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THE ESCAPE
Why It’s So Hard For Us to See Our Own Problem Habits
We’re often blind to our own self-defeating behaviors.
*Note: This piece originally appeared in The Escape, my Substack.
Earlier this month I wrote an article for Time magazine about the differences between reading on paper and reading on screens.
In that article, I talk about a 2024 study that found students scored better on reading comprehension tests when they read short stories on paper, as opposed to on a 13-inch laptop.
The study was small, but its findings are in line with a lot of previous work. Research dating back to the 1980s has found that printed text usually beats out screen-based text when it comes to a reader’s comprehension and retention of the material. Some have termed this “the screen inferiority effect.”
Like many of those older experiments, the 2024 study I wrote about used eye-tracking technology, which revealed that readers were much more likely to skim a text when reading on screens. Screen readers also spent a lot more time looking back over the text when it came time to answer simple questions about what they’d read. (If you want to know more about why these differences emerge, check out my Time article.)
