Study: Multitasking hinders youth social skills

[seabeyond]

Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses.

The study only included girls who responded to a survey in Discovery Girls magazine, but results should apply to boys, too, Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor of communications who worked on the study, said in a phone interview. Boys' emotional development is more difficult to analyze because male social development varies widely and over a longer time period, he said. "No one had ever looked at this, which really shocked us," Nass said. "Kids have to learn about emotion, and the way they do that, really, is by paying attention to other people. They have to really look them in the eye."

The antidote for this hyper-digital phenomenon is for children to spend plenty of time interacting face-to-face with people, the study found. Tweens in the study who regularly talked in person with friends and family were less likely to display social problems, according to the findings in the publication Developmental Psychology.

*

A few years ago, Nass worked on a study about how multitasking affects adults. He found that heavy multitaskers experience cognitive issues, such as difficulty focusing and remembering things. They were actually worse at juggling various activities, a skill crucial to many people's work lives, than those who spent less time multitasking, Nass said.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/25/tech/social-media/multitasking-kids/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

[hobbit709]

1. If you spend all your time texting, you're monotasking.

And pretty much oblivious to the rest of the world. which can result in poor social skills and also personal danger.

[LeftishBrit]

2. There is a problem here of cause and effect

Youngsters may choose to spend their time multitasking between different technologies because they have few real-life friends, or because they don't find social communication easy. Before current technologies, such youngsters might have spent much of their time watching television or pursuing a solitary hobby.

No doubt there's a vicious circle, where people with poor social skills avoid face-to-face social interactions, or are excluded from them, and thus are further hindered in developing their social skills. But a study of this nature cannot really tell us what comes first. Moreover, studies that rely on response to surveys can be very unrepresentative, especially perhaps in the case of children.

I am not suggesting that it is at all a good idea for children to spend all their waking out-of-school hours online; and there is indeed evidence that this can become an addiction with many of the characteristics of other addictions. But I think that some of the claims made about current technologies being peculiarly bad in comparison with the activities of previous generations are based on rather poor evidence.

My own hypothesis is that the big problem nowadays is that people (a) live far further than in the past from friends and family; and (b) are more physically restricted in their ability to mix easily with others, because of distances, traffic, and in the case of children, parental perceptions of 'stranger danger'; and that these are the primary causes of increased difficulties in social interaction. Use of technology is a partial, rather inadequate compensation for this reduction in everyday social contact, rather than the *cause* of it. But of course this theory would also need testing!

[HuckleB]

3. Kick.