Your Roommate's Phone Use Impacts You Too!
Economics Unpacked
We already know your own phone habits affect your outcomes. But new research shows your roommate’s behavior creates a negative spillover (an externality) that affects you too.
Your roommate’s phone use can lower your GPA and reduce your income by about 1%. The impact of your roommate’s behavior is substantial; it is roughly 60% as large as the effect of your own phone use.
In the recent installment of Economics Unpacked, Dr. Mallika Pung covers a new research paper by
Citation:
Barwick, P. J., Chen, S., Fu, C., & Li, T. (2026). Digital distractions with peer influence: The impact of mobile app usage on academic and labor market outcomes. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 141(1), 1–49. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf048
You can find the slides and a more detailed summary here.
Why does your roommate’s behavior impact you?
The roommate effect operates through two distinct channels.
The first is direct disruption. A roommate gaming or scrolling in a shared dorm room, where four to eight students live, sleep, and study within a few feet of each other, creates noise and distraction that impairs your ability to focus and sleep, regardless of what you are doing on your own phone.
The second is behavioral contagion. Phone use is genuinely infectious. When a roommate increases their usage significantly, it pulls your own usage up by roughly 5.8%. The researchers were careful to establish that this contagion is driven by what your roommate does around you (behavioral peer effects), not simply by the type of person they are (contextual peer effects). If phone use spreads primarily because of who your roommate is, there may not be very many policy tools to address the adverse effects of phone use. If it spreads because of what they do around you, changing the shared environment can actually work. According to this study, the behavioral channel dominates here. It is not who your roommate was before college that matters most — it is what they do in the room with you.
This is even more reason to pick your roommates more carefully.
Some Slides from the Gourmet Economist
More slides can be found on the website.
Very insightful. It makes sense when you think about it. It is a added distraction . Phone use already disrupt people sleep patterns. Im glad i never needed a room mate since i was a commuter. Great work!