# An Explorative Model to Assess Individuals' Phubbing Risk
## 1 Introduction  
The impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) (e.g., smartphone, tablet, kindle, smartwatch) on people's everyday lives is very noticeable [1; 2]. Indeed, for instance, millions of people all over the world relate to others simply by using their phone [3]. Despite merely remaining updated about who contacted us, smartphones and other ICTs devices also permit handling our own virtual social identity and keep in touch with relevant virtual social communities [4]. In such sense, virtual environments have a strong social attractiveness. Consequently, brand new psychological questions and issues emerged. Indeed, while the world is becoming more and more connected, people can develop addictions in response to this wider possibility of virtual contacts and thus becoming more disconnected from reality [5]. Despite recent studies that highlighted a positive influence of smartphones in professional environments such as health care coordination [6], infrastructure monitoring [7], and in promoting socialization with geographically distant individuals, in other cases, smartphone usage could be detrimental for individuals' well-being [8; 9; 10]. Phubbing behavior (i.e., the habit of snubbing someone in favor of a mobile phone) has recently received a growing attention among those psychological issues and consequences related to smartphone usage [11; 12; 13; 14]. Phubbing is derived from the union of the words \"phone\" and \"snubbing\", and describes the action of ignoring someone in a social environment by looking at the phone instead of paying attention to the other person [15]. Phubbing is also prominent during intimate social interactions. For instance, a large number of couples interrupt repeatedly their meal while eating together to check their phone for messages or missed calls [16]. Phubbing is considered by the scientific literature as a new form of addiction [14; 17], a compulsive behavior realized in order to temporary escape and avoid a particular stressful situation or negative thoughts and emotions. Since more and more people are becoming addicted to their smartphones [18], web-based platform and online services relying on mobile phones should rapidly find a solution to avoid addiction-related taxes (similarly to cigarette use) and to meet well-being required standards [19]. One possible way to achieve this goal relies on understanding which individual characteristics are linked to smartphone addiction and thus profiling the user according to these parameters to assess their phubbing-related risk. However, the current literature is a little meagre, and there are only a few studies that investigate phubbing's possible predictors and they certainly did not give us the full picture of this complex phenomenon. For instance, psychological constructs like anxiety, self-efficacy and personality were not fully taken into consideration and several studies demonstrated that all these observables can trigger a compulsive behavior [20; 21; 22]. In particular, neuroticism, trait anxiety, as well as social involvement, appeared very related to online addiction behaviors [23; 24]. On the one hand, phubbing could be defined as a form of addiction, in which the compulsive component appears to be preeminent. On the other, checking the phone ignoring the speaker could also be linked to the increased availability of virtual social environments. In the latter case, the attention could simply be directed towards the social group perceived at that moment as more salient. Smartphones and virtual environments' great availability potentially increased the number of social identities to be managed at the same time. For instance, people often use more than a social network [25]. Furthermore, people try to re-create their offline self online. However, individuals spend efforts in editing self's facets to project a given identity online [26]. Thus, virtual identities managing process could be very time consuming and can lead to privilege virtual environments even to the detriment of face-to-face interactions.