Ryan J. Allred ’20 Ph.D. completed his doctoral dissertation in communication studies, examining how the presence of a cell phone causes individuals to feel snubbed by their conversation partners. This phenomenon is termed “phubbing,” or phone snubbing. His dissertation is titled “Cell Phone Presence, Phubbing, and Rejection: Antecedents and Effects of Cell Phone Usage During Face-to-Face Communication.” Allred, now an assistant professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, spoke with UConn Today about his research.

There has been previous work done on phone snubbing, but not quite the way that you are studying it. What attracted you to this subject?
My research focuses on communication inhibitors, things that stop people from communicating when they want to. I often see social interactions where somebody is trying to communicate something but they’re just not able to because a cell phone is being used inappropriately. It has gotten to where pulling out a phone is equivalent to turning your back on someone during a conversation. I don’t think people intend it to be that way, I just think we don’t often consider what we’re doing with our cell phones. That got me thinking: How could we learn how to use technology appropriately so that it can help us improve our relationships, rather than inhibiting our communication?

You have looked at the two types of relationships involving social media, parent-child relationships and romantic relationships. Why did you decide on those specifics, and what are the underlying theories that you’re using to examine these significant relationships?
Even though we’ve had cell phones now for quite a while, we haven’t had them for anybody’s entire lifespan so it’s hard to understand how they’re really affecting us long-term. We decided to look at both parent-child and romantic relationships. We can get a picture of how this is going to affect us in 20 or 30 years if we can see how children are affected now, and how adults are affected now. It can help us to understand a bigger picture of how this is all going to work together.

I used a couple of big theories. One of them, interpersonal acceptance and rejection theory, was created by Ronald Rohner, professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Connecticut. It is a theory that talks about how our interactions with our parents help us to develop a sense of identity that leads us to feel confident in our future relationships, or afraid in our future relationships. The big term within this theory that I connected to was rejection sensitivity. The theory suggests that individuals who felt rejected by their parents develop a tendency to look for signs of rejection during social interactions. Even when other people are not rejecting them, individuals with rejection sensitivity believe that other people are rejecting them because of the negative experiences they had with their primary caregivers as children.

The second thing I looked at was nonverbal immediacy. In face-to-face conversations we have nonverbal signals that we utilize to show people that we’re interested, that we’re engaged–eye contact, head nods, etc. Those things are really disrupted by having a phone present to the point where having a phone is basically like having a clumsy third limb and we’re bringing it into our nonverbals. Every time we glance at our phones, we miss out on important eye contact, but we also signal to our partners that they are not as important as whatever is on our phone. Our phones are disrupting our ability to use these other immediacy cues and to make intimate connections.

We always see people sitting together and constantly looking at their phones. How does that fit into what you found?
Our original studies actually looked at what we called the mere presence hypothesis, the idea that merely having a phone visible was negative for conversations. We’re actually seeing that effect is going away. People are just so used to having phones out now that they are not really having the same negative effect, perhaps because we realize that we all do it and therefore we don’t judge other people when they do it to us. Where it becomes problematic is when our attention is drawn to the phone. As soon as our conversation partners recognize that our attention is no longer on them but is on this device, which represents other people, it starts to hurt conversations. We’re finding that having your phone out is not really a huge deal, but once you’re putting the attention on it, then it becomes problematic.

Addiction to our phones is also taking up a portion of our cognitive capacity. Even when we are trying to pay attention—when we think that we’re engaged in the conversation—a part of our brain is still focused on our phones because we are anticipating any potential notification that may come in. This addiction is inhibiting psychological connections that we could be making with the other person. Communication is not about saying the right thing all the time and always being perfect in how you say things. Communication is about connection with other people. When you add this other distracting variable; that’s inhibiting our connections. Our big finding here was that having your phone out makes your conversation partner less satisfied with your conversations because they weren’t seeing the nonverbal signals of attention that we tend to look for in close conversations.

The use of a cell phone and the presence of a cell phone can become an issue in romantic relationship. What did you find about this issue?
A lot of this is pushed by our expectations. People who have low expectations going into a relationship but find that their partner is better than they expected are generally really happy and enjoy that relationship. But, individuals who go in having high expectations that aren’t met, that’s when they’re not happy. We’re seeing the same thing with phones as relationship partners start to create their own expectations for what is and what is not appropriate with cell phone usage. That’s why I think the original research on this topic really struggled. Some of the findings would say — yes, cell phones are bad and some would say, cell phones are good. It’s because they weren’t looking at those expectations. If in your relationship you have decided it’s not appropriate for you to have your phone out while you’re talking with one another, then having your phone out is breaking an expectation and it’s going to be really bad for the relationship. But, if you and your partner have decided it’s okay for you to be on your phones or to be playing games or texting other people when you’re just hanging out together, then you’re not breaking that expectation. We’re seeing, especially in these newer relationships where they haven’t had time to establish these expectations, that there’s a disconnect. One partner might be expecting one thing; the other partner is expecting the other. That’s where you’re getting a lot of that tension and the negative effects are coming up because expectations are being violated.

You point out there is a difference with father-son relationships compared with mother- daughter, father-daughter and mother-son situations. What did you find?
According to the interpersonal acceptance and rejection theory, we all tend to identify with our parents in a way that causes us to build our own identity, but we also tend to identify with our similar parents. If I’m a male, I’m more likely to identify with my father. What we’re seeing is that individuals create a special connection with one of their parents because they tend to model their behavior after that specific parent. What we saw in our finding here is that for sons, especially who felt the need to be like their fathers and model their behavior after their fathers, when they felt rejected by their fathers it had a really negative effect on their identity, causing them to develop this rejection sensitivity. The research would suggest generally that both mothers and fathers are going to have this effect on children. I think the reason why we saw this in this particular study is we focused on individuals who had high levels of rejection sensitivity. What we’re seeing is that, particularly for young boys in our culture right now, there’s a lot of pressure on them to be something, to have some sort of identity and when they feel like they’re not living up to that ideal, it has a heavier weight on them, causing them to develop this sensitivity to being rejected.

What’s the question that you don’t get about this subject but would like people to ask you?
What can I do individually? That’s a hard one for a researcher to answer because it is personal; you need to have your own guidelines for how you approach this. For example, in order to improve my relationships, I take off everything that is an entertainment factor from my phone. That way when I’m in social settings with other people and I get bored, my tendency is not to go to my phone. My tendency is to find something else around me that can enhance the conversation. This has helped me turn my device into a tool to improve communication, rather than to distract from communication.