Find out why you’re no longer enjoying time with friends.
Smartphones are killing the simple pleasure we can take from socialising.
Research finds that people enjoy socialising with friends and family more if they avoid using their smartphones.
Using smartphones during a dinner with friends led people to feel more distracted and to enjoy the experience less.
Surprisingly, people who used their smartphones during lulls in the conversation reported feeling more bored.
Score one point for old-fashioned conversation.
Mr Ryan Dwyer, the study’s first author, said:
“As useful as smartphones can be, our findings confirm what many of us likely already suspected.
When we use our phones while we are spending time with people we care about — apart from offending them — we enjoy the experience less than we would if we put our devices away.”
In the research 300 people went to dinner with friends and family at a restaurant.
Half were randomly assigned to keep their phones in their pocket, while the other half kept them on the table.
They were interviewed afterwards to see how much they had enjoyed the meal.
Mr Dwyer explained that people were slightly more bored with their phones out, which was surprising:
“We had predicted that people would be less bored when they had access to their smartphones, because they could entertain themselves if there was a lull in the conversation.”
Another study tested other situations by sending a group of over 100 people text messages five times a day to report how they were feeling and what they were doing.
Once again, people enjoyed socialising with others more if they were not using their phones as well.
Professor Elizabeth Dunn, study co-author, said:
“An important finding of happiness research is that face-to-face interactions are incredibly important for our day-to-day wellbeing.
This study tells us that, if you really need your phone, it’s not going to kill you to use it.
But there is a real and detectable benefit from putting your phone away when you’re spending time with friends and family.”
The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Dwyer et al., 2017).
