We’re all addicted to our phones, but are you so addicted to your phone that you text in the middle of your Econ lecture—or even in the middle of hooking up? A recent Penn State study found that college students text in all sorts of inappropriate situations, whether they’re in class, in the shower or even during sex.
In the survey, college students even admitted to texting at funerals or while using the bathroom. Penn State researchers say that college students aren’t necessarily trying to create new norms as far as texting behavior goes, but breaking the current norms is just too tempting most of the time. They added that “when [college students] receive texts, the tempation to check their texts and send messages back is much greater than the urge to pay attention to their present situation.”
In the survey, most participants said that they thought texting while in the shower was inappropriate, but 34 percent chose to text from the shower anyway. Most also agreed that texting during the Pledge of Allegiance was wrong, but 22 percent admitted having done it. And though nearly all participants could agree that texting during sex was inappropriate, 7 percent said they’d done it.
Marissa Harrison, an associate professor of psychology at Penn State Harrisburg, said, “We are all programmed to notice movement and change, so maybe those buzzes and bells of texting, just like certain sounds that used to indicate the charging of a predator, for example, reinforce the need to find out what is going on.”
Can you control the compulsion to check your phone every time it buzzes?