Popular Commentary On Practical Multitasking
Multitasking has been criticized as a hindrance to completing tasks or feeling happiness. Barry Schwartz has noted that, given the media-rich landscape of the Internet era, it is tempting to get into a habit of dwelling in a constant sea of information with too many choices, which has been noted to have a negative effect on human happiness.
The idea that women are better multitaskers than men has been popular in the media. Recently, a study by British psychologist Professor Keith Laws at the University of Hertfordshire was widely reported in the press to have provided the first evidence of female multitasking superiority. A formal research paper has yet to be published.
In another study, females were found to perform better at coordinating a primary test with a secondary test (p=0.007), supporting this notion that females are better at multi-tasking. However, the authors concluded their tests may not reflect real life multi-tasking and that further research was required.
Observers of youth in modern society often comment upon the apparently advanced multitasking capabilities of the youngest generations of humans (Generation Y and Generation Z). While it is true that contemporary researchers find that youths in today's world exhibit high levels of multitasking, most experts believe that members of the Net Generation are not any better at multitasking than members of older generations. However, recent studies by Bardhi, Rohm, and Sultan argue that Generation Y is becoming better at media multitasking. This is evidenced by the fact that they are gaining control over deciding which messages they pay attention to or not. Furthermore, while there is a great deal of evidence showing the negative effects of multitasking on cognitive tasks, there is no evidence showing that multitasking has a positive or neutral effect on these tasks.
Read more about this topic: Human Multitasking
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