# Linking Phubbing Behavior to Self-Reported Attentional Failures and Media Multitasking
## 4 Discussion
Interestingly, the correlations between phubbing behavior and everyday attentional failures (_rs_ = 0.45-0.72) were stronger than those observed between media multitasking and everyday attentional failures (for MMI-2, _rs_ = 0.27-0.60; for MMM-S, _rs_ = 0.18-0.52). This suggests that attention may be more implicated for phubbing than it is for media multitasking, which could help to explain some of the conflicting findings between media multitasking and self-reported attentional abilities [32; 33; 34; 35; 36; 37]. Particularly, some studies have found frequent media multitasking to be associated with impaired reports of task monitoring and switching [32; 33; 34], while others have failed to find any such relationship [35]. Another potential explanation of these results could be that phubbing behavior and media multitasking may not require the same attentional abilities. Future studies should explore how various other attentional abilities may be associated with phubbing and media multitasking to better interpret and expand upon our findings. Prior to the current study, the conceptual relatedness and indirect associations between phubbing and media multitasking were not yet proposed. This could possibly be due to the fact that phubbing has been primarily investigated through social and personality frameworks, and media multitasking has been primarily, but not exclusively, investigated from a cognitive framework. Similarly, we could not find any studies that directly tested for a relationship between phubbing and media multitasking. To address this gap, we examined the correlation between phubbing and media multitasking. We discovered significantly positive correlations between GSP scores and MMI-2 and MMM-S scores. These results imply that individuals who engage in phubbing behavior also frequently media multitask. This further suggests that media multitasking and phubbing are two similar yet distinct manifestations of technology use and multitasking behaviors. Additionally, related to media multitasking, we identified the MMM-S [48] to be a shorter, viable alternative to the original 132-item MMI [25] and modified yet equally lengthy adaptions such as the MMI-2 [46; 47] for an adult participant pool sampled from the United States. Prior to our study, it appeared the MMM-S had not been used or validated in a sample of adults located in the United States. Lengthier surveys such as the MMI and MMI-2 could result in low participant motivation that encourages response errors and poor response quality. Identifying shorter, equally valid instrumentation is valuable because it lessens overall study completion time, leaving room to include other measures, and it potentially reduces participant attrition, both of which are especially important for online studies. Overall, the current study lays the groundwork for future research aimed at better characterizing the relationship between cognitive abilities and various technology use and multitasking behaviors. That said, no study is without limitations, including the current study. For example, using self-report measures allowed us to explore a wide variety of everyday attentional failures as they are associated with, and are predictive of, phubbing behavior. However, we realize that a limitation of self-report measures is that respondents may be influenced by social desirability [59]. Future research interested in expanding upon our findings could use cognitive behavioral tasks to better clarify and tease apart such relationships. Specifically, while we found self-reported task switching ability to be strongly correlated with and predictive of phubbing behavior, it is not clear if these patterns would be similar should future studies use reaction time measures of task switching performance. Another limitation is our conceptualization of multitasking primarily as task switching in the current study. Task switching is just one multitasking domain.