For Whom The Cell Tolls
I'm addicted to my phone -- Twitter, Instagram, news, texts...you name it. My girlfriend feels disrespected and unheard when I look at it while she's talking, but I can't seem to stop. Please help me out before I lose the woman I love!
--Addicted
If your smartphone were actually smart, it would ping you to listen to your girlfriend before she's your ex-girlfriend trash-talking you in a bar.
Instead, smartphones and apps turn us into lab rats ferociously hitting the touch screen for another hit of techno-crack. They do this through what psychologists call "intermittent reinforcement" -- "rewards" that come randomly and unpredictably. Checking your phone sometimes "rewards" you with a new message or newsbit -- sometimes (or even often), but not always. When "rewards" come regularly and reliably -- like when a rat pushes a bar and gets a food pellet every time -- the rat chills out and only presses when, say, his stomach rings the dinner bell. Unpredictable rewards, on the other hand -- only sometimes getting a hit -- drive the little rats to pump the bar incessantly, sometimes even till the little fellers go claws up.
However, there is hope for you -- and your relationship -- thanks to research on habit formation (by psychologist Phillippa Lally, among others). Repeatedly behaving differently when your girlfriend's talking to you -- by turning your phone totally off and, if possible, relocating it to another room -- can change your default behavior (from robotically checking your phone to attentiveness to those important to you).
In time, you might expand your attentiveness into other areas of your life. A good test for whether it's okay to be all up in your phone is swapping in its low-tech counterpart. For example, when the highway patrolman strides over and taps on your car window, is that really the best time to pick up that Stephen King novel and read the end of Chapter 4?
Please help me out before I lose the woman I love!
You may love this woman, but you love your phone even more, so you're not going to stop looking at it while she's talking. In this, you're just ahead of the curve. In the not-too-distant future, the primary relationship most people will have will be with their phone.
JD at June 2, 2018 7:55 AM
When I started in corrections in the 1950s, newspapers were our internet, and highly addictive. And reading newspapers at work was a fireable offense. By the 1960s, I was managing my first prison, and we banned our officers from bringing them to work.
Andre Friedmann at June 3, 2018 5:55 AM
There's something about a phone. You will see people walking down the street attending to business with he phone up in the left hand--not being attended to--as if they had their orthopedic guy fix their shoulder and elbow permanently. I saw a woman in a story trying to get an item which required two hands off a shelf. She was having trouble because one hand had a phone. Never occurred to her to pocket it.
Last month, two cops pursued a possible burglar across fences, down alleys, and around hedges. Eventually they shot him because when he turned, he had an object in his hand which, in the dark, they thought might be a gun. It was a cell phone. Never dropped it, never lost it, never gave it up because unfettered use of both hands might have facilitated an escape.
Concur on random reinforcement. Did some rat running in behavioral psych.
Richard Aubrey at June 4, 2018 5:09 AM
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