An iPhone app pinged 15,000 people at random and caught them thinking
Harvard researchers interrupted 15,000 strangers mid-life to ask what their mind was doing. The pattern was blunt.
In 2010, psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert built an app that did something deliberately intrusive: at random points during the day, it buzzed a stranger's phone and asked two questions. What are you doing right now? And, separately, are you thinking about something other than what you're doing?
More than 15,000 people used it, generating over 650,000 responses from all over the world, across nearly every activity people do in a day, including some they'd rather not admit to. The mind was somewhere else roughly half the time, regardless of what the body was up to. That part wasn't the surprise; people have always known their attention drifts.
The surprise was the direction of cause and effect. People weren't mind-wandering because they were unhappy with the task in front of them. Reported happiness dropped after the mind wandered, not before, even when the wandering thoughts were neutral or pleasant, and even when the task itself was going fine. The researchers concluded that how present a mind is predicts happiness better than what it happens to be doing.
The uncomfortable implication isn't that daydreaming is a symptom of unhappiness. It's closer to a cause, running quietly in the background of an ordinary Tuesday, showing up whether or not you noticed it leave.