Recently, I was at a dinner party (with other vaccinated people, mind you) and I noticed that some of them were spending a lot of time on their phones instead of in conversation. I was perplexed. We have been waiting for actual years to be in the same place with other humans, I thought, but some people will still choose texting or scrolling through Instagram over in-person interactions they could easily be having. As a person who generally keeps their phone out of sight at parties, I find this mystifying. But, it turns out, there are important psychological factors at play when someone stares at their phone when they’re socializing.
This phenomenon is so common that communication experts have given it a name: Phubbing, a.k.a. snubbing people with your phone. When you do it to friends — as opposed to strangers in public — it’s called Fphubbing — friend phubbing. Recent research on phubbing, which was published yesterday by the University of Georgia, was inspired by a situation similar to the one I described. “I observed that so many people use their phones while they are sitting with their friends at the cafe, any dining time, regardless of the relationship type,” Juhyung Sun, lead author on the paper, told EurekAlert. Sun saw the people around her phubbing (and fphubbing) and was eager to find out why.
