China’s AI and tech breakthroughs are built on decades of work. Here’s what other nations can learn

By Frederik von Briel, The University of Queensland

Image: Zhe ZHANG - Unsplash

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a race for technological and ideological supremacy.

The Cold War was still in its early years and each side was intently focused on the other’s scientific and military progress. The US believed it was firmly in front.

So the Americans were caught almost completely off guard in October 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik-1, the world’s first ever artificial satellite, into orbit.

Today, the US is locked in competition with a different superpower: China. In recent years, China has given the world some surprise breakthroughs of its own – from advanced hypersonic missiles to cutting-edge computer chips and powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The question is, how did China get there – and what can other countries like Australia learn from it?

Decades in the making

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the US sought to better understand Chinese innovation by examining about 14 million Chinese patent publications from between 1985 and 2023.

Its findings suggest these modern “Sputnik moments” were not isolated strokes of luck, but were instead decades in the making.

The study noted that Chinese patent activity in critical technology areas (as defined by the US Department of Defense) has been growing.

The number of new patents has steadily increased from fewer than 10,000 annually in the early 2000s to more than 400,000 in 2022.

A related report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suggests China now leads globally in 69 of 74 critical and emerging technology domains.

Quality and quantity

When looking more closely at the recent NBER study, a few interesting insights emerge.

First, it reveals China hasn’t just been filing an increasing number of low-quality patent applications. On a measure that tracks whether novel ideas influence later inventions, Chinese patents steadily gained ground relative to US patents.

Second, it hasn’t just been a few “national champion” organisations driving China’s patenting activity. Quite the opposite.

The ten largest owners of critical-technology patents only held 4% of all Chinese patents in 2022. That’s markedly different to the US, where the ten largest owners held 20% of all patents.

And there are big differences on a third point, too – the role of universities. While the private sector accounts for 58% of China’s critical-technology patents, 27% of patents originate from Chinese universities.

That’s in stark contrast to the US, where universities account for only 3% of critical-technology patents.

The role of public research

History suggests that this pattern may not be unique to China. In her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State, US-Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato challenges the myth that individual entrepreneurs and firms develop major breakthroughs on their own.

She argues many technological breakthroughs in the US depended on the long-term accumulation of inventions and capabilities across various actors. And importantly, that publicly funded research often also played a major role.

For example, drawing on the iPhone as a breakthrough product, Mazzucato shows that many of the technologies that made the iPhone possible – from touchscreens to GPS and even its voice assistant Siri – had been developed across different, often publicly funded, research institutions before the iPhone was even conceived.

How does Australia compare?

Australia has had a strong track record of invention and scientific discovery in the past. But we’re increasingly struggling to keep pace with the world’s technological leaders.

Australia does still punch above its economic weight in some specific critical technology areas.

For instance, since 2000, Australia accounts for almost 9% of patents in critical-metals refinement for batteries. Australia also ranks 12th globally in the number of quantum-computing patents.

And Australia has had some big innovation success stories in the past. A form of solar cell developed at UNSW in the 1980s now powers more than 90% of new solar panels around the world.

The wireless local area network (WLAN) technology that made modern wifi fast and reliable was also developed here, by the publicly funded CSIRO.

A troubling trajectory

However, Australia’s current trajectory in technology development is somewhat concerning.

Relative to the size of its economy, Australia’s spending on research and development has fallen from 2.24% of gross domestic product in 2008–09 to 1.69% in 2023–24.

Simply increasing spending on research and development may not be enough. New inventions and capabilities also need businesses with the people, expertise and resources to absorb them and develop them further.

Here, Australia appears comparatively weak. Australian businesses employ only around 3 researchers per 1,000 employees, compared with an OECD average of 6.5.

This suggests Australia might have less capacity to turn technological breakthroughs into commercially viable products and services compared with the rest of the world.

Lessons for other countries

This doesn’t mean Australia or other middle powers need to invent and build every critical technology domestically to benefit.

Wireless LAN technology generated around A$430 million in licensing revenue. It is also embedded in more than 15 billion devices globally. This is despite Australia never becoming a dominant producer of wifi hardware.

One key takeaway from China’s innovation success is that by the time a technological breakthrough becomes visible globally, the domestic capabilities behind it may have been accumulating for decades.

Trying to develop them only when they suddenly become critical may be too late.

Frederik von Briel, Associate Professor in Strategy and Entrepreneurship, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.

Read next: Women and racialized CEOs may outperform their peers because they face tougher barriers to the top

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Study Examines How Personality Traits Relate to Phubbing Behavior

By Inderscience

Image: Julie Ricard - Unsplash

Personality traits may help predict whether a person will ignore others while using their smartphones, according to a study of healthcare workers in the International Journal of Business Innovation and Research.

The study involved 177 co-workers and looked at how prevalent 'phubbing' is. Phubbing is a portmanteau of the words 'phone' and 'snub' and is the practice of ignoring someone in preference to using one's phone despite being in a situation in which face-to-face conversation and interaction would be the norm. The study might help social scientists and others understand better the notion of smartphone addiction.

The research assessed participants using the so-called Big Five personality traits - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Personality and phone addiction were self-reported, while co-workers provided evidence of phubbing by others. The team found that people scoring higher in openness, extraversion and neuroticism were more likely to display phubbing behaviour. Conscientiousness, a tendency towards responsibility, self-discipline, and consideration of one's obligations, was associated with less phubbing. There was no significant relationship between phubbing and agreeableness, oddly enough.

If a condition we might call mobile phone addiction exists, then it might be described as an inability to refrain from phone use despite the potential for offline human interaction. To be a true addiction, there has to be associated harm, and the researchers suggest that psychological harm may well occur, either to the phubber or the phubbed. This phenomenon partly explains the relationships between personality and phubbing, the team reports. That said, the researchers emphasise that understanding individual differences behind problematic smartphone use could help organisations address antisocial phone behaviour without treating smartphone use itself as inherently harmful.

Khan, M.N., Shahzad, K. and Shafi, M.Q. (2026) 'This or that, which coworker phubb more; association between personality traits and phubbing behaviour through mobile phone addiction', Int. J. Business Innovation and Research, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp.466–487.
DOI: 10.1504/IJBIR.2026.155659.

Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.

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• Can baby monitors protect children without data security risks?

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Can baby monitors protect children without data security risks?

Erika Sanchez-Velazquez, Anglia Ruskin University

Image: Jakub Żerdzicki - Unsplash

For parents, keeping children safe is not only instinctive but a priority. We babyproof the house, we check the car seat twice, we wake up in the middle of the night at the smallest sound.

As technology has evolved, it also offered a promise to help parents watch over our kids even when we are not in the same room as them.

Throughout the different stages of kids’ lives, parents now rely on different technology to help keep kids safe. This tech now includes trackers, location-sharing apps and parental control apps. But at the earliest stages of our kids’ lives, we rely on baby monitors.

Monitors allow parents to keep an eye on babies without having to be in the same room. The first model was the Zenith Radio Nurse, released on sale in 1938.

More recent products have many advanced features, including contactless breathing and vital signs monitoring, AI-powered sleep analytics, cry and sound analysis, and environmental monitoring. However, these new levels of functionality depend on ever more sensors, more cloud processing, and more data being collected on children.

Parents now have to weigh up the privacy of the data these devices collect, as well as the security risks they bring into the home. In May 2026, a security researcher in France named Sammy Azdoufal decided to probe some of the weaknesses behind budget smart cameras.

Azdoufal discovered that he could pull up other people’s live and recorded footage without needing to guess a password or do anything that really counts as “hacking”. His findings, reported by CyberNews, traced back to a shared system used behind the scenes by more than 300 different camera brands sold on retailers such as Amazon.

He estimated that more than one million devices were affected, many of them baby monitors in bedrooms.

Shared vulnerabilities

What most parents don’t realise is that the brand on the box is rarely the company that built the camera or wrote its software. Many monitors, even from well known sellers, come out of a small number of factories. They get sold under dozens of different names, so one weakness underneath can affect them all.

The cybersecurity operations company Rapid7 published some of the first well known research into these cameras years ago, and a 2026 academic study found the same pattern repeating in newer devices and their apps.

Regulators have started responding. Updated in 2022, new cybersecurity rules under the EU’s Radio Equipment Directive have applied to any internet-connected wireless device sold in the EU. These new rules require manufacturers to protect users’ data, stop devices being hijacked and guard against fraud.

Some manufacturers are taking steps to improve security. For example, the baby monitor manufacturer Owlet announced in late 2025 that its newest model was the first baby monitor awarded the SGS Cybersecurity mark. This mark requires manufacturers to include encryption, a unique passwords and a channel for researchers to report flaws. The certification gives parents something concrete to look for.

Security is only half of it. Even a monitor that’s never hacked can still raise data privacy issues. Many collect more than video. They gather information on feeding times, as well as sleep and growth data, and share it with third parties for analytics or advertising under vague “partner” clauses.

Sleep pattern data from a baby monitor isn’t classed as medical information under GDPR, so companies can use it for analytics or advertising unless parents opt out. This data often isn’t as anonymous as companies claim once combined with other details.

Cry detection and sleep analysis add to this, since both usually mean sending audio and video to the cloud, where it may also help train a company’s algorithms.

Because these features depend on cloud processing rather than staying on the device, the data often leaves the home network, increasing both privacy and security exposure.

Privacy and long-term protection

The UK has rules covering both sides of this. The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act, in force since 2024, bans default passwords and forces manufacturers to say how long they’ll support a device.

On the data side, the UK goes further than most countries through the Information Commissioner’s Office Children’s Code, which applies to any connected device likely to be used by children.

The code requires the highest privacy settings by default, and gives parents a genuine right to see, or delete, what’s been collected, backed by fines of up to 4% of global turnover. Most parents just don’t know to ask.

None of this means every camera monitor is dangerous, or that the reassurance they offer isn’t real. But the trade-off keeps showing up in the research. Internet-connected monitors carry more risk than simple closed ones that talk directly between two devices in your home.

Treat the password like a banking one, keep the app updated, and check how long the manufacturer will support it. The bigger issue isn’t something one password can fix. The underlying issues in the industry mean new vulnerabilities will keep appearing, so the safest path is staying informed and choosing devices with transparent security and support policies.

Erika Sanchez-Velazquez, Deputy Head of School, Computing and Information Science, Anglia Ruskin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fact-checked by Irfan Ahmad.

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Can you teach yourself to detect AI writing? Maybe

By Celeste Rodriguez Louro, The University of Western Australia

Image: Jess Morgan - Unsplash

AI is quietly reshaping writing. It’s not just that prose is changing — the very structure of written language is genuinely changing too.

It’s not just a new technology.

It’s not a fad.

It’s an undeniable revolution.

Did this article’s introduction seem AI generated? What made you feel that way?

The truth is, it was not AI generated; I wrote it to emulate synthetic prose, the kind you get when a large language model (LLM) organises words into text.

That kind of prose suddenly seems to be everywhere: on low-quality websites built to accumulate advertising clicks, in social media captions chasing engagement, and even book manuscripts. Crime novelist Jerry Falade recently lost a book deal worth more than $2 million after his own literary agents said they could no longer faithfully determine how his manuscript had come together. Hachette pulled the horror novel Shy Girl in March this year under similar suspicion.

Before generative AI, we could generally assume that written text had been composed by a human. This is no longer the case. So how can we spot AI-written text?

There is no single giveaway. Instead, there are patterns: particular words, sentence structure and expressive habits that appear repeatedly in AI-generated prose. LLMs are also updated rapidly and efficiently so what gives away synthetic text today may no longer do a few months from now.

Quiet, quietly and genuinely

The word quietly is a significant giveaway. Search interest in the word has climbed steadily on Google Trends since December 2021, though this measures searches rather than appearances in writing, so it is suggestive rather than proof.

What did change over that period is how many people began writing with the help of LLMs, and these models do seem to reach for quiet and quietly more than the average human writer.

Genuinely is a similar story, and a more anecdotal one. I notice it overused in AI output, Claude included, more than I would expect from a person writing casually. No one has run a rigorous study on that specific word yet.

The documented version of this pattern is vocabulary that has spiked in scientific writing since 2022: delve, meticulous, underscore, boast and intricate all appear far more often in scanned PubMed abstracts than before, in a pattern researchers have tied directly to ChatGPT-style phrasing.

None of these words is proof on its own. But when words like quietly, genuinely, delve and meticulous appear alongside the same polished sentence framing, it starts sounding like a shared house style among LLMs, rather than an individual voice.

A house style of its own

The “not X, but Y” construction is another part of that house style, alongside a fondness for the rule of three.

It also favours taking a modest claim and then immediately escalating it. For example: “This article presents a useful perspective on language. It fundamentally changes how we think about what it means to write”. Human writers have always used it, but generative AI produces the pattern with remarkable consistency.

Then there’s the em dash, the earliest and most mocked AI tell. It never held up particularly well. One writer ran the same prompt through six chatbots and got eight em dashes from ChatGPT in 573 words, but none from Gemini or Meta AI.

This reaffirms the lesson that, while individual clues are unreliable, their accumulation matters.

Lengthy text

Another clue to generative AI use is text length.

A reporter for The Atlantic describes how, after a driver crashed into her in Johannesburg, his frantic and incoherent behaviour at the scene gave way to a lengthy text written in polished prose only half an hour later. When she later contacted a mechanic whose texts had previously been filled with shorthand, his reply came back in the same distinctive AI voice.

Human language is shaped by the pressures of effort and time. Generative AI removes much of that cost. Realistically, a person might text: “Sorry, running late. Traffic is awful. Be there in 20”.

AI can swiftly turn that into a paragraph explaining the unexpected traffic congestion, expressing sincere regret and thanking the recipient for their patience. Nothing in that longer version is necessarily wrong. It’s simply doing far more linguistic work than the situation generally requires when time is of the essence.

The dangers of AI detection

Some people believe AI detection software can identify AI-generated text. However, these systems are far from perfect and can worsen existing biases.

A 2023 Stanford study found that seven popular AI detectors falsely identified an average of 61% of essays written by non-native English speakers as AI generated, with one tool flagging 97% of them.

AI detection has evolved since then, and more recent research presents a more complicated picture: current detectors can perform better in some settings, yet remain vulnerable to evasion and still produce false positives.

At the same time, the question is shifting beyond detection altogether: the European Union is now demanding that all AI-generated content is labelled or watermarked.

Are LLMs changing the way we write?

A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, analysing more than 880,000 Reddit posts, news articles and academic pieces, found that the spread of LLMs was associated with less variation in writing style.

Knowing who wrote something matters because language lands differently depending on who it comes from. Is the person trustworthy? Knowledgeable? Funny? Younger? Are they real?

The other reason is dexterity. Humans are excellent at problem solving and creativity, and those abilities appear in the peculiarities of individual language: an unexpected word, a unique comparison, a sentence structure that may reappear across writers but not en masse, as is the case with synthetic text.

If the prose across our media begins to sound as though it has been cut from the same automatic, uncreative, underwhelming and repetitive mould, we lose individuality, nuance, and our trust in the authenticity of the written text and its writer.

Celeste Rodriguez Louro, Associate Professor and Director of Language Lab, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fact-checked by Irfan Ahmad.

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by External Contributor via Digital Information World

The real reasons you procrastinate – and how to stop, according to science

Itamar Shatz, University of Cambridge

Image: Kevin Ku - Unsplash

Faced with a task or project, do you repeatedly tell yourself that you’ll do it “tomorrow”, “soon”, or “after watching just a few more videos”?

If so, as someone who has studied the science of procrastination for years, I can reassure you that you are not alone. Around 20% of adults procrastinate regularly.

Those of us who do this – myself included – may also experience a range of issues and outcomes that research shows are linked to procrastination, including worse exam grades, lower income, lack of sleep, and poor mental and physical health.

Procrastination can be painful and frustratingly difficult to deal with. A key reason is that a lot of what we hear about this common behaviour is wrong.

Perhaps the biggest misconception is that it comes from not caring enough, or from being lazy. By this false reading, people who procrastinate just need to “try harder”. Such misperceptions can lead to feelings of guilt and shame.

In reality, procrastinators usually intend to work every bit as hard as their peers – if not harder. But a defining feature of procrastination is the gap between intentions and actions. Not only does “just trying harder” not work, it often backfires by sidetracking us from solutions that do.

What really causes procrastination?

Essentially, our brains are hardwired to prioritise what will make us feel better right now, over what will make us feel better in the long term and overall.

So, when we worry that doing something might be painful or difficult, our brain nudges us to put it off as a defence mechanism, to postpone the pain we expect it to bring.

This can happen when we feel that studying will be frustrating, or an upcoming exam will be stressful. Or, we may be worried that our writing or presentation won’t be perfect.

Perfectionism can be especially problematic when we worry our work will be criticised by others – whether or not that’s likely to happen in reality.

Our brains can be further confused when we’re faced with tempting alternatives that we know will be immediately gratifying, such as social media feeds that are hyperoptimised to capture our attention for as long as possible.

Additional issues can make it even harder for us to course-correct our brains when procrastinating about a deadline. A key one is being tired – or worse, burned out – from working too hard for too long on tasks that are draining.

This can then end up in a vicious cycle. We are too exhausted to do what we need to, so we procrastinate on it, which stresses us out and drains us further, tightening procrastination’s grip.

An explanation of procrastination. Video: TED-Ed.

Studies have also linked procrastination with ADHD, a neurodevelopmental disorder that can make it harder for people to stick to one particular task.

Fortunately, just as misunderstanding procrastination can set us on the wrong path for overcoming it, understanding the real reasons can help us figure out how to stop.

How to stop procrastinating

There are lots of reasons for procrastinating, each of which may call for a different solution. Start by asking yourself why you are procrastinating this time? (It may not always be for the same reason.)

Are you exhausted? Are you getting distracted by your phone? Are you afraid you’ll make mistakes? Or is it some other issue, or combination of issues, that’s getting in your way of achieving the goal or task you’ve been set, or set yourself?

If you’re unsure, try comparing cases where you took action with ones where you put it off endlessly. What was the difference?

Alternatively, pretend that a friend is in a similar situation and reflect on their problem instead. Adding this psychological distance could help you see things more clearly.

Next, try asking what one change you can make right now that will make you more likely to complete the task. Some are easier than others, admittedly.

If you’re getting distracted by your phone, for example, turn it off before you start the task. If you’re working in a library or cafe, put away your phone inside your bag when you sit down.

If fear of a particular outcome is the problem, that’s harder. But try asking yourself: how likely is it, really, that whatever you’re most afraid of will actually happen? Often it’s a lot less likely, or less scary, than you think.

Another strategy is to work through this worst-case scenario, considering how you could lessen the negative impact if it does happen.

I discuss other causes of procrastination, and more solutions to them, in my new book, Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop. Briefly, these include suggestions such as:

• Unpack unclear tasks into manageable micro-steps, to make your path forward feel clear and attainable.

• Build your self-belief by identifying and achieving consistent wins, to silence the inner pessimist that’s holding you back.

• Structure your schedule according to your productivity rhythms, to work with your natural preferences, not against them.

Above all, overcoming procrastination is never simply about “trying harder”. Rather, it’s about figuring out the real reasons you tend to put things off – and then addressing them using the techniques that are right for you.

Itamar Shatz, Affiliated Lecturer, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Edited by Irfan Ahmad.

Read next: Digital amnesia: Taking screenshots makes you more likely to forget information

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Digital amnesia: Taking screenshots makes you more likely to forget information

By Jennifer Micale, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Binghamton University psychology research explores the mechanism behind the digital capture effect.

Image: DIW, CC BY

Snapping a photo or a screenshot to remember something? According to recent cognitive research from Binghamton University’s Psychology Department, the practice may make you more likely to forget.

If you take photographs or screenshots during an experience, consistent evidence has shown that your memory of the information or event is degraded, explained Sophia Fabrizio ’22, MA ’24, a Binghamton University doctoral candidate in psychology and the lead author of “Digital amnesia: The aftermath of a screenshot.” Co-authored with Rebecca Lurie, MA’19, PhD ’23, and Psychology Professor Deanne Westerman, the article was recently published in the journal Memory & Cognition.

Known as the photo-taking impairment effect, the phenomenon occurs for material that the picture-taker doesn’t review afterward. According to other research, using photographs to retrieve and review memories may benefit long-term retention, Fabrizio said. However, many of us take more photos and screenshots than we can use — around 20 photos a day, with around 2,000 photos stored on the average smartphone, according to estimates.

“Unless you are actively reviewing those images as cues for elaborative memory retrieval, it is unlikely to benefit you,” she said.

Another study suggests that our memory isn’t impaired when photographs are captured automatically, using a wearable clip camera; this indicates that there’s something about the act of taking a photo or capturing a screenshot that impairs memory, rather than the knowledge that something is being saved, Fabrizio said.

Binghamton researchers conducted a series of seven experiments to explore the digital capture effect. Participants captured images of artwork and were tested on their memory; some experiments also used math problems to test whether participants’ cognitive resources were reallocated. None showed clear benefits of taking screenshots when compared to the degree of memory impairment for the captured images.

Potential mechanisms

One possible mechanism behind digital amnesia is divided attention: The act of capturing an experience takes away cognitive resources that would otherwise be dedicated to encoding the information in memory. While divided attention plays a role, it’s unlikely to be the main source of memory impairment; people show a comparable deficit when extra time is provided to view an art piece before or after taking a photograph, and when the capture task is made less difficult, which should minimize its effects.

Another possibility is cognitive offloading, in which we do not allocate cognitive resources to remember information if it’s stored externally. Offloading allows us to redirect those conserved cognitive resources toward aspects of an experience that weren’t captured or toward unrelated tasks.

Individuals should only employ the strategy if the information is reliably saved and accessible. However, research has shown that memory remained impaired even when the picture-takers knew their images would be immediately deleted. With screenshots in particular, people were less likely to remember whether they captured an image or viewed a piece of art, and had worse memory for the art itself when it was captured.

A third hypothesis is attentional disengagement, in which the act of taking a photograph or screenshot causes us to unconsciously distance ourselves from the experience.

“This extends beyond captured information to the broader context of an event,” Fabrizio explained. “The poorer ‘source’ memory for whether the art pieces were screenshotted or viewed — and in the original museum study on this effect, worse memory for the location of photographed art pieces in the exhibit — provides some preliminary support for this account.”

This unconscious detachment may be sparked by a longstanding association between capturing images and the ability to offload information. Binghamton researchers and others continue to test predictions related to the attentional disengagement account.

A better option for remembering information: break out a pen and paper. Writing something down — for example, taking notes during a lecture — forces us to process and organize the information into manageable bullet points, and draw connections. Known as “desirable difficulty,” the mental effort in this kind of processing may make us more likely to remember the information.

However, it’s not foolproof; sometimes, writing something down can lead to cognitive offloading — such as forgetting a friend’s birthday after we add it to our calendar and set reminders. Like the phone numbers in your contact list, you may no longer be able to remember the specific information.

Screenshotting can potentially supplement your memory if you take only a few intentional shots and review them later — similar to how a calendar reminder can support your memory of an upcoming event. But taking frequent screenshots and letting them accumulate unreviewed has the opposite effect, research shows.

“Taken together, the results of the current study suggest that we are likely harming our memory for information and experiences with the press of a button, and that this impairment may even extend beyond what is captured,” Fabrizio said.

Edited by Irfan Ahmad.

Read next: Study Links Workplace Doomscrolling to Rumination and Lower Work Engagement
by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Study Links Workplace Doomscrolling to Rumination and Lower Work Engagement

By Lesley Henton, Texas A&M University

The effects of consuming negative news during the workday can linger in employees' minds long after they stop scrolling.

Image: Vitaly Gariev - Unsplash

Whether on lunch break or on the clock, many employees scroll through the news and social media during the workday. Researchers found that employees who “doomscroll” at work suffer hidden costs that extend beyond lost productivity.

Dr. Ian Hughes, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University, led the study published in Computers in Human Behavior, finding that employees who obsessively consume negative news during the workday are more likely to get stuck thinking about what they just read. As those thoughts linger, engagement with work tends to suffer.

“Doomscrolling, or the act of obsessively scrolling through social media with a focus on negative or otherwise distressing information, is something that is growing more and more common among all age groups, but particularly folks between the ages of 18 and 35 across the world,” said Hughes, whose research focuses on the intersection of organizational behavior and occupational health psychology.

Across two studies involving workers in the United States and United Kingdom, Hughes and his colleagues found a consistent pattern: employees who doomscroll at work are more likely to ruminate on the negative information they encounter, and that rumination contributes to lower work engagement. The relationship was especially strong among people with higher levels of neuroticism, a personality trait associated with anxiety and worry.

While doomscrolling is often dismissed as a productivity issue, the researchers found the consequences extend beyond the time spent looking at a screen.

“What we find is that workers who doomscroll on the clock are less engaged, in part because their mind is preoccupied, sort of replaying the images and messages that they encountered during their doomscrolling sessions,” Hughes said.

Doomscrolling is a habit that’s hard to break

Hughes said doomscrolling can be a surprisingly difficult habit to shake as people often turn to social media not because they enjoy feeling distressed, but because they are trying to make sense of uncertainty.

“It’s something that people do oftentimes as a way of soothing their anxiety,” he said. “During very uncertain, rapidly unfolding social situations, whether it’s a pandemic or a war or some sort of armed conflict, a public safety threat, something like that, we see people turn to social media and really refresh their feeds constantly to stay informed and up to date.”

In that sense, doomscrolling is not simply mindless scrolling, it’s an attempt to stay informed during moments that feel consequential or threatening. The problem, Hughes said, is that this information-seeking behavior repeatedly exposes people to distressing content that can be difficult to stop thinking about.

“Doomscrolling is a sort of double-edged sword in that it is, at its core, an information-seeking behavior,” he said. “But it’s an information-seeking behavior that exposes people repeatedly to distressing or otherwise negative information.”

Modern workplaces may be especially vulnerable because employees carry the entire news cycle with them throughout the day. Smartphones, laptops and social media feeds make it easy to check the latest developments between tasks, meetings or emails.

“For a lot of people, it’s very hard to look away from those things,” Hughes said. “The world of work represents a unique area where people don’t leave their cellphones at home.”

Setting boundaries

Despite the findings, Hughes doesn’t believe organizations should respond with strict bans on phones or social media.

“The reality is, those policies often just make people upset and they don’t really work,” he said.

Instead, he recommends setting boundaries around when and where doomscrolling happens.

“If you’re going to doomscroll, try to contain that behavior to one physical location in your life,” he said. “Rather than doing it at work, maybe it’s at home in a comfy chair, maybe at a lounge or a coffee shop or a bar, someplace where you allow yourself to doomscroll and take in some of this negative information.”

That advice is unlikely to become less relevant anytime soon. Hughes says doomscrolling is a behavior that is here to stay because access to social media continues to expand and algorithms continually feed users a stream of attention-grabbing content.

“It is important to stay informed,” he said. “What is also important, though, is that you don’t let that information-seeking occupy every moment of your life.”

More information: Working, scrolling, and worrying: Doomscrolling at work and its implications for work engagement, Computers in Human Behavior, (2023). DOI 10.1016/j.chb.2023.108130 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563223004818.

Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.

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