For those who’ve been in the situation where we unlock our phone and start futzing around on our home screen, only to find ourselves looking up at the clock an hour later with a sense of shame and regret, fear not: science has your back, according to research published and presented at the human-computer interaction conference CHI.
Researchers at the University of Washington, Columbia University, and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan followed 17 U.S. Android users for seven days. They captured a screenshot every five seconds, then paired those 34,000-plus images with real-time intention surveys, daily regret ratings, and follow-up interviews. An AI model automatically labeled each screenshot and categorized them into seven activity types, including direct messaging, search, or browsing an algorithmic feed.
This data allowed researchers to map user reactions and their levels of regret for each type of phone activity.
“There are all of these products that people say they value and choose to use every day, and yet they also talk about how frustrated they feel by some of their own usage habits,” says Alexis Hiniker, an academic at the University of Washington and one of the coauthors of the paper. “They’ll talk about deleting things or trying to quit—we were trying to dig into what’s going on there.”
The findings suggested we’re a pretty regretful bunch. Inside social apps, viewing algorithm-recommended posts and reading comment threads topped the regret rankings, even beating subscription-feed browsing. In contrast, direct communication and active search were the activities users regretted the least.
Time played a role too. Longer sessions, and those that drifted from initial intentions (often from “send a message” to “just scrolling”), pushed regret scores higher, though still lower than sessions that began as pure browsing.
“Habit-driven social media checking was pretty regrettable for a lot of people,” says Hiniker. “They didn’t necessarily mind if they were using social media to do something totally unproductive, just to help them relax or just enjoy themselves. But they felt a lot better when that was an intentional choice and they chose to go there for some entertainment, as opposed to not really thinking about what they’re doing and just picking up their phone out of habit.”
The findings reflect poorly on big tech companies, which have made fortunes by shifting people from purposeful engagement with one another to mindless scrolling, pushing users toward algorithmically dictated feeds—the type most disliked by users.
But Hiniker believes there’s hope for platforms that take a different path. “We desperately need social platforms that really are trying to support people in engaging with others, rather than extracting as much of their attention as possible and directing them to this recommended and sponsored content that they never chose to follow,” she says.
