Seeing Your Mindless Face: How Viewing One's Live Self Interrupts Mindless Short-Form Video Scrolling

2026-04-21

AI Summary

This study addresses the loss of self-control stemming from unintentional overuse of short-form videos by proposing a novel intervention that periodically embeds self-relevant cues—such as live camera feeds, selfies, textual displays of one’s name, or blank screens—within the application interface to trigger self-awareness and disrupt habitual scrolling. Innovatively integrating an endogenous self-reflection mechanism into digital media consumption, the authors developed a mobile application enabling multimodal cue delivery. Through a combination of controlled laboratory experiments and in-depth interviews, the findings demonstrate that such cues significantly increase users’ intention to voluntarily terminate viewing sessions. Notably, implicit cues like blank screens outperformed explicit visual stimuli in both effectiveness and user acceptability, offering a new paradigm for designing behavioral interventions against digital overuse.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

The widespread, addictive consumption of short-form videos, which allegedly causes "brain rot," has become an urgent public concern. This study proposes that self-related cues serve as an intrinsic, self-reflective strategy that enhances self-control over media overuse. We developed an app that de-immerses users by periodically displaying different self-related cues (live camera, selfie, name in text, and black screen) and tested their effects in a laboratory experiment (N=84). Overall, findings show that self-related cues effectively disrupt mindless viewing, enabling users to voluntarily stop short-form video consumption. Interestingly, the black screen, intended as a control, elicited the greatest intention to use the app: Participants noted in the follow-up interview that they preferred the subtler reflection on a black screen over the explicit image from a live camera. The findings offer practical design guidelines for implementing self-awareness interventions in mobile contexts, including which modalities work best and how real-time contextual anchoring enhances effectiveness.

Problem

• mindless scrolling
• short-form video
• self-control
• media overuse
• self-awareness

Innovation

• self-related cues
• mindless scrolling
• self-awareness intervention
• short-form video
• real-time contextual anchoring