Multitaskers Bad at Multitasking

Whoa!! That is surprising! That's almost as mysterious and unexplainable as when Hillary Clinton got slightly cranky 'cause that one guy in the audience asked her what her husband thought about something during her Q&A. What was that all about?

But this is even more shocking. You mean that that girl I saw that one time who was walking her dog and smoking and holding a cup of coffee and talking on the phone all at the same time didn't necessarily have her act together?

I say: further studies are needed!

Study: Multitaskers Bad at Multitasking

Stanford Study Shows that People Who Do More Are More Easily Distracted

(AP News) That is the surprising conclusion of researchers at Stanford University, who found multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking. "The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked," Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford's communications department, said in a telephone interview. ..

In a society that seems to encourage more and more multitasking, the findings have social implications, Nass observed. Multitasking is already blamed for car crashes as several states restrict the use of cell phones while driving. Lawyers or advertisers can try to use irrelevant information to distract and refocus people to influence their decisions.

In the study, the researchers first had to figure out who are the heavy and light multitaskers...Then they tested the abilities of students in the various groups. For example, ability to ignore irrelevant information was tested by showing them a group of red and blue rectangles, blanking them out, and then showing them again and asking if any of the red ones had moved. The test required ignoring the blue rectangles.

The researchers thought people who do a lot of multitasking would be better at it. "But they're not. They're worse. They're much worse," said Nass. The high media multitaskers couldn't ignore the blue rectangles. "They couldn't ignore stuff that doesn't matter. They love stuff that doesn't matter," he said.

Perhaps the multitaskers can take in the information and organize it better? Nope. "They are worse at that, too," Nass said. "So then we thought, OK, maybe they have bigger memories. They don't. They were equal" with the low multitaskers, he added...

"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," lead author Eyal Ophir said. "The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."