We all know that online classes can be dreadful. Many students have sat with their laptops looking at a wall of bored faces on Teams, or the dreaded “wall of black screens” when students all turn their cameras off. A new paper by former UNC Greensboro Psychology graduate student Michael McHale and Vacc Professor Dr. Michael Kane (accepted for publication in the journal Collabra) examined whether mind-wandering spreads during virtual lectures, just as it does in person.
We already know that some behaviors can be contagious. “A prime example of this,” their paper says, “is the chain reaction caused by a student zipping up their backpack near the end of a lecture that inevitably precipitates notebook closing and bag zipping among their peers.” This phenomenon is known as social contagion in the psychology literature.
Moreover, recent research shows that cognitive states like attention or distraction may also be contagious. For example, Forrin and colleagues suggested that mind-wandering and inattentiveness can also spread through a classroom: seeing other students lose focus may lead to other nearby students also losing focus.
McHale and Kane argue that social contagion effects occur in part because we tend to follow social norms in public places. We all know that we are supposed to listen to the lecture and not play on our phones and fidget. When others violate those norms, however, we may feel emboldened to do the same.
To look at this, they ran an online experiment in which 352 participants watched a professor delivering an environmental sciences lecture about concentrating agriculture and its impact on the natural world. The participants’ computer screens looked very much like a typical Zoom or Teams online lecture class; they saw the usual grid of videos of classmates during the lecture, including their own face. However, the other “students” were actually pre-recorded videos of confederates — that is, people who were aware of the purpose of the experiment and performing the experimenters’ instructions. To increase the realism of the experience, the confederates were all real UNCG students with acting experience recruited from the UNC Greensboro School of Theatre. The actors’ job was to act engaged and then after a predetermined number of minutes, each actor would switch to a more inattentive style, looking bored and disengaging from the lecture to varying degrees.
At twelve different points during the lecture, the screen turned gray and they had to indicate what they were thinking about. This let the researchers determine whether students were on-task or engaged in mind-wandering, or task-unrelated thoughts as they call it. The results? Yes, mind-wandering is contagious. Consistent with their hypothesis, they found that students who watched the lecture with inattentive peers were thinking about off-topic content more often.
For students, this means that your own behavior during a lecture matters for your peers’ attentiveness, even online. Keeping your camera on and paying attention to the lecture may help other students stay focused, too. And for educators, the findings highlight how classroom dynamics can shape individual learning experiences in subtle but powerful ways.
