Cell Phone Use Linked to Selfishness

Thank goodness for cell phones, right?  They help keep us connected to the world around us.

Now, though, comes a revealing study into the psyche of your average cell phone user.

It seems cell phones may actually make users less socially-minded, according to a recent study from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Marketing professors Anastasiya Pocheptsova and Rosellina Ferraro, with graduate student, Ajay T. Abraham, conducted a battery of experiments on test groups of cell phone users. The findings appear in their working paper, “The Effect of Mobile Phone Use on Prosocial Behavior.”

Prosocial behavior, as defined in this particular study, is action intended to benefit another person or society as a whole.

The researchers found that after a short period of cell phone use, the subjects were less inclined to volunteer for a community service project when asked to do so, compared to their control-group counterparts. The cell phone users were also less enthusiastic about solving word problems, even though they were told that their answers would translate to a monetary donation to charity.

The decreased focus on others could be observed even when study participants were simply asked to draw a picture of their cell phones and think about how they used them.

The study involved men and women, generally in their early 20s.

“We would expect a similar pattern of effects with people from other age groups,” said Ferraro. “Given the increasing pervasiveness of cellphones, it does have the potential to have broad social implications.”

The authors described their findings further:

“The cellphone directly evokes feelings of connectivity to others, thereby fulfilling the basic human need to belong.” This results in reducing one’s desire to connect with others or to engage social behavior.

In one test, the researchers compared cell phone user to Facebook users.  They found that participants felt more connected to others via their cell phones than they do via their Facebook accounts.

This would seem to imply that this difference in connectedness was the underlying driver of the observed phenomenon.

It only seems to make sense that chatting on your cell phone makes you feel more connected than view a bunch of status updates on Facebook.

Still, this seems to say a lot about today’s society.  Just about everyone has a cell phone.  Are well becoming less socially-minded because of it?

Related articles

• Cellphone Use Linked to Selfish Behavior (scienceblog.com)
• Cellphone use linked to selfish behavior in UMD study (eurekalert.org)
• CONFIRMED: Mobile Phone Lovers Are Selfish Pigs (businessinsider.com)

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