Researchers Wonder What it Means When You Keep Your Phone out Without Using it
Men are less likely to do it than women, and mixed-sex pairs least likely of all
People of all ages and socioeconomic groups have incorporated smartphones into their everyday life, making them important tools in human relationships at home and at work. Not surprisingly, the smartphone revolution has also given rise to new human behaviors.
Today we learn about one of these thanks to the work of Laura Schaposnik and James Unwin at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who have discovered a previously unobserved phenomenon and begun to study it for the first time.
They call this new behavior “phone walking”; it involves holding a phone for long periods of time without actually using it. This turns out to be surprisingly common among pedestrians. But, curiously, men and women engage in it to significantly different degrees. Schaposnik and Unwin attempt to tease out why phone walkers exist at all and how the gender differences arise.
The researchers begin their work by studying over 3,000 adult pedestrians at six city center locations in Paris. Just over half the pedestrians were female, and the sample as a whole had an estimated average age of about 35.
