# Linking Phubbing Behavior to Self-Reported Attentional Failures and Media Multitasking
## 4 Discussion
This implies that, when examined alongside other everyday attentional abilities, reports of lower distractibility predicted a higher phubbing behavior. One potential interpretation could be that because a \"phubber's\" attention is prioritized toward their phone, they are unlikely to be distracted away from their phone by their conversational partner (rather than be distracted away from their conversational partner by their phone) and this leads to greater phone snubbing behavior. However, this interpretation should be taken with caution given the strong bivariate correlations between our predictor variables, though again multicollinearity was likely not an issue because the VIFs for all predictors in both regression models were below 5 [54]. Replications of our study, as well as perhaps employing a smaller number of measures, could provide more insight. To account for other potential predictors of phubbing behavior, we expanded our initial regression model to include the six a priori attention predictors in addition to demographics, such as age, and select psychosocial and personality variables, including impulsivity, self-regulation, and social connectedness. The variance in phubbing behavior scores increased from 61% in the initial regression model to 63% in the expanded regression model. In this expanded regression model, attention-related cognitive errors remained the biggest predictor of phubbing behavior and was again followed by attentional shifting. Notably, deliberate mind wandering replaced spontaneous mind wandering as the third biggest predictor of phubbing behavior. Though characteristics such as impulsivity, self-regulation, and social connectedness were significantly correlated with phubbing behavior, they were not significant predictors of phubbing behavior. Again, most of the past research on phubbing has used social and personality frameworks. It is surprising that we did not find these select variables to predict phubbing behavior when investigated alongside attention variables. This further emphasizes the importance of investigating phubbing through a cognitive framework. One interpretation of our results could be that attentional abilities can perhaps better explain and predict engagement in this technoference behavior rather than certain personality and psychosocial variables, although more research is needed to verify such a claim. Regardless, our results emphasize the need for future research to further investigate how individual differences in cognitive abilities relate to and predict this technoference behavior. Our secondary aim was to explore the indirect and direct associations between phubbing and media multitasking. Phubbing and media multitasking both appear to be technology multitasking behaviors, as they involve paying attention to a media activity either while engaging in a social interaction or alongside another media activity. Because these technology use behaviors appear to be conceptually related, exploring the indirect and direct associations among phubbing and media multitasking helped us better understand these different aspects of human-technology interaction. We first investigated the indirect relationship between phubbing and media multitasking by testing if these two behaviorsshared the same directional relationship among various measures of everyday attentional failures. Consolidating separate pieces of past research has revealed that phubbing and media multitasking are indirectly related among several psychosocial and personality constructs, such as sensation seeking [14; 27; 28; 29] and fear of missing out [6; 7; 13; 27], and it was possible that a similar trend could be revealed in terms of cognitive abilities, particularly as it concerns attention. We discovered that phubbing and media multitasking shared the same significant positive associations across all measures of perceived attentional failures.