Time Is Money: The Decision Making of Smartphone High Users in Gain and Loss Intertemporal Choice.

Zixuan Tang,An Yan,Chen Qu,Huijun Zhang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00363

Abstract

Nowadays the smartphone plays an important role in our lives. While it brings us convenience and efficiency, its overuse can cause problems. Although a great number of studies have demonstrated that people affected by substance abuse, pathological gambling, and internet addiction disorder have lower self-control than average, scarcely any study has investigated the decision making of smartphone high users by using a behavioral paradigm. The present study employed an intertemporal task, the Smartphone Addiction Inventory (SPAI) and the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale 11th version (BIS-11) to explore the decision control of smartphone high users in a sample of 125 college students. Participants were divided into three groups according to their SPAI scores. The upper third (69 or higher), middle third (from 61 to 68) and lower third (60 or lower) of scores were defined as high smartphone users, medium users and low users, respectively. We compared the percentage of small immediate reward/penalty choices in different conditions between the three groups. Relative to the low users group, high users and medium users were more inclined to request an immediate monetary reward. Moreover, for the two dimensions of time and money in intertemporal choice, high users and medium users showed a bias in intertemporal choice task among most of the time points and value magnitude compared to low users. These findings demonstrated that smartphone overuse was associated with problematic decision-making, a pattern similar to that seen in persons affected by a variety of addictions.

Highlights

With the development and the popularization of mobile internet, most of us have our own mobile phone and can access the internet anytime and anywhere
The present study explored the decision making of smartphone high users in intertemporal choices concerning gain and loss
Are our major findings: (a) high smartphone users and medium users were more impulsive than low users; (b) With an intertemporal task, comparing to low users, it was validated that high smartphone users and medium users have a higher tendency to make irrational decisions, no significant differences between high smartphone users and medium users in all conditions of the intertemporal task; (c) the discounting rate in the gain condition was much lower than in the loss condition for all the three groups; (d) the results supported our hypotheses and are important because we separate time and money, and showed that high smartphone users and medium users showed a bias in intertemporal choice task among most of the time points and value magnitude compared to low users

Summary

Introduction

With the development and the popularization of mobile internet, most of us have our own mobile phone and can access the internet anytime and anywhere. Data from 2014 showed that mobile internet users accounted for 80% of internet users in China (Meeker, 2014). While the smartphone brings us convenience and efficiency, it can cause problems through overuse. Some researchers have even conceptualized severe overuse as a form of addiction. Shaffer (1996) defined an addiction behavior as one that: (1) brings pleasure and relieves pain and stress; (2) individuals cannot control even if it causes some harmful consequences. Many smartphone high users have reached these criteria, but smartphone overuse was not included in DSM-5

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion