Side-by-side success: Lo-Fi as a body doubling technique

Body doubling or co-working, where you work in the presence of someone else, has become popular with students, homeworkers and freelances. It uses the idea of accountability with psychological research showing that people are less willing to disappoint people they know.

But have you heard of Lo-fi? It's not just a music genre – it also connects with the concept of body doubling. 

Our committee member Leila Ainge recently caught up with researchers Leya Breanna (Bre) Baltaxe-Adomony and Tessa Eagle from the University of California Santa Cruz, working in computational media, which looks at how people are interacting with technology and how this in turn shapes social interactions. She asked them about their research paper on body doubling with neurodivergent participants.

Leila: First, can you tell me what Lo-Fi is?

Bre: Have you seen the Lo-Fi 'study with me' video online? it's just an animated loop of a girl writing on a page, with calming (lo-fi) music in the background. We were interested in why people were using it and this idea of people forming parasocial relationships with this 10 second animated clip. This is really interesting. So why does having another presence help you get things done? And then Tessa was interested in body doubling.

Tessa: Yeah, Lo-Fi is interesting because it's a style of music. So, you could listen to it on Spotify, but YouTube is a place that people go to see it. And Lo-Fi Girl is always live, there's this constant chat feed.

Leila : The really intriguing thing for me reading your paper was how positionality came through in terms of what your intention was with the participants and community. And I really liked that when I read it, more of us are thinking about community involvement when we do research.

Tessa : Yeah, I came into grad school (2019), and we submitted a paper about mental health apps, and they were like, you should add a positionality statement. And my advisor at the time and I were like, OK, we don't really know about that. And it's getting a lot more common.

Leila: What definition did your participants come up with around body doubling?

Bre: The definition which was generated by the community is 'Having someone in the room or on a video call or chat in order to accomplish a task or be productive.'  The second person may be doing a different task or a similar one. And it's a form of accountability that helps you stay on task. So that's the baseline definition, some people use it differently and there's different ways of engaging in body doubling. 

But it seems like people are most often using this to complete household chores, like dishes, laundry, cleaning, things that you don't want to do, like schoolwork, studying, work, reading, writing, self-care, really just things that you might not want to do or that you find monotonous. And so, it's just really hard to find that motivation to even start.

Leila: You write about this being a community-driven phenomenon, body doubling. And so often in psychological spaces, for example, we will research or observe participants, we will come up with theories, and then we will think of interventions and deliver those interventions back to a community. But this feels like the community saying to us, hey, this works for us, and this is what we do. Do you want to come and have a look? How did you get involved with that?

Bre: I think that's totally true. I think in our field as well, we look to subjects to generate knowledge, (by sharing lived experiences). We both identify as neurodivergent, so we're already a part of those communities. And we are trying to do the best research that we can. So, we have kind of done a lot of work outside of this and how do we want to properly engage with communities and uplift them as knowers and makers? So, it comes along with our own ethos, our own position.

Tessa: Bre and I both moved into this laboratory kind of later in our PhD and our advisor is coming from a disability studies perspective, which has been a really interesting journey to go on. I discovered I was neurodivergent in grad school and everything just started to click and make sense;  we both use it (body doubling) and see it as something that people are using a lot.

Leila: Why do we think body doubling including Lo-Fi works?

Bre: We think accountability is part of it, but it's not all of it because you can do accountability in many ways. We talked to people who said that they felt being perceived was part of it. So, my favorite quote is someone had said that they have to 'cosplay (get into character) as a productive person'. 

Body doubling kind of forces them to go through the motions of, my hands are on the keyboard if I'm supposed to be writing. I think there's a social component of it. You don't have to be doing this with someone you know, but it could help if you're doing a monotonous task that you have someone who you can talk to as you're doing it, there's a lot of different factors happening.

Leila: When I researched Imposter Phenomenon there was something around enclothed cognition, when we wear clothes that make us feel more confident etc. So, this is kind of subverting that a little bit and saying I don't need to put clothes on but actually if I get myself into a space where I perceive myself to be that type of person, it's not even about a uniform.

In your paper you do talk about some related theories that could explain how body doubling works. Like, parallel play, mirror neurons, social facilitation and diffuse sociality.

If we look at social facilitation, we know that some teams are high performance and work very well together and you get competition and people facilitate each other's performance. In traditional work settings you see that a lot. In the entrepreneurial space, I found it quite intriguing that we've had this rise in online spaces where people will virtually come together and create. It's almost like self-selecting your own virtual work team. And I do wonder if some of that performance enhancement is playing into the success of body doubling across different communities, not just for neurodivergence, but also just for anyone who thinks, yes, this will give me bit of edge, you know, I'll get a bit more done today.

Tessa: Yeah, definitely. I think that's why, you know, I think it's so common to go to a coffee shop or the library, even if you're not neurodivergent, right? You see other people being productive, even if they aren't necessarily. In our survey someone mentioned it's kind of a physical reminder of what they feel like they're supposed to be doing. Or like Bre mentioned earlier, like cosplaying, being productive. And I think social facilitation is interesting because (in the literature) it's often working on the same task and more competitive. Whereas, in co-working or in body doubling, know, it doesn't have to be the same task.

Leila: Seeking company of other people without having to interact with them sounds like my ideal day! My work colleagues will laugh at me. I work at a university a couple of days a week and we have an office and I'm very rarely there. I prefer to go and sit in a coffee shop around people, surrounded by people, but not with the people that I work with because I'll get distracted.

Tessa: Mm-hmm. And it's interesting because it's, like you said, you know, you want to be around people, but you either don't want to be social, like maybe you don't feel like you have the spoons for that, or you don't want to do it because you know that you won't be productive and you'll get distracted. There are a lot of memes of people at their offices and they either put a note on their door or on their chair and it's like, please do not talk to me, I am very distractible.

Biographies 

Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony is a technologist and researcher focused on advancing assistive and healthcare technologies. She has a multidisciplinary background in robotics engineering and human-centered design approaches. She recently graduated with a PhD in computational media from the University of California Santa Cruz, where her dissertation explored equitable engineering and design methods for collaborative development with disabled communities.

Tessa Eagle is a researcher specialising in human-computer interaction (HCI) and neurodivergent communities. Her research draws from critical disability studies to study online support systems for neurodivergent individuals and push back on neuronormative technology research and healthcare practices. Her expertise lies in driving user-centered design by deeply understanding and engaging with the needs of diverse communities.

Leila Ainge is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. Her research interests are Imposter Phenomenon and cyberpsychology.

 This is an edited excerpt of a longer podcast interview (including video and transcript).

Research article

'"It was something I naturally found worked and heard about later"': An investigation of body doubling with neurodivergent participants 

 You might also be interested in this BPS research archive article by Juliet Hodges that looks at a study on gym-goers and a buddy scheme