Smartphones reduce smiles between strangers

New developments in technology-from the printing press to television-have long facilitated our capacity for “absent presence,” enabling us to escape the limits of our immediate environment. Does being constantly connected to other people and activities through our smartphones diminish the need to engage with others in the immediate social world, reducing the likelihood of approach behavior such as smiling? In a preregistered experiment, strangers waited together with or without their smartphones; their smiling was later coded by trained assistants. Compared to participants without smartphones, participants with smartphones exhibited significantly fewer smiles of any kind and fewer genuine (Duchenne) smiles. These findings are based on objective behavioral coding rather than self-report and provide clear evidence that being constantly connected to the digital world may undermine important approach behavior.