In an age of constant connection and instant access to information, many of us are tied to our smartphones. It would be advisable though to stop using our smartphones every once in a while—when we’re dining out with friends and family, for example—so we can truly enjoy our time with them.

In a recent study conducted by the University of British Columbia, Canada, the researchers found that people who used their smartphones during dinner with friends and family enjoyed themselves less than those who did not.

“As useful as smartphones can be, our findings confirm what many of us likely already suspected,” Ryan Dwyer, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “When we use our phones while we are spending time with people we care about—apart from offending them—we enjoy the experience less than we would if we put our devices away.”

The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, aimed to look at the effect that smartphone use has on face-to-face social interactions. Through two different experiments, the researchers found a pattern in the way smartphone use increases distraction and decreases enjoyment of in-person social interactions.

First Study

In the first study, the researchers invited over 300 people from the local community to go to dinner with friends and family at a restaurant. The participants were randomly assigned to either keep their phones on the table or put them away, without knowing that the study was intended to monitor smartphone use.

“We ensured participants did not know we were monitoring their phone use by telling all participants that we were just interested in the dining experience,” Dwyer told The University Network (TUN). “We also told participants in the phone group to leave their phones out so we could text them a one-item survey, while we told the participants in the no-phone group to put their phones away during the study, and we gave them the same survey on a piece of paper.”

After dinner, the participants were asked a variety of questions, including how much they enjoyed the experience. Participants who had their phones on the table reported that they felt more distracted, which reduced their enjoyment of time with their friends and family by about half a point less on a seven-point scale.

In addition, participants also reported that they felt slightly more bored when their phones were on the table, which came as a surprise to the researchers.

“We had predicted that people would be less bored when they had access to their smartphones, because they could entertain themselves if there was a lull in the conversation,” Dwyer said in a statement.

Second Study

This pattern of diminished enjoyment while using a smartphone was repeated in a second study involving over 100 participants. This time, the researchers sent a survey to the participants’ smartphones five times a day, asking how they had been feeling and what they had been doing for the past 15 minutes.

The participants also reported that they enjoyed their face-to-face social interactions less when they used their phones.

“This study suggests that smartphones can distract us from our face-to-face interactions, which undermines the benefits we derive from these interactions,” Dwyer told TUN.