Phubbing responses in real-time: rapid recovery from a single phub and declining affect with repeated phubs

Abstract

People tend to feel negatively when they are ignored by a conversation partner attending to their phone (i.e. ‘phubbing’). We investigated how quickly people recover in an experiment where participants provided intensive real-time ratings of their mood during a simulated conversation with a partner who engaged in either no phubbing, a single phub, or repeated phubbing. Drawing on ostracism theories, we hypothesized and found that a single phub induces negative affect, d ≈ 0.40, and people begin recovering immediately. However, repeated phubbing causes increasingly negative affect, d ≈ 1.20, with a pattern of partial recovery between phubs. People quickly feel bad, but recover within seconds, unless repeated phubbing interrupts the recovery, and produces increasingly negative affect.