Smartphone addiction physically prevents two people's brains from synchronizing while they are trying to cooperate on a task.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
Exploring the Impact of Problematic Smartphone Use on Cooperation and Competition Behavior among College Students Based on fNIRS Hyperscanning
SSRN · 6636655
The Takeaway
Interpersonal brain synchronization in the prefrontal cortex is a biological requirement for successful human cooperation. Using fNIRS hyperscanning, researchers found that heavy smartphone users fail to achieve this neural lock when collaborating with others. Interestingly, this failure does not happen during competitive tasks, where the brains remain perfectly capable of tracking an opponent. This suggests that digital addiction specifically erodes the social-neural pathways needed for collective effort. Modern workplaces may be struggling not because of simple distraction, but because their employees' brains can no longer physically align.
From the abstract
Problematic smartphone use (PSU) is highly prevalent among college students and robustly associated with broad social functioning impairments. However, the impacts of PSU on cooperation and competition—two core forms of interpersonal interaction underpinning daily social adaptation—and their underlying neural mechanisms remain largely uncharacterized, creating a critical gap in understanding PSU-related social dysfunction.We employed a two-phase study design: an online prescreening of 532 colleg