Study: 'Pics or it didn't happen' distracts you from real life

Kara Sherrer | Vanderbilt University

Corrections and clarifications: Updated to include photo attribution.

“Who curls their hair and takes a selfie stick to go for a hike in the park?” one of my friends incredulously asked me this weekend. Apparently, one of our mutual acquaintances was so committed to “pics or it didn’t happen” that she decided that lugging a selfie stick on a nature walk was worth the photo op.

This pressure to photograph everything we do (and post those photos to social media) is common among young adults, especially college students. After all, Instagram is the third most popular social network among college students after Facebook and Twitter.

Furthermore, 77% of college students also use Snapchat, the popular self-deleting photo app, on a daily basis. City Lit College in London even went so far as to offer a course in “the art of photographic self-portraiture” (read: selfies) starting last March.



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Clearly, college students take and post a lot of photos to social media, and it seems intuitive that all of this documentation would improve our memories of the events we’ve photographed. After all, don’t we take photos to remember what happened later?<

However, a study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that having a “pics or it didn’t happen” approach to every event you attend could actually distract you from being in the present moment, not to mention impair your memories of what happened.

After following student participants around Fairfield University’s art museum, psychologist Linda Henkel found that when she tested their recall, students who had taken photographs of objects did not remember details as well as students who has simply observed them. Henkel calls this phenomenon “photo-taking impairment effect.”



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This official-sounding term just means that when we reach for our smartphones to take a selfie or a Snapchat, we’re directing our attention away from the actual event and focusing on the act of taking the photo (or video) instead. We only have a finite amount of cognitive attention available at any given time, so if we’re concentrating on taking a photo, then that necessarily means that we can’t focus as much on our friends and what’s happening around us.

Sometimes, getting distracted by taking a photo can have dangerous consequences.

Earlier this year, a video began circulating of a snowboarder so absorbed in filming himself with a selfie stick that he failed to see an oncoming chairlift until he ran into it headfirst. For an example that hits a bit closer to home, a recent survey revealed 4% of drivers admitted to taking selfies while they were driving.

However, there’s no need to forsake Instagram and delete your Snapchat quite yet.

Despite the drawbacks of constantly taking photos, Henkel does not advocate for putting your camera away for good. Instead, she recommends that people be more mindful of when and how they take photos so they can better savor the moment — and avoid unfortunate accidents like the selfie snowboarder’s.



Kara Sherrer is a student at Vanderbilt University and a summer 2015 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.