Minds Wandered 46.9% of the Time in a 2,250-Person Phone Study: A One-Evening Test
Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010): a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. What the iPhone study measured, which activities rated happiest, and a one-evening test.
In this article8 sections
Picture a phone that goes off at moments you cannot predict and asks three things: how do you feel right now, what are you doing, and are you thinking about anything other than that? Nobody has to remember last Tuesday. The answers pile up in a database, thousands of them, and the pattern that emerges is about where attention sits at the moment someone interrupts it. That is the design of Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert’s 2010 Science paper, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” and it suggests a way to think about excitement that has little to do with what is on the calendar.
Below: what the paper measured, what it does not show, and a one-evening test you can run. I have not run the test and make no claim that it works. It is a proposal, written the way I would plan it for myself.
What did the iPhone study measure?
Killingsworth and Gilbert (Science, volume 330, issue 6006, page 932, 12 November 2010) built a web application for the iPhone that contacted volunteers at random moments in their waking hours. Each ping asked a happiness question (“How are you feeling right now?”) answered on a slider from 0 to 100, an activity question with a choice of 22 activities adapted from the Day Reconstruction Method, and a mind-wandering question with four answers: no, or yes with something pleasant, neutral or unpleasant.
The analysis covered 2,250 adults, 58.8% male, 73.9% living in the United States, with a mean age of 34. They had signed up at a project website and contributed an average of 7.9 reports each. The wider database held nearly a quarter of a million samples from about 5,000 people in 83 countries.
How often do minds wander?
Mind wandering occurred in 46.9% of samples, and in at least 30% of the samples taken during every activity except making love. The authors note that this is considerably higher than the rate usually seen in laboratory experiments. The activity itself had only a modest influence on whether a mind wandered. The nature of activities explained 3.5% of the between-person variance in wandering, according to the supporting online material.
That second finding is the awkward one for anyone planning a better evening. Doing something nicer did not, by itself, produce an attentive mind.
What did wandering do to happiness?
People were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not (slope b = -8.79, P < 0.001), and this held during all activities. Minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to neutral topics (31%) or unpleasant topics (26.5%). Yet pleasant wandering was no happier than staying with the current activity, and neutral and unpleasant wandering were clearly worse.
A table of the paper’s own comparisons shows the relative weight of the two influences:
| What was tested | Share of within-person variance in happiness | Share of between-person variance |
|---|---|---|
| What people were doing | 4.6% | 3.2% |
| Whether their minds were wandering | 10.8% | 17.7% |
The authors concluded that what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were doing, and that the two were largely independent influences.
Did wandering cause the unhappiness?
Probably in part, though the design cannot settle it. Negative moods are known to cause mind wandering, so the authors ran time-lag analyses. Wandering at the previous ping was negatively related to happiness at the current one (Model 1, b = -1.07, P < .01). Wandering at the next ping was not (b = -0.365, not significant). Their reading is that this pattern is what you would expect if wandering caused unhappiness, and the opposite of what you would expect if unhappiness alone caused wandering. They add that it does not preclude unhappiness also causing wandering, which “appears to play at most a modest role.”
Other limits apply. The data were observational, from self-selected volunteers, happiness was one slider, and the study measures mood rather than excitement. A mind fully engaged in an ordinary evening is not a thrilled one.
Which activities rated happiest?
The Harvard Gazette summary of the paper reports that people were happiest during sex, exercise and conversation, and least happy while resting, working or using a home computer. The figure in the paper (Fig. 1, top) plots mean happiness for each activity, and the resting/sleeping, working and home-computer bubbles sit at the low end.
The paper’s text reports wandering rates only for the whole sample and for the one exception, making love, so the claim is limited. It does not tabulate, in the text, how often minds wandered during exercise or conversation. What it does show is that those activities were among the happiest,. The Day Reconstruction literature, which supplied the activity list, points the same way: in Kahneman and colleagues’ 2004 sample, intimate time and socializing ranked first and the commute last.
From this the working idea is that excitement may be as much an attention state as an event. That is an inference. The study did not test whether making an evening more attention-holding makes it feel more exciting.
Which low-cost activities map onto the study’s categories?
The categories below are taken from the paper’s list of 22 activities, as plotted in its Figure 1. Reading the bubble chart, each of the eight sits above the dashed line that marks mean happiness across all samples, though the figure gives no exact values and I am reading positions by eye.
| # | Idea | Study category | What the paper supports |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A phone call or in-person talk with one person, phone face down | Talking, conversation | Among the happiest activities (Gazette summary) |
| 2 | Twenty minutes of exercise you pick on the day | Exercising | Among the happiest activities |
| 3 | A board game or card game | Playing | Above the all-sample mean in Fig. 1 |
| 4 | A walk with no destination | Walking, taking a walk | Above the all-sample mean in Fig. 1 |
| 5 | One full album, no other screen | Listening to music | Above the all-sample mean in Fig. 1 |
| 6 | Cooking something from a recipe you have not used | Preparing food | Above the all-sample mean in Fig. 1 |
| 7 | Eating the meal without a screen | Eating | Above the all-sample mean in Fig. 1 |
| 8 | Time with someone you are close to, planned in advance | Making love (the one low-wandering category) | The only category the authors say fell below 30% wandering |
Cheap is my criterion for the list. The study sorted activities by label, so it cannot say whether a board game held attention better than the same game played badly, and it did not measure novelty. An new-experience approach such as an awe walk and the evening ideas in a list of low-effort friend nights are sources of ideas for items 1, 3 and 4.
What would a one-evening test look like?
The plan borrows the study’s method and shrinks it to one evening. A friend, or a timer app, sends a ping at five unpredictable moments between dinner and bedtime. You answer three things in under 20 seconds: a number from 0 to 100 for how you feel, what you are doing, and whether your mind is on something else (no, pleasant, neutral, unpleasant).
- Spend the first 90 minutes as you usually would. Expect two or three pings.
- Switch to one item from the table above, chosen in advance, with the phone out of reach except for answering pings. Expect two or three more.
- Next morning, compare the average happiness number and the count of “no, I was not elsewhere” answers between the two blocks.
The ordering confounds the result with time of night, and five pings are too few for any statistics, so I would treat the outcome as a story about one evening. If the second block shows an obvious gap, run a second evening with the blocks in the opposite order before drawing a conclusion.
How would I design a more present weekend?
The same logic extends to a weekend with no tracking at all. Choose two items from the table, put one in each day, and write down beforehand where the phone will be during them. The point of deciding in advance is that the study found activities alone did not keep minds from wandering, so the arrangement around the activity matters: one person, one task, and nothing else asking for attention. The savoring study by Quoidbach and colleagues suggests a cheap way to finish, a short replay of what held your attention.
What the 2010 data cannot say is whether any of this makes life more exciting. They show that in a large, volunteer, mostly American sample, moments with an attentive mind were rated happier than moments without, whatever the activity. Whether that holds for a single deliberately designed evening is an open question, and one evening is a small enough experiment to find out.