Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

by Manoush Zomorodi

In a study from 2014 called The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices, researchers at Virginia Tech found that the mere presence of a mobile device, even just lying there, seemingly benign on the kitchen counter, can lower the empathy exchanged between two friends. In a “naturalistic field experiment,” one hundred pairs of people were assigned a ten-minute conversation and then observed from a distance. If people happened to have a mobile device in their hands or on the table, they were not told to put the phones away. And guess what? “It was found that conversations in the absence of mobile communication technologies were rated as significantly superior compared with those in the presence of a mobile device, above and beyond the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, and mood,” the study noted. “People who had conversations in the absence of mobile devices reported higher levels of empathetic concern. Participants conversing in the presence of a mobile device who also had a close relationship with each other reported lower levels of empathy compared with pairs who were less friendly with each other.”