Though cellphones are usually considered devices that connect people, they may make users less socially minded, finds a recent study from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Marketing¹ 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 Use on 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 cellphone use the subjects were less inclined to volunteer for a community service activity when asked, compared to the control-group counterparts. The cell phone users were also less persistent² in solving word problems -- even though they knew their answers would translate to a monetary³ 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 a similar pattern of effects with people from other age groups," said Ferraro. "Given the increasing pervasiveness⁴（广泛性） of cellphones, it does have the potential to have broad social implications."

The authors cited previous research in explaining a root cause of their findings: "The cellphone directly evokes⁵（引起） feelings of connectivity to others, thereby⁶ fulfilling the basic human need to belong." This results in reducing one's desire to connect with others or to engage in empathic and prosocial behavior.

The study also distinguished⁷ its subjects from users of other social media -- Facebook users -- in one of the tests. The authors found that participants felt more connected to others because of their cellphones than because of their Facebook accounts, suggesting that this difference in connectedness was the underlying⁸ driver of the observed phenomenon.

Related investigation⁹ involves the authors studying the effects of using other types of technology on prosocial behavior.