I'm going to describe one extremely simple step you can take to dramatically improve the quality of your conversations and the closeness and intimacy of your relationships.

And although it's simple, it's not easy.

In fact, most people simple will not do it.

I want to talk about a simple step that we can all take to improve the quality of our conversations. If I go on Reddit’s social skills page, everybody there is talking about, "How can I improve the quality of my conversations?" If you look around the news media, there's always studies about loneliness. I was reading the news this morning and about all of these studies about the plague of loneliness effecting people of all ages. People that were alone and who were unsatisfied, not just with the quantity of their relationships, but with the quality of their relationships.

If you look in your own personal relationships, you find that people are often dissatisfied with the quality of their communication in their relationships. I started this website and YouTube channel in part to improve on those kinds of challenges. To help you improve, I've tried to teach you about a variety of techniques, especially involving listening and how you exhibit empathy in a face-to-face conversation, how you manage embarrassment and loss of face. These are all fundamentals of getting along in a face-to-face conversation.

But I think in the modern world, there's an even simpler thing that you can do to improve the quality of your conversations and deepen the intimacy and the level of connectedness you feel in your relationships. Put away your phone. You've got to put away your phone. You just absolutely have to. I'm talking to myself as much as I'm talking to you. Bruce, you've got to put away your phone. These things are not just incredibly distracting, they damage our ability to concentrate, to do deep work and to learn things fast.

I made a video about Cal Newport's book on digital minimalism, where the whole book describes getting rid of our phones in part so we can improve the quality of our conversations. In that book, he quotes at length a different book called Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle, where she makes the same basic point. I was listening to Sherry Turkle's book the other day and she was saying there are these studies that show even the mere presence of a cell phone in an interaction, even if neither person is using the phone, diminishes the quality of the interaction.

I had found this a little bit hard to believe so I actually went online and searched for these papers. I found two with fascinating results. One of them was done in the laboratory and one was done in a Starbucks coffee shop setting, and both amazingly found the same thing. I'll describe the experimental study first.

Study #1 - “Can You connect with me now?”

In this experimental study, they brought people into a laboratory and had them sit facing one another, with a table between them off to the right. In one condition, there was a cell phone sitting on a book face down on the table, off to the side. In another condition, there was just a little notebook shaped like a cell phone sitting on the book on the coffee table off to the side.

Then they had people talk about either kind of a trivial topic or a meaningful topic for 10 minutes. Afterwards, they filled out a bunch of questionnaires about their level of connectedness and the quality of the conversation and so on. To cut to the conclusions, the mere presence of the cellphone led to a decrease in the perceived quality of the conversation, along a variety of dimensions - empathy, connectedness, intimacy.

They used many different kinds of social scientific scales to measure the quality of the conversation. But using each of those scales, the mere presence of the cellphone inhibited and took away from the quality of the conversation. This is a really surprising finding.

When they interviewed the participants after the study, they asked them if they even noticed the cell phone and lots of the subjects didn't even notice the cell phone, or at least they claimed not to. So, some of these effects are taking place at the level below conscious awareness. It isn't necessarily that we're thinking, "Oh, there's a cell phone. I'm going to be distracted by knowing that it's even there. It might ring or something." Somehow even at the level below conscious awareness, the presence of a cell phone makes our conversations less enjoyable, less meaningful, and less intimate.

Study #2 - “The Iphone effect”

Some researchers took that study, which was done in the laboratory, and they wanted to see, could they extend it in a real-world setting? Would it still be valid in the real world? So they went to a bunch of coffee shops and observed 100 pairs of people in coffee shops.

They would go to a coffee shop and recruit people who came into the coffee shop in pairs. They approached them at the counter and said, "Would you like to be in this study? We want to study conversation." The people who agreed had a conversation in front of a research assistant who observed them for 10 minutes while they talked. Again, either about a superficial topic or a meaningful topic.

Here, the researchers didn't control whether or not a cell phone was present. They just observed whether or not either person in the pair took out a cell phone. And again, at the end of the 10 minutes, they took a bunch of social scientific questionnaires about intimacy and empathy and connectedness and the quality of the conversation and so on. They essentially replicated the same finding that in the conversations where the cell phone came out, the quality of the conversation by both people was perceived to be less than in the conversations where the cell phone did not come out.

I think this fact alone probably isn't surprising to lots of you, because I think we all intuitively sense the cell phone is like the third person in the conversation. You're trying to connect with someone and talk and they're either looking at their phone or their phone is there on the table and it's a constant source of distraction.

How Does the Theory Work?

It is interesting to think about how, what's the mechanism of this effect? That is how does the presence of the cell phone, or taking out a cell phone during a conversation, detract from the conversation? These authors offer a variety of explanations.

One is that the presence of the cellphone simply reminds us of this larger web of relationships that we exist in. It reminds us that anyone who is symbolically ‘inside’ the phone could be wanting to talk to us, or we could be talking to them. So it distracts us. It pulls our attention away. In that way, the phone detracts our ability to actually connect with the person who we're sitting across from.

Of course, there's also the possibility presence of a phone is constantly tempting you, since it has an addictive quality to it. You seek the hit from Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or something like that. Its presence is tempting because you could get a little dopamine hit if you picked up the phone and began to scroll. This also distracts you from engaging in the conversation and thereby decreases the quality of the conversation. The clear implication of these studies and our own intuition tells us, I said at the beginning is simple, but not easy. We’ve got to put the phones down.

The Digital Generation

I grew up for the first 42 years of my life without an iPhone. So I actually learned to have conversations without an iPhone present, but I'm just as hooked on the iPhone as everybody else now. At least I kind of developed before the iPhone could ruin my ability to socialize.

But as I go around the internet, especially in places like Reddit social skills and other places where people are concerned to improve their communication skills, they go on and on and people say things like, "I don't know how to have a conversation. I don't know how to keep a conversation going. I don't know how to respond to people. I don't know how to connect to people." They bemoan that they're lonely, socially isolated, and unable to succeed in relationships.

But of course, these people are on Reddit and presumably getting to Reddit via a smartphone or a tablet or a computer. I don't believe that iPhones are responsible for every social ill. I think that's overly simplified. A lot of the research about the relationship between digital devices and outcomes should be carefully questioned. We should be skeptical about it, probably including these two studies. But at least they've been replicated once.

Summary

Even if iPhones are not responsible for every problem in our culture, for suicide and loneliness and depression and anxiety and homelessness or whatever else we want to blame on the iPhone, I think it's pretty clear that the presence of these devices can have a detrimental effect on our relationships and especially on the quality of our conversations. If for no other reason, they represent a constant distraction and a high-quality conversation requires attention. It requires a lot of energy to maintain the focus of attention on the other person, on all of their verbal and nonverbal behavior so that we can respond empathically.

All those other videos I made about empathy assume that you're paying attention, that you're listening to what the other person is saying, and that you're closely observing their behavior so that you can respond empathically to what they say and do. But the presence of a phone draws our attention away from the interaction and thereby makes us just poorer counterparts in any kind of conversation. We're basically bad company when we've got the iPhone out.

What's the answer? Put the damn phone away when you're at a restaurant, put the damn phone away when you're talking to your boyfriend or girlfriend, put the damn phone away when you're talking to your children, put the damn phone away.

Again, am I guilty of this? Absolutely. I'm trying to convince myself to do this so that I can improve the quality of my own conversations. So that's it, a simple, but I think powerful opportunity to improve the quality of your social relationships. Put the damn phone away.