Towards a Holistic Understanding of the Drivers of Media Multitasking

Abstract

Media multitasking, defined as simultaneously engaging with multiple tasks when at least one of the tasks involves media, is a highly prevalent behaviour known to negatively impact performance across a variety of contexts. It is therefore crucial to understand what motivates individuals to engage in this behaviour. The studies presented in this thesis examined participants’ decisions to engage in media multitasking during sustained attention tasks, along with the predictors of these decisions, to provide a more nuanced understanding of the drivers of media multitasking. Chapter 1 discusses the current media multitasking literature, highlighting a need for further research investigating the variables that underly changes in this behaviour over time, as well as research investigating the combined role of individual differences and contextual factors in media multitasking. Chapters 2 and 3 explored whether variables relevant to the perceived opportunity costs of completing a task, namely boredom and motivation, are associated with changes in media multitasking over time. Chapter 2 provided evidence that rising opportunity costs, signaled by increases in boredom over time, may drive temporal increases in media multitasking. Across two studies, Chapter 3 demonstrated that increasing motivation attenuates temporal increases in media multitasking. Chapters 4 and 5 examined the joint role of individual differences and contextual factors in predicting media multitasking. Chapter 4 specifically explored the interactions between these two classes of factors, revealing that relations between in-study media multitasking and individual differences in attention-related and self-regulatory traits, as well as real-world media multitasking tendencies varied based on two key contextual variables: whether participants were completing an easy or challenging task and the order in which they completed these tasks. Chapter 5 tested the assumption that, if media multitasking arises from a combination of individual differences and contextual factors, then when context is held constant over time, patterns of media multitasking should remain consistent. Moreover, this consistency should largely be driven by individual differences. Media multitasking was assessed in the same laboratory context on two separate occasions and was found to be consistent across sessions. Additionally, several individual difference factors interacted with session when predicting media multitasking. For the most part, relations involving these factors varied in strength, but not direction across sessions. The final chapter (Chapter 6) summarizes the work presented in this thesis, contextualizes it within the current literature, and emphasizes the need for further work investigating how factors within various layers of influence interact to give rise to media multitasking. This chapter also proposes a novel framework for considering and guiding future research on these interactions.