Phubbing

How many times have you sat at dinner with someone and you were just itching to check you phone to see if you got an email or a voicemail? And what are the chances that you actually tried to check it without the other person noticing? I thought so. Phubbing: snubbing someone by paying attention to your phone instead of them in a social setting. And there’s an awareness campaign begging us all to stop it. With so many people now owning cell phones, more people are likely to just disregard the person right next to them and pay attention to their phones as if they are going to miss some major announcement. What happened to people talking to each other when they go out together? In a second experiment, the researchers showed that discussing personally meaningful topics in the vicinity of a phone is particularly hazardous for relationships—likely because opening up makes us feel more vulnerable and therefore more threatened by the prospect of a listener being distracted.