Two studies that have gotten some play in the last couple days suggest a connection between antisocial behavior and technology use. First, UNC Chapel Hill professor Barbara Fredrickson writes in the New York Times about recent research suggesting that over engagement with technology affects “our biological capacity to connect with other people:”

When you share a smile or laugh with someone face to face, a discernible synchrony emerges between you, as your gestures and biochemistries, even your respective neural firings, come to mirror each other. It’s micro-moments like these, in which a wave of good feeling rolls through two brains and bodies at once, that build your capacity to empathize as well as to improve your health.

If you don’t regularly exercise this capacity, it withers. Lucky for us, connecting with others does good and feels good, and opportunities to do so abound.

The piece goes through the usual steps you’d expect in a piece like this: technology, neuroplasticity, meditation and its benefits. (Does anyone not know this stuff at this point?) Fortunately, she doesn’t make the mistake of conflating neuroplasticity with inevitability:

So the next time you see a friend, or a child, spending too much of their day facing a screen, extend a hand and invite him back to the world of real social encounters. You’ll not only build up his health and empathic skills, but yours as well. Friends don’t let friends lose their capacity for humanity.

In other words, through deliberate practice you can rebuild a capacity for sociability.

Second, University of Winnipeg psychologists Paul Trapnell and Lisa Sinclair, spent the last three years testing 2,300 students on their texting habits, personality, and ambitions. 

Text more than 100 times a day and you’re 30 per cent less likely “to feel strongly that leading an ethical, principled life was important,” say the data, in comparison to those who texted 50 times or less a day.

And even worse, “Higher texting frequency was also consistently associated with higher levels of ethnic prejudice,” said the study….

Trapnell and Sinclair also reported significant annual declines since 2006 in first-year students’ mean levels of self-reported reflectiveness and openness to experience, but not in any other broad personality traits annually measured in their surveys.

About 30 per cent of students reported texting 200-plus times a day.

Twelve per cent reported texting 300-plus times per day.

Those who texted frequently also tended to be significantly less reflective than those who texted less often, the researchers learned.

I can’t find the original paper, but Trapnell is quoted as saying that there are “modest but consistent associations” between texting and being a Kardashian, so I can’t say how big the differences are absolute terms. Nor is there an indication of whether texting causes anti-social feeling, or people who have lower empathy are more likely to text; still, it’s interesting that they’ve been doing this since 2006.