Dr. Lea-Christin Wickord

In psychology, we don't do research.

We do a me-search.

Oh, yes.

Me-search.

As you can imagine, I have a problem with my phone on my own.

So I realized, especially during COVID, that this is a research topic that could really help me with my usage pattern, using my phone, using social media in a healthy and beneficial way, and not only doom scroll the whole day.

One of the students talked about, OK, but have a look at our old phones, like the first phones we ever had.

It was like...

In Europe, we had these old Nokia phones.

It was a black and white phone.

We used it to text somebody.

We used it to call somebody, maybe play a game.

But that's it.

And then we discussed, OK, like, how can we arrange that nowadays?

Can we make our phones crappier like they used to be?

Not to make it more crappy, but to make it less attractive.

And we realized all those saturated colors, your blinking red push or notification button, all of those colors keep you distracted and keep you on your phone.

We asked our participants, OK, how do you feel?

How are you?

And what they did say was...