Your mobile phone indeed means your social network: Priming mobile phone activates relationship related concepts

Abstract Mobile phones have become an integral part of life, drawing researchers' attention to their behavioral consequences. Yet, we know little about the psychological associations of mobile phones. It has been proposed that due to their role in maintaining social relationships, the mobile phone, as an object, has become the representation of a person's social network. This paper empirically investigates this idea. A sample of 154 university students participated in an experiment that tested the cognitive consequences of activating the concept of a mobile phone. We primed the concept of a mobile phone and measured the accessibility of thoughts related to social relationships with a word fragment completion task. People reminded of their mobile phones (vs. neutral personal objects) found significantly more words related to social networks, demonstrating the association between social relationships and the idea of mobile phones. Additionally, priming people with their mobile phones was associated with lower need to belong.

[1]  Alekseĭ Nikolaevich Leontʹev.  Problems of the development of the mind , 1981 .

[2]  András Kornai,et al.  Web-based frequency dictionaries for medium density languages , 2006 .

[3]  J. Bargh,et al.  Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-activation on action. , 1996, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  L. Vygotsky.  Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes: Harvard University Press , 1978 .

[5]  A. Greenwald,et al.  Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. , 1998, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[6]  Celeste E. Doerr,et al.  Liberty and Justice for All? Implications of Exposure to the U.S. Flag for Intergroup Relations , 2007, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[7]  C. Lam.  The Efficacy of Text Messaging to Improve Social Connectedness and Team Attitude in Student Technical Communication Projects , 2013 .

[8]  M. Leary,et al.  Construct Validity of the Need to Belong Scale: Mapping the Nomological Network , 2013, Journal of personality assessment.

[9]  B. Thornton,et al.  The Mere Presence of a Cell Phone May be Distracting , 2014 .

[10]  J. Bargh,et al.  The perception–behavior expressway: Automatic effects of social perception on social behavior. , 2001 .

[11]  James A. Roberts,et al.  The invisible addiction: Cell-phone activities and addiction among male and female college students , 2014, Journal of behavioral addictions.

[12]  Kenichi Ishii.  Implications of Mobility: The Uses of Personal Communication Media in Everyday Life , 2006 .

[13]  Kenneth J. Gergen,et al.  Self And Community In The New Floating Worlds , 2003 .

[14]  Marcus Ynalvez,et al.  Are mobile phones changing social networks? A longitudinal study of core networks in Kerala , 2011, New Media Soc..

[15]  Jian Li,et al.  College students' cell phone use and attachment to parents and peers , 2016, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[16]  Linda Simon,et al.  Terror Management and Self-Awareness: Evidence that Mortality Salience Provokes Avoidance of the Self-Focused State , 1998 .

[17]  Ran Wei,et al.  Staying connected while on the move , 2006, New Media Soc..

[18]  C. Rovee-Collier,et al.  Infants Form Associations Between Memory Representations of Stimuli That Are Absent , 2006, Psychological science.

[19]  Stefana Broadbent,et al.  Intimacy at Work: How Digital Media Bring Private Life to the Workplace , 2015 .

[20]  Katelyn Y. A. McKenna,et al.  Relationship formation on the Internet: What's the big attraction? , 2002 .

[21]  Daniel L. Schacter,et al.  Priming effects in word-fragment completion are independent of recognition memory. , 1982 .

[22]  S. Dixit,et al.  A Study to Evaluate Mobile Phone Dependence Among Students of a Medical College and Associated Hospital of Central India , 2010, Indian journal of community medicine : official publication of Indian Association of Preventive & Social Medicine.

[23]  Andrew K. Przybylski,et al.  Can you connect with me now? How the presence of mobile communication technology influences face-to-face conversation quality , 2013 .

[24]  Robert A. Cummins,et al.  Need for belonging, relationship satisfaction, loneliness, and life satisfaction , 2008 .

[25]  P. Greenfield,et al.  Online Communication and Adolescent Relationships , 2008, The Future of children.

[26]  David L. Strayer,et al.  Driven to Distraction: Dual-Task Studies of Simulated Driving and Conversing on a Cellular Telephone , 2001, Psychological science.

[27]  Sherry Turkle,et al.  Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other , 2011 .

[28]  Jonathan G. Shalom,et al.  Social anxiety and physiological arousal during computer mediated vs. face to face communication , 2015, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[29]  L. Horowitz,et al.  Word fragments as aids to recall: the organization of a word. , 1968, Journal of experimental psychology.

[30]  Y. Engeström.  Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. , 2001 .

[31]  R. Schvaneveldt,et al.  Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. , 1971, Journal of experimental psychology.

[32]  D. Stokols,et al.  Psychological and Health Outcomes of Perceived Information Overload , 2012 .

[33]  Patricia M. Greenfield,et al.  Technology and Informal Education: What Is Taught, What Is Learned , 2009, Science.

[34]  Jeff Schimel,et al.  Clarifying the Function of Mortality Salience-Induced Worldview Defense: Renewed Suppression or Reduced Accessibility of Death-Related Thoughts? , 2001 .

[35]  Shalini Misra,et al.  The iPhone Effect , 2016 .

[36]  R. Baumeister,et al.  The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. , 1995, Psychological bulletin.

[37]  J. Wajcman,et al.  Families without Borders: Mobile Phones, Connectedness and Work-Home Divisions , 2008 .

[38]  T. K. Srull,et al.  The Role of Category Accessibility in the Interpretation of Information About Persons: Some Determinants and Implications , 1979 .

[39]  Maarten W. Bos,et al.  Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity , 2017, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

[40]  B. Skinner,et al.  Principles of Behavior , 1944 .

[41]  Louis Leung,et al.  More Than Just Talk on the Move: Uses and Gratifications of the Cellular Phone , 2000 .

[42]  L. Srivastava,et al.  Mobile phones and the evolution of social behaviour , 2005, Behav. Inf. Technol..

[43]  Ran R. Hassin,et al.  A Single Exposure to the American Flag Shifts Support Toward Republicanism up to 8 Months Later , 2011, Psychological science.

[44]  Clifford Nass,et al.  Cognitive control in media multitaskers , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.