Why People Check Their Phones at the Wrong Times and a Simple Trick to Stop It

&gt; Posing a direct question does the person a favor by pulling him back while sending a clear message. The technique works like a charm. For one, the unexpected question elicits an entertaining reaction — sort of like what happens when you hold someone’s nose when he’s dozing off. He gasps and sputters, but in this case it’s not your fault, because you, as questioner, can play dumb. “Oh, sorry, were you on your phone? Is everything O.K.?”<p>Despite how it&#x27;s characterized in the previous paragraph, nothing about this technique is &quot;subtle&quot;.<p>I really don&#x27;t understand the impulse some people have to control the behavior of other adults.

Social Antibodies regarding cell phone use is far more prevalent in Western (US) than in (most of) Asia for example. It is perfectly normal at all levels in business to take a phone call including movie theaters just to inform the caller that the recipient is in a movie theatre.<p>Japan on the other end has a culture of absolute mobile silence in the subway for example.

About meetings. In two out of three companies I&#x27;ve worked for most of the meetings were basically pointless. That&#x27;s the type of meeting where people would pull out their phone out of pure boredom. If you&#x27;re having these kinds of meetings, it&#x27;s not the screen behavior that is bad. It&#x27;s just a symptom.

Maybe when a social gathering starts you could just ask everyone if they would like to have a no-screens norm. People who want a screen ban would say why, and so would the ones who are opposed. I am thinking that this might work because someone who would want to take out their phone would be unhappy if someone else did, but feels like he or she can&#x27;t stop it because it is an acceptable norm today. Maybe the person even realizes they have an addiction and would appreciate help fighting it. Maybe you could set a norm of only two minutes on the phone. Maybe people could think of other ideas. Maybe nothing would be decided on, but it would be an interesting discussion.<p>We could even have a web site where people would describe what happened. Speaking of which, are there any sites on overcoming web addiction?

&quot;This one weird trick to keep humans engaged&quot;.....

If it bothers you and you are my friend, please just tell me, don&#x27;t ask weird questions.<p>I won&#x27;t be offended enough to speak up against it, you will have a slight benefit of doubt and I&#x27;ll be in the defense, but I will recognize your manipulative, slightly dishonest behavior. (manipulative, because you want to trick me in to something and dishonest, because you cover your true intentions instead of stating what you really want.)

I think the point about &quot;phone stacking&quot; is interesting. There doesn&#x27;t need to be explicitly punitive measures to discourage people using their personal tech since the social conventions are already there.