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100 More Things #152: CELL PHONES NEARBY NEGATIVELY AFFECT PERSON-TO-PERSON COMMUNICATION

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Imagine that you’re sitting in a restaurant with a friend and he takes his smartphone out of his pocket, turns off the sound, and puts it off to the side, face down, on the table. He doesn’t touch it all through the meal you have together. He doesn’t look at it, text with it, or even glance at it. Can the mere presence of the phone change your relationship with him?

The answer is yes, and not for the better!

Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein (2013) studied how the presence of a cell phone affects the way people communicate with each other.

The idea from social psychologists is this: Because people use their mobile devices to stay connected with people who are not in close proximity, it’s easy to build a conditioned response to the device and think of it as “everyone else.” When the device, for example, a smartphone, is sitting on the table at the restaurant, it is representing the rest of its owner’s social network. In a way, his whole social network is actually at the restaurant.

The smartphone will therefore trigger thinking about other people and other events outside the immediate context, which will in turn divert attention away from the experiences that are occurring at the particular time and place.

Some of this may occur consciously, but some of this “not being present” occurs unconsciously. Social psychologists, including Przybylski and Weinstein, theorize that these devices can, therefore, have a negative impact on person-to-person relationships.

To research the idea, they ran two experiments. In the first experiment people who did not know each other were assigned to pairs, asked to leave all their personal belongings outside the room, and then told to “Discuss an interesting event that occurred to you over the past month,” for 10 minutes. For half of the pairs, there was a mobile phone (not belonging to either person) on top of a book. The book was on a nearby desk, but not in the direct visual field of the participants. The other half of the pairs had the same room setup, but without a mobile phone.

After the 10-minute discussion, each participant individually filled out forms to measure things such as relationship quality, closeness, and positive affect.

The pairs that had been in the room with the mobile phone felt less close to each other, and rated the relationship lower than the pairs in a room without a cell phone present.

In the second experiment, some of the pairs were instructed to discuss their “thoughts and feelings about plastic holiday trees” (casual condition). Other pairs were instructed to discuss “the most meaningful events of the past year” (meaningful condition). The surveys were the same as in the first experiment, except some new surveys were added to measure trust and empathy.

When the mobile phone was in the room participants gave lower ratings on all the measures, including the new trust and empathy measures. But this effect was stronger in the meaningful condition pairs than the casual condition pairs.

The researchers concluded that simply placing the cell phone in the room interfered with the formation of a new relationship, and that the negative effect of the cell phone was stronger during a meaningful conversation.

Establishing Project Relationships

Although this research may not directly apply to the designs you create, it certainly can apply anytime you meet with clients, stakeholders, users, or your own team. Think about all the meetings you have. Sometimes people ask the group to turn off cell phones, usually to avoid interruptions or distractions. You may want to not only have people turn off their phones, but also put them away. This will make it easier to establish and/or deepen the project relationships as well as establish and increase trust.

Takeaways

  • When you’re establishing a new relationship with someone, don’t have a cell phone in view.
  • When you’re trying to deepen an interpersonal relationship or get someone to trust you, don’t have a cell phone in view.
  • When you’re in a meeting, model the behavior by not only turning off your cell phone, but actually putting it out of view.
  • When you’re running a meeting, ask everyone to turn off their cell phones and put them out of view.

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