. Third, the heterogeneity ran against the prescription: the paper reports that the performance gain from the app was smaller for heavy social media users, who were also more likely to feel greater frustration and technological anxiety during the study. Fourth, and this is the autonomy problem made empirical: in the endogenous condition only about 36% of participants used the app for a meaningful amount of time, and as a group they did not on average show a significant change in performance, with a positive effect only among those who did use it. When people were free to protect their own attention, most did not, and protection only worked when it was imposed.
Written from the nOT A PEER-REVIEWED STUDY. An SSRN working paper, still unpublished eight years on. ABSTRACT READ IN FULL AT SOURCE at the SSRN landing page; THE 40-PAGE PDF WAS NOT OPENED, so nothing beyond the abstract may be attributed to it.
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SSRN working paper 3283951. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3283951