Post Last Edit by midory at 17-2-2012 10:48
Guna Telefon Bimbit Jadikan Manusia 'selfish'?
Though cellphones are usually considered devices thatconnect people, they may make users less socially minded, finds a recent studyfrom the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Marketing professors Anastasiya Pocheptsova and Rosellina Ferraro, with graduate student, Ajay T.Abraham, conducted a series of experiments on test groups of cellphone users.The findings appear in their working paper,
The Effect of Mobile Phone Useon Prosocial Behavior.
Prosocial behavior, as defined in the study, is action intended to benefit another person or society as a whole.
The researchers found that after a short period of cellphoneuse the subjects were less inclined to volunteer for a community serviceactivity when asked, compared to the control-group counterparts. The cell phoneusers were also less persistent in solving word problems – even though theyknew their answers would translate to a monetary donation to charity.
The decreased focus on others held true even when participants were merely asked to draw a picture of their cellphones and think about how they used them.
The study involved separate sets of college student subjects– both men and women and generally in their early 20s. “We would expect asimilar pattern of effects with people from other age groups,” said Ferraro.“Given the increasing pervasiveness of cellphones, it does have the potentialto have broad social implications.”
The authors cited previous research in explaining a rootcause of their findings: “The cellphone directly evokes feelings ofconnectivity to others, thereby fulfilling the basic human need to belong.”This results in reducing one’s desire to connect with others or to engage inempathic and prosocial behavior.
The study also distinguished its subjects from users ofother social media — Facebook users — in one of the tests. The authors foundthat participants felt more connected to others because of their cellphonesthan because of their Facebook accounts, suggesting that this difference inconnectedness was the underlying driver of the observed phenomenon.
Related investigation involves the authors studying theeffects of using other types of technology on prosocial behavior.
credit to scienceblog Last edited by midory on 4-4-2013 10:30 PM
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Post time 17-2-2012 10:45 AM
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