Do Rising Opportunity Costs Lead to Increases in Media Multitasking Over Time?

Evidence suggests that one’s likelihood of media multitasking increases with time-on-task, which can negatively impact performance. The opportunity costs account of sustained attention might explain this finding. This account states that rising feelings of boredom and effort signal increasing opportunity costs, motivating us to direct our attention elsewhere and causing progressive decreases in performance. We examined whether patterns of media multitasking, boredom, effort and performance during a sustained attention task supported the notion that rising opportunity costs drive temporal increases in media multitasking. We further tested this account by affording one group of participants the option to respond to increasing opportunity costs by watching a video (media multitasking) while completing the task. Another group received no such option. Temporal patterns of media multitasking, boredom, effort and performance partially supported the opportunity costs view. Surprisingly, many also multitasked with activities outside the experimental context. Exploratory analyses revealed that patterns of boredom, effort and performance among these individuals and those who did not multitask supported the opportunity costs view. Our findings suggest that many media multitask in response to rising opportunity costs signaled by changes in feelings of boredom and effort – a relation that may be particularly problematic for online studies.