Why Do We Still Look At Others’ Phone Screens Knowing It's Just Rude?

Well don’t you worry. You are not the only one who’s been doing this kind of rude stuff just because it’s in your sight.

About ten years ago, with desktops and laptops are the only computer screens being the only computer screens that people have the access to, people knew it was rude looking at others’ screen. Nowadays, things are just a little bit different. Screens of smartphones have become portable, larger in size and also brighter. How can we keep our eyes off it?

This is also the reason of "shoulder surfing". The term is used to denote the act of glancing at others’ phone screen when they are in use, and for most of the time, they have no notice of being looked at. Sometimes you do it unconsciously. Other times you might just follow other people also looking at that phone screen, just because we cannot resist the temptation of phone screens.

Even though in the past, criminals often used this kind of act to steal other people’s passwords and data, it is now a much more common thing. According to researchers at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, smartphones are now "mostly casual and opportunistic". If discovering someone sneakily look at your phone screen on a bus or a train, it is very likely that they are not trying to steal your information of something like that. We just simply cannot say no to a phone screen that is right in front of our eyes.

The researchers once used questionnaires to ask people randomly about a hypothetical situation. In this situation, a fictional character calleded "Vic" looks over “Cas”, another fictional character, to see her phone screen. People doing the questionnaire are asked if they have experienced the same situation or not.

And collected results show that:

Having that kind of feelings, then why do people still look at others’ phone screens? The simplest answer is, we are just curious, or, bored. However, when it comes to our own phone screen, none of us adores the idea of someone else looking at it, no matter what we are doing with the phone.