Savvy Texting, Hindered Competence? Smartphone Use Has a Negative Relationship with Social Communication Competence

Research suggests that smartphone use divides people’s attention and can disrupt face-to-face social interaction to include negatively impacting in-person communication fluency. Using a newly developed, reliable scale to measure social communication competence, we find that excessive smartphone use relates to diminished fluency in nonverbal and inferred social communication.