People's Behaviour Affected by Size of Their Mobile Phone Screen

 

A study by the Harvard Business School has found that the type of mobile device we use, and how we hold it can affect the sort of behaviour that person would exhibit in an office meeting.

Previous unrelated research had shown that adopting expansive body postures increases psychological power, so the researchers hypothesized that working on larger screen mobile devices, which forces people to physically expand, may users to behave more assertively.

The hypothesis suggests that hunching over smartphones before a stressful social interaction, such as a job interview, may undermine our confidence and performance during that interaction.

To test this, 75 participants were randomly assigned to interact with one of four electronic devices that varied in size: an iPod Touch, an iPad, a MacBook Pro (laptop computer), or an iMac (desktop computer).

As predicted, participants who worked on smaller devices behaved less assertively during the tests than people who were handed larger devices. The smaller device users tended to wait longer to interrupt an experimenter who had made them wait, or were not interrupting at all.

The report concluded that as many of us spend hours each day interacting with our electronic devices, we may, however, lose sight of the impact the device itself has on our behavior and as a result be less effective.

They suggest that some time before going into a meeting, and obviously also during it, you put your cell phone away.

On the web: iPosture: The Size of Electronic Consumer Devices Affects Our Behavior

Click on images to enlarge

Before leaving participants alone in a room, a researcher said, “If I am not here in five minutes, please come get me at the front desk.” This graph shows how long participants waited -- or whether they left the room at all. The results were tied to the size of device the participant had been using.