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Tactful calling: investigating asymmetric social

dilemmas in mobile communications
a b b c a
Ohad Inbar , Gesche Joost , Fabian Hemmert , Talya Porat & Noam Tractinsky
a
Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, PO Box 643, Beer
Sheva 84105, Israel
b
Design Research Lab, Berlin University of the Arts, and Deutsche Telekom Laboratories,
Berlin, Germany
c
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, PO Box 643, Beer
Sheva 84105, Israel
Accepted author version posted online: 28 May 2014.Published online: 07 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Ohad Inbar, Gesche Joost, Fabian Hemmert, Talya Porat & Noam Tractinsky (2014): Tactful calling:
investigating asymmetric social dilemmas in mobile communications, Behaviour & Information Technology, DOI:
10.1080/0144929X.2014.928743

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 Behaviour & Information Technology, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2014.928743

Tactful calling: investigating asymmetric social dilemmas in mobile communications

Ohad Inbara , Gesche Joostb , Fabian Hemmertb , Talya Poratc and Noam Tractinskya∗
a InformationSystems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, PO Box 643, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel; b Design Research Lab,
Berlin University of the Arts, and Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany; c Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, PO Box 643, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel
(Received 26 June 2011; accepted 21 May 2014 )

Recipients of phone calls face a constant dilemma between ignoring calls at the possible expense of offending the caller,
missing business opportunities or neglecting family members on one hand; and answering them at the expense of interrupting
their train of thought or appearing rude and impolite towards others with whom they share a social activity on the other hand.
Downloaded by [Ben Gurion University of the Negev] at 07:46 09 July 2014

We studied people’s attitudes regarding these dilemmas, with emphasis on their social aspects. In a cross-cultural study,
conducted in Israel and in Germany, we surveyed both caller and recipient attitudes towards answering mobile phone calls in
various circumstances. The study also assessed the aspects of providing contextual information about a call prior to it being
answered, including types of information deemed most valuable. The results emphasise the importance of social norms in
affecting respondents’ attitudes towards making or accepting phone calls regardless of role (caller or recipient), gender or
culture. We also found that the norms in the physical context (e.g. being in a meeting) prevailed over norms in the virtual
context (e.g. the phone call). Cultural and gender differences did not affect the degree to which people were frustrated by
insufficient information regarding the other party’s context. However, these factors did affect the suggested design solutions
to this problem. The research provides insight into the social aspects of the problem of interruptive mobile phone calls and
towards designing applications that help users maintain politeness while handling the caller–recipient dilemma.
Keywords: mobile phones; politeness; self-others; gender differences; social dilemmas; tactful calling

1. Introduction
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was considered
impolite and even rude for women to initiate phone calls to
men, as a “‘tactful” girl will avoid all appearance of pur-
suing the man of her acquaintance’ (Telephony 1907, 138).
While this social etiquette, among other guidelines sug-
gested by telephone companies (Rakow 1988), is long gone
in most cultures, other etiquettes are still widely accepted
(Licoppe and Heurtin 2001; Cimino 2009). It appears to be
socially acceptable for conversations on the mobile phone
to be briefer and more purpose-driven than their land-
line equivalents. It is also understood that the answering
party may be distracted or limited by other activities or
events. Thus, mobile phone owners need to balance the
new demands posed by the greater accessibility and the
interruptive nature of mobile phones (Lenhart et al. 2010).
We derive great value from being able to connect
with others easily and constantly. However, people often
find themselves overwhelmed by too many communication
opportunities and distracting interruptions (Hancock et al.
2009; Birnholtz et al. 2010; Reynolds et al. 2011). Conse-
quently, people lose control over their social interactions.
For example, Birnholtz (2010) found that users abandoned
instant messaging (IM) since they desired more control over
who could interrupt them and at what times.
A recent case study on gender aspects in mobile
communication (Joost and Buchmüller 2009; Buchmüller
et al. 2011), which focused mainly on female perspectives,
often a neglected aspect when developing new Information
and Communication Technology (ICT) services (Bratteteig
2002; Oudshoorn, Rommes, and Stienstra 2004), teased out
additional aspects of the problem. The main topics dis-
cussed by the participants were communication with one’s
social network, privacy and data control, as well as the need
for non-communication and time-out. The study gained
insights into the difficulty of handling both professional
and private life and the role which ICT plays in aiding
the juggling between the two. Participants clearly indicated
the need for ‘time-off’ (i.e. not being available on their
mobile phone) due to the stress created by mobile com-
munication overload. However, mothers of young children
reported that they feared they might miss an emergency call
if they completely turned off their phones. Joost and Buch-
müller’s studies also showed that rejecting a call from a
known person was perceived by many as impolite. Partic-
ipants reported embarrassing situations in which they did

∗ Corresponding author. Email: noamt@bgu.ac.il

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 2 O. Inbar et al.
not want to answer a call, but also did not feel comfortable
rejecting the call, for fear that the caller might know that
s/he was rejected intentionally. Therefore, the phone con-
tinued ringing and stressed the recipient even more. Thus,
participants expressed the need to manage one’s availability
in certain times and for certain callers or caller groups and
the desire for ICT support for such needs.
Our research aims to study various aspects of this prob-
lem to help users regain control over their social interactions
by decreasing distracting interruptions while being polite to
their social counterparts. More specifically, we study one of
the dilemmas that mobile phone users face: trying to balance
the tension between the obligation to be constantly available
on the phone, the stress induced by too many calls and the
fear of being impolite by either answering the call or not.
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We approached the problem by analysing it from vari-
ous theoretical perspectives, which are described in the next
section. We define the research approach and questions in
Section 3. In Section 4, we describe the research method –
a questionnaire-based study designed and administered to
investigate the problem space from four different perspec-
tives: role in the phone conversation (caller vs. recipient),
the self-other perspective, gender and culture. Following
the study’s results (Section 5), we conclude by describing
how the study’s results could inform a revised thinking of
the problem and possible future solutions.
2. Background
Technology-mediated social interaction carries a number
of unique challenges that stem from both general social
processes and specific contexts (Grudin 1994). In this study,
we were confronted with two major questions:
• What are the key issues required to resolve the tension
between peoples’ desire to respond to incoming calls
on the one hand, and to adhere to social norms of
behaviour, which often preclude answering calls in
certain circumstances, on the other?
• How can people be polite both to the calling party and
to people with whom they share a current activity?
In this section, we review the aspects of these prob-
lems that appear to reflect a fundamental aspect of mobile
communication.
2.1. Asymmetry in communication
In face-to-face social situations, most people know when
it is acceptable to interrupt someone else’s activity (Marti
and Schmandt 2005), making use of a rich set of visual
and auditory information regarding the other party’s avail-
ability (Wiberg and Whittaker 2005). Conversely, in tele-
phone usage, the caller tends to lack information about the
recipient’s current activities (Nardi and Whittaker 2002;
Danninger et al. 2007). Furthermore, and differing from
landline telephony, in mobile phones, the caller has no infor-
mation about the recipient’s whereabouts, making it harder
to predict possible activities the recipient might be engaged
in (Avrahami et al. 2007). Thus, a caller may be calling at
his or her convenience, but the recipients of such calls may
find themselves interrupted under unfavourable conditions
(Bardram and Hansen 2004): The call may be unexpected
and its specifics (e.g. the topic and the expected duration)
may be unknown (Nardi, Whittaker, and Bradner 2000).
A phone call may be a major cause of interruption since
it ‘requires immediate attention’ and ‘insists on action’
(Covey 1989). While interruptions may at times be wel-
come, their negative impact appears to be more salient.
Receiving calls at inconvenient times disrupts people’s
current activities regardless of whether they choose to
answer the calls (Love and Perry 2004; Milewski 2006;
De Guzman, Sharmin, and Bailey 2007), and requires them
to remember the content and status of the original activity
that has been interrupted (Wiberg and Whittaker 2005). A
recent survey (Lenhart et al. 2010) found that 38% of parents
and 48% of teens with mobile phones are irritated by incom-
ing calls or text messages. Moreover, interruptions from
incoming calls are not limited to the recipient. As a ring-
ing phone requires immediate attention, all prior activities
involving third parties are put on hold. Thus, mobile phones
simultaneously occupy multiple social spaces with poten-
tially conflicting norms of behaviour: the physical spaces
that the caller and the recipient occupy, and the virtual space
where the conversation takes place (Palen, Salzman, and
Youngs 2000). This can negatively affect ongoing face-to-
face interactions (e.g. during meetings), as talking on the
phone results in psychological disengagement between the
recipient and her/his prior partner in conversation (Geser
2004). It may also generate a ‘need-to-listen’ (eaves-
dropping) effect in others who are exposed to only one
side of the conversation (Monk, Fellas, and Ley 2004;
Humphreys 2005).
2.2. Social norms
The uncertainty surrounding the norms for mobile phone
use in public stems from the conflicting nature of private
and public space, which inhibits social interaction with
proximate others (strangers or known persons) (Banjo, Hu,
and Shyam Sundar 2008). Using a mobile phone in pub-
lic places can distract users from social responsibilities, as
they neglect the surrounding environment (Banjo, Hu, and
Shyam Sundar 2008), ‘in a sense prioritizing the absent
other over those who are physically co-present’ (Campbell
2007, 739). The mobile phone can be seen as an ‘indis-
creet’ technology, one which leaks the personal into the
public (Hoflich 2006). The mobile phone upsets the estab-
lished practices of proximity and distance. Such behaviour
‘lacks civility’ because someone is troubling others, against
their will, with the ‘burden of one’s self’. Ling (1999) found
that co-present others openly scorned mobile phone users
 Behaviour & Information Technology
when they judged mobile phone use as inappropriate. The
uncertainty about the etiquette of mobile phone usage is
reflected by efforts to curb voice calling in both formal and
informal ways, including recorded broadcasts and posters
informing passengers, attendees and visitors of restrictions
and behavioural expectations.
Mobile phone users have to constantly negotiate their
social relations on two fronts. For example, they may pass
non-verbal cues to the proximate others, or ask distant others
to wait and then apologise to them upon resuming the con-
versation (Humphreys 2005; Banjo, Hu, and Shyam Sundar
2008). This struggle is moderated by the nature of the prox-
imate environment (Banjo, Hu, and Shyam Sundar 2008).
Thus, mobile phone users’ behaviour is influenced by the
persons and the tasks with which they were engaged before
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talking on the mobile phone. For example, if someone is
chatting face to face with a proximate friend and a distant
person calls, the recipient may feel obligated to take care
of the proximate friend while talking on the phone. For
instance, they are expected to show more non-verbal cues
to the proximate other, such as nodding, eye-contact with
apology and signalling with the hand that this call will take
‘just one minute’ (Humphreys 2005).
In addition, expectations for involvement (or obligation
to proximate others) vary with the focus of the social occa-
sion. Mobile phone use during fully focused occasions,
where everyone in attendance is collectively engaged in
the same activity (e.g. theatres and classrooms), tends to
be less socially acceptable than use in partially focused
(some participants are collectively engaged in something
while others are not) or multi-focused situations (gatherings
involve more than one encounter occurring in the same set-
ting) (Campbell 2007). Thus, studies that have examined
the acceptability of mobile phone use in numerous settings
found that classrooms, churches, theatres and restaurants
were among the most irritating places for mobile phone
use, while public transportation, streets and shopping cen-
tres were among the least (e.g. Wei and Leung 1999; Hoflich
2006; Campbell 2007). Accordingly, people tend to turn
their mobile phones off or switch them to silent mode in
places such as theatres, concert halls, churches and meetings
(Caporael and Xie 2003), in order to minimise the ‘collateral
disruptions’ that it may cause (Harr and Kaptelinin 2007).
Norms for social behaviour vary also according to
culture. For example, Hoflich (2006) found French and
Germans to be much more likely to regard leaving the
mobile phone on in a restaurant as a faux pas, compared
with Italians, Spanish or English (Hoflich 2006). Campbell
(2007) found that Taiwanese participants tended to report
more tolerance for mobile phone use in a theatre, restaurant
and classroom than did participants from the other cultural
groupings. Japanese participants also tended to be more tol-
erant of mobile phone use in a classroom, but less tolerant
of use on a sidewalk – and particularly on a bus – than
were the other participants. Moreover, even within cultures,
social norms may change over time. Okabe and Ito (2005)
3
described the development of norms for mobile phone use
on Japanese public transportation. As the mobile phone
transitioned from a business tool to a general social tech-
nology, voice calling became less acceptable on crowded
Japanese trains and buses.
Still, regardless of cultural background, people do have a
desire for a private sphere in public space to be respected by
others (Hoflich 2006). But since there is no public consensus
as to what should be appropriate boundaries or acceptable
etiquette for these private behaviours in public spaces, the
struggle between satisfying the expectations of proximate
others and distant others continues to fuel the dilemma of
whether to answer or not to answer the phone in public
settings.
2.3. The caller–recipient dilemma
The inherent tension associated with decisions about
answering (or not) mobile phone calls is manifested in the
behaviour of both callers and recipients. Broadly speaking,
the tension stems from uncertainty regarding various con-
textual aspects of the call, which may lead to wrong decision
making (i.e. to call or not to call; to answer or not to answer).
The caller’s dilemma may be easier than the recipi-
ent’s, at least in the sense that callers can choose the best
timing for the call from their perspective, while recipients
have less control over the timing of the call, resulting in a
‘Caller hegemony’ (Hopper 1992). Still, callers would like
to increase the probability of fruitful conversation by not
calling at an inappropriate time for the recipient. To deter-
mine whether to initiate a call, prospective callers typically
consider their relationships with the recipient, the likeli-
hood of the recipient’s availability (e.g. location, activities,
date and time) and the characteristics of the call (e.g. impor-
tance and urgency; De Guzman, Sharmin, and Bailey 2007).
Avrahami et al. (2007) found that callers, once given addi-
tional recipient-related information, such as mobile phone
ringer state, location and presence of people around the
recipient, made more accurate decisions on whether to call.
In Pedersen’s ‘Calls Calm’ project (Pedersen 2001), phone
users were able to display status information, similar to
VoIP and messaging services (e.g. Skype). The use of self-
declared statuses, however, faces limitations when users
forget to update them (Milewski and Smith 2000). The need
for information about the recipient’s status is manifested in
caller’s tendency to use asynchronous communication, such
as IM, SMS or e-mail, to negotiate the availability for later
phone conversations (Nardi, Whittaker, and Bradner 2000;
Bardram and Hansen 2004; Danninger et al. 2007). These
findings also give a potential positive answer to the issue
raised by Grudin (1994), namely whether callers would
be willing to put the extra effort into communicating the
importance of a call before making it.
From the recipient’s viewpoint, the dilemma is more
complex. Grandhi and Jones (2010) conceptualise the
dilemma as a decision-making process regarding whether to
 4 O. Inbar et al.
answer incoming calls. When conditions are not favourable
for answering calls, people may engage in interruption–
avoidance behaviour. However, the recipient’s dilemma
becomes even more difficult because some of the avoid-
ance behaviour may carry undesirable consequences. For
example, turning off the mobile phone can result in people
missing important, urgent or desired calls, especially if they
forget to turn the phone back on. An alternative strategy
is to generally allow for interruptions, constantly making
decisions on how to respond: complete dismissal, immedi-
ate engagement or negotiation for future response (Grandhi
and Jones 2010). Clearly, the dilemma stems mostly from
the likelihood that such a strategy will interfere with the
recipient’s current activities and physical social context,
drawing her/his attention away from it. However, another
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facet of the dilemma stems from the caller’s potential neg-
ative interpretation of the recipient’s lack of response. This
complex situation may lead people to deceive others about
their actual status, availability and activities (Hancock et al.
2009; Birnholtz 2010; Birnholtz et al. 2010). Thus, white
lies or ‘butler lies’(Hancock et al. 2009), which allow
for polite entry and exit of social interactions, including
avoiding interaction and taking leave of one, are becoming
common in such situations.
Previous studies have shown that the context of the
call is quite important. The literature distinguishes three
contextual dimensions. (1) The cognitive context refers to
the cognitive or mental workload a person is experienc-
ing due to the current ongoing task or activity (McFarlane
and Latorella 2002). (2) The social context includes the
social aspects that encompass the recipient’s physical envi-
ronment, such as the place itself, the people around and
the recipient’s relationships with them, and the nature of
the social activity in which people are engaged (Fogarty
et al. 2005; Ho and Intille 2005). The social context prob-
lem is exacerbated further: previous research has shown that
speaking on mobile phones is more annoying than speaking
face to face (Monk et al. 2004). (3) Recently, Grandhi and
Jones (2010) have persuasively argued for the importance
of a third contextual dimension – the relational context,
which refers mostly to the type of relationships between
the caller and the recipient and what the call is about. Thus,
not only do the relationships influence the decision whether
to accept the call or not; the decision itself affects future
relationships (Harr and Kaptelinin 2007).
Until recently, the literature on interruption management
implicitly assumed that unexpected calls are inherently
negative, because they interrupt the cognitive and social
contexts with which the recipients are engaged. By intro-
ducing the relational context, Grandhi and Jones (2010)
counter this idea, suggesting that recipients of interrupt-
ing calls engage in a process of weighing the positive and
negative impacts of the incoming call. This process, the
‘interruption preview’, provides the recipient with informa-
tion prior to the conversation, allowing him to make a more
informed decision about whether to accept the incoming
call. The decision involves evaluating information about
the three contextual dimensions and a cost–benefit analysis
of that information (i.e. ‘do I stand to lose more or gain
more if I answer the call?’). Teevan and Hehmeyer (2013)
support this idea by showing that presenting the recipient’s
availability status results in higher likelihood of answering
calls when busy. This is explained by the fact that callers
are aware of the recipient’s status and attempt to call only
when the communication is important, and that recipients
are also aware of this fact.
Grandhi and Jones (2010) define the predicted inter-
ruption value (PIV) as the cost–benefit evaluation of an
individual’s response to the interruption based on his/her
knowledge of the cognitive, social and relational con-
texts. They suggest that a person’s first step when being
interrupted by a call is ‘to engage in the interruption as
a means to reduce uncertainty . . . to better predict the
interruption value’ (297). While the cognitive and social
contexts are clear to the individual, the relational con-
text is more uncertain and poses greater uncertainty to
recipients and more challenges to designers of interruption
management applications. In an empirical study of their
theoretical framework, Grandhi and Jones (2010) found
strong support for the importance of the relational con-
text. Almost 50% of decisions on whether to answer a
call were based on the caller’s identity (i.e. relational con-
text). Caller identity was more important in the decisions
to answer calls than in the decision as to whether to ignore
them. Cognitive and especially social contexts were used
much less in general (about 10%). However, they were used
more as reasons to ignore calls, then as reasons to answer
calls. This pattern of information use may be indicative of
the tension between the need to answer due to commit-
ments to personal relationships with the caller and the need
to conform to polite and acceptable behaviour mandated
mostly by the social context, which often requires ignoring
the call.
To conclude, it appears that the recipients of incoming
calls are engaged in an evaluative process of the costs and
benefits associated with the reaction to an incoming call.
The greater the uncertainty associated with the relational
context of the call, the greater the recipient’s dilemma as to
whether to answer the call or to ignore it. Without relational
context information, the recipient relies solely on social
context and cognitive context, when deciding whether to
answer or to ignore the call.
2.4. Approaches to designing interruption
management tools
Grandhi and Jones (2010) suggest that interruption manage-
ment approaches can be divided into two main categories.
One approach relies on reducing the impact of the inter-
ruption. The most straightforward manifestation of such
an approach is people turning off the phone when they
do not want to be interrupted. To overcome the obvious
 Behaviour & Information Technology
limitations of such a tactic, researchers have developed tools
that would take responsibility for managing calls when the
recipient cannot. These tools, however, concentrate on the
identity of the recipient and social and cognitive contexts
but do not take into consideration the relational context’s
other factors, such as the topic of the call, its importance
or urgency (Grandhi and Jones 2010). Some examples of
such tools include Horvitz et al.’s (2005) Bayes phone that
filters incoming calls based on calendar information and
contact settings; Wiberg and Whittaker’s (2005) ‘Nego-
tiator’ scheduling tool; and Bardram and Hansen’s (2004)
Aware phone.
The second approach relies on the recipient’s preview
of call information as a first step, after which a decision is
made. This approach relies on providing the recipient with
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as much pertinent information about the call as necessary
to reduce uncertainty and increase the likelihood of making
the correct choice. In addition to the increased likelihood of
making a better response decision, this strategy maintains
the recipient’s control. Grandhi and Jones (2010) found
that recipients prefer to be in control of the interruption
management decisions and to weigh the costs and bene-
fits of handling calls rather than delegate this responsibility
to automatic tools or filtering mechanisms. Examples of
attempts to manage interruptions according to this approach
include ‘Quiet Calls’ (Nelson, Bly, and Sokoler 2001),
which enabled recipients to listen to the caller silently,
without having to vocalise a response; the ‘Taming of the
Ring’ project’s proposal (Pering 2002), which allows people
to respond to calls through button-triggered, pre-recorded
voice messages; and Telling Calls (Grandhi, Schular, and
Jones 2011) that was based on the principles of the
call preview approach and allowed callers to indi-
cate several bits of information regarding the call that
recipients could see before deciding whether to answer
the call.
Taking into account the approaches described above,
an initial prototype was developed to examine a solution
that would appeal to both callers and recipients. The proto-
type was called ‘Tactful Calling’, abbreviated ‘TaCa’. On
the caller side, it allowed for the caller to indicate contex-
tual information about the call and its urgency. Urgency
was expressed by the extent of physically pressing a button
equipped with a pressure sensor on the ‘dial’ button. On the
recipient side, the recipient was presented with the infor-
mation provided by the caller, as opposed to the automatic
interruption reduction approach, in order to maintain the
recipient’s control. It also allowed the recipient to tactfully
reject a call by sending an explanatory text message, e.g.
when s/he would call back.
However, during the development, the designers con-
fronted various issues that could not have been answered
satisfactorily with mere intuition or design experience.
Those issues called for better understanding of the prob-
lem space, embracing a more empirically systematic
approach. Consequently, we designed and administered
5
a study, described below, about various aspects of the
problem.
3. Research approach and questions
Our review of the literature on interruption management
and on approaches to designing interruption management
tools yielded several insights. First, it became apparent that
while most of the interruption management studies and
development efforts deal with the problem from a cognitive
cost–benefit approach, various other theoretical and practi-
cal issues regarding politeness and civility aspects of mobile
phone interruptions exist (although these approaches are not
necessarily mutually exclusive). Secondly, we found that
most empirical studies of interruption management in the
context of mobile phones use field studies as their method of
choice. While such studies enjoy greater realism and more
natural context, they lack in terms of controlled stimuli and
systematic manipulations of various social scenarios and
factors. We decided to address these issues by including
politeness as a central aspect in our study and by exert-
ing more control over factors that potentially affect users’
attitudes and behaviour in the context of mobile phone
interruptions.
The research is thus focused on five issues. First, the
literature suggests that in order for an interruption manage-
ment tool (e.g. TaCa) to succeed, it needed to appeal both
to callers and to recipients (cf. Grudin 1994). While recipi-
ents would likely be motivated by the application’s ability
to reduce the information asymmetry discussed above, it
was also necessary to examine whether callers would be
willing to put the extra effort into specifying the parameters
of the call. Thus, our first research question was whether
callers and recipients of phone calls have different views of
the problems associated with interruptions and of potential
solutions to those problems.
Secondly, based on the understanding that relational
context is crucial for an interruption management tool
(Grandhi and Jones 2010), it was important to study what
specific relational context information would be the most
effective for such a tool. One trade-off was related to the
number of information fields provided to the caller. Obvi-
ously, a greater number of fields might provide the recipient
with more contextual information. However, these would
increase the burden both on the caller (by demanding greater
effort to fill the fields) and on the recipient (who would need
to invest more time and effort to review the fields and assess
the PIV of the call). Evidence supporting a restricted num-
ber of information fields was found by Grandhi, Schular,
and Jones (2011), who report that callers did not use all
the information fields or any consistent subset of them. At
the same time, recipients needed only one or two infor-
mation items to infer a great deal about the incoming call.
Therefore, our second research question was which infor-
mation items are of the greatest importance for callers and
recipients.
 6 O. Inbar et al.
In addition, we examined three other issues. Given that
politeness and asymmetry in information between parties
involve consideration of others’ attitudes and actions, we
decided to study whether in interruption situations requiring
politeness considerations, people see a gap between their
own behaviour and that of others (Jones and Nisbett 1971).
Finally, we studied whether users’ attitudes towards polite-
ness issues and towards interruption management solutions
are influenced by gender and culture; two factors that can
potentially influence attitudes towards mobile phones (e.g.
Castells et al. 2006) and politeness (Blum-Kulka 2005).
To answer those questions, we conducted a survey-
based experiment to assess people’s attitudes towards
interruptive phone calls, with emphasis on the perceived
politeness of callers and recipients’ behaviours and on the
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types of information that could help resolve the polite-
ness dilemma if incorporated in phone applications. To test
for potential moderating variables and to extend the gen-
eralisability of the findings, we controlled for gender and
conducted the survey in two different countries, Israel and
Germany, as explained in the following section.
4. Method
4.1. Instrument
We developed a questionnaire that was based on two manip-
ulated factors – self vs. other and caller vs. recipient. The
questionnaire comprised three parts. The first part included
three general items regarding people’s personal experience
and attitudes towards the politeness problem of calling or
answering (see items 1–3 in Appendix 1). In the second
part, we presented a short scenario that described a situa-
tion in which a person needs to decide whether to answer a
phone call while engaged in an important meeting. For this
scenario, the participants responded to eight or nine items
(depending on the experimental condition) that addressed
various aspects of the situation (e.g. frustration, politeness,
taking offense and offending other people). The wordings
of the four scenarios are presented in Appendix 1. The third
part of the questionnaire consisted of five items that probed
what call-related information would be more desired by
people if an application like the proposed one was available
for everyday use. To answer the questionnaire, participants
indicated their level of agreement on each item on a 7-point
scale (1 = ‘strongly disagree’ and 7 = ‘strongly agree’).
4.2. Experimental design
We manipulated two experimental dimensions: (1) The
Self–Others (or Actor–Observer) dimension referred to
whether the participants addressed the issues from their own
perspective or from the perspective of ‘other’ people (i.e.
their views of how other people would think or behave).
Research suggests that the two perspectives can yield con-
siderably different judgements and attributions (e.g. Jones
and Nisbett 1971; Pronin, Lin, and Ross 2002); (2) The
Call–Receive dimension refers to whether the survey was
presented from the viewpoint of the caller or from that
of the recipient. The combination of the two dimensions
resulted in four versions of the questionnaire. Participants
were assigned randomly to these versions.
4.3. Manipulations
In the Self–Others dimension, the scenario and the ques-
tionnaire items were phrased in a way that addressed the
respondents, their attitudes, concerns and behaviours (the
Self condition), or in a way that asked the respondent about
others’ attitudes, concerns and behaviours (the Others con-
dition). For example, in the Self condition, the scenario
opened with the sentence ‘Imagine a situation in which
you urgently need to speak to a person who is important to
you. . .’ In the Others condition, the scenario opened with
the sentence ‘At times, there are situations in which peo-
ple urgently need to speak to a person who is important to
them. . .’
In the Call–Receive dimension, the scenario and the
items were phrased from the viewpoint of the caller (the Call
condition) or from the viewpoint of the recipient (the
Receive condition). For example, the scenario described
above under the Self condition also refers to the Call con-
dition. In the Receive condition, that sentence was phrased
as ‘Imagine a situation in which you cannot answer a call
or are not interested in accepting incoming calls. . .’ The
complete scenarios are presented in Appendix 1.
4.4. Controls
Two demographic variables, gender and country of resi-
dence, were measured and applied in the analyses. Gender
was used because previous research suggests that females
and males relate differently to mobile phones on various
aspects. For example, women treat mobile phones as a
key channel to maintain intimate personal relationships,
whereas men tend to use mobile phones for instrumental
purposes (Holmes 1995; Castells et al. 2006). Norms for
interpersonal conduct may vary between cultures. Euro-
pean societies have stressed the importance of politeness
as a core principle of civility (Blum-Kulka 2005). Conse-
quently, indirect speech forms are often adopted to prevent
offending others. In Israel, on the other hand, people may
perceive indirect speech as insincere. They tend to engage
in Dugri speech, which is a direct form of communication
often taken by outsiders to be impolite (Katriel 1986). Thus,
comparing respondents from the two countries may yield
insights regarding the universality of the study’s findings.
4.5. Procedure
The questionnaire was distributed in Israel and in Germany.
In Israel, the four versions of the questionnaire were dis-
tributed randomly to students in graduate and undergraduate
 Behaviour & Information Technology
Table 1. Experimental design, sample size and number of females in each condition.
Self
Dimension 2 Israel
Call N = 31 (f = 15) N = 41 (f = 23)
Receive N = 32 (f = 17) N = 46 (f = 21)
classes. In Germany, a hyperlink to the questionnaire was
sent to potential respondents (undergraduate and graduate
students). Upon access to the survey site, the respondents
were assigned randomly to an experimental condition and
completed the corresponding survey online.
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4.6. Sample
In total, 309 people participated in the study. Because most
of the participants were university students, we excluded
respondents who were outside the age range of 19–33 (18
people) and respondents who did not disclose their age (5
people) from further analysis, resulting in a sample size of
286. Of those, 162 were living in Germany (average age =
25.8, median = 26) and 124 in Israel (average age = 25.9,
median = 26). Table 1 shows sample size (N ) and number
of females (f ) in each of the questionnaire’s conditions.
5. Results
The answers to the questionnaire’s items were analysed
using a four-way, between-groups, analysis of variance.
The four factors were the experimental manipulations
(Self–Others and Call–Receive), Gender and Country
(Israel or Germany). In this section, we present the results
of the analyses for each item (identified by a serial number
equivalent to the numbers in Appendix 2). A summary table
of the items’ means and of main and interaction effects is
presented in Appendix 2. To improve readability, signifi-
cance levels of the ANOVAs are presented in the tables but
not in the text. For the same reason, only the significant main
effects and interactions are discussed below.
5.1. Part I – general behaviour and attitudes
The first part of the questionnaire included items about gen-
eral behaviour and attitudes of mobile phone users to the
idea of answering or not answering calls.
(1) Answering calls from known people. On average, over
all conditions, the survey suggests that people tend
to answer calls when they know the identity of the
caller (mean = 5.80 on a 1–7 scale). This result resem-
bles Grandhi and Jones’ (2010) finding that about 83%
of calls handled intentionally were answered. Partici-
pants who were asked about this issue from a Receive
7
Dimension 1
Others
Germany Israel Germany
N = 30 (f = 14) N = 37 (f = 17)
N = 31 (f = 13) N = 38 (f = 19)
Figure 1. Usually offended when people do not answer calls
(scale: 1 = ‘strongly disagree’ and 7 = ‘strongly agree’).
viewpoint agreed with this statement more (m = 5.96)
than participants who answered from the Call per-
spective (m = 5.64). The next two items inquired
whether not answering calls is perceived as offensive
or impolite.
(2) Not answering calls is offensive. A significant Self–
Other effect indicated that people thought that not
answering calls is less offensive when asked about
themselves (m = 3.24) than when they were asked
about what other people think (m = 4.03). This main
effect was qualified by a Self–Other × Call–Receive
interaction (see Figure 1). Under the Self condition,
the participants indicated that they are less offended
when their call is not answered (m = 2.94) than other
callers whose call is not answered by the participant
(m = 3.54). However, in the Others condition, the
respondents indicated that callers are quite offended
when their call is not answered (m = 4.35) but that
recipients think that not answering incoming calls will
not offend the caller as much (m = 3.78).
(3) Not answering calls is impolite. A significant Self–
Other effect indicates that the perceived impolite-
ness of not answering calls was lower when respon-
dents were asked about themselves (m = 3.31) than
when asked about others’ perceived impoliteness
of not answering calls (m = 3.81). A significant
Country × Call–Receive interaction indicates that in
Germany, not answering calls was considered less
impolite by callers than by recipients (m = 3.18 and
3.90, respectively). In Israel, these differences were not
statistically significant.
 8 O. Inbar et al.

In summary, it seems that, in general, our respondents

tend to answer calls. In addition, they did not perceive not
answering calls as highly offensive or impolite, but there
is a discrepancy between how people perceive this act and
how they think that others perceive it. Thus, ‘others’ are
thought to perceive not answering calls as more impolite
and offensive than how ‘I’ (the respondent) perceive it.

5.2. Part II – attitude and behaviour in specific

dilemmatic context
In this part of the questionnaire, the items were preceded
by a description of a situation in which in the Receive con- Figure 2. Attitudes towards not answering calls: in general and
dition a person needs to decide whether to answer a phone during important meetings (scale: 1 = ‘strongly disagree’ and
7 = ‘strongly agree’).
call while in an unfavourable social context, such as an
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important meeting. In the Call condition, the scenario asked

about a decision on whether to call a person who might be in
an important meeting (see Appendix 1). Participants were
asked to indicate their agreement or disagreement with the
following statements.

(4a) Calling others who are in important meetings. Par-

ticipants indicated that they (and others) tend to not
call other people whom they know are in an impor-
tant meeting (m = 5.89). Participants were more
in agreement with this statement when describing
their own behaviour (m = 6.19) compared with
when describing others’ behaviour (m = 5.60). In
addition, participants from Germany (m = 6.16)
agreed with this statement significantly more than
participants from Israel (m = 5.63).
(4b) Answering calls when in important meetings. Par-
ticipants tended to disagree with the statement that
they (and others) answer incoming calls from peo-
ple they know, even during important meetings
(m = 2.58). There were no main or interaction
effects associated with this finding. In other words,
people tend not to call other people whom they
know are in important meetings (Item 4a) and
also not to answer calls during important meetings
(Item 4b).
Items 5 and 6 repeated the questions of polite-
ness and offensiveness (Items 2 and 3) associated
with not answering calls – but under the scenario
of the recipient being in an important meeting. In
general, respondents were even more receptive to
not answering calls under the important meeting
scenario. A paired-sample t-test found that people
considered not answering a call when in an impor-
tant meeting to be less impolite and less offensive
than under regular circumstances (for the offensive
item, t(285) = 9.79, p < 0.001; for the impo-
liteness item, t(285) = 11.57, p < 0.001). These
differences are depicted in Figure 2. A detailed
analysis of Items 5 and 6 follows.
Figure 3. It is impolite to not answer calls when the recipient is in
an important meeting (Call–Receive by Self–Others interaction).
(5) Not answering calls is offensive when the recipi-
ent is in an important meeting. Participants thought
that others are more offended (m = 2.88) than they
themselves are (m = 2.38). The perception that
callers are offended if their call is not answered
was stronger among participants in the Receive
condition (m = 2.86) than among participants in
the Call condition (m = 2.41). However, a Self–
Others by Call–Receive interaction revealed that
the major difference was due to participants in the
Self–Call condition indicating the lowest levels
of being offended (m = 1.93), compared with the
Self–Receive (m = 2.84), Others–Call (m = 2.89)
and Others–Receive (m = 2.87) conditions.
(6) Not answering calls is impolite when the recipient
is in an important meeting. Participants in the Call
condition thought it was less impolite (m = 2.09)
than participants in the Receive condition (m =
2.58). This effect was moderated by interaction
with the Self–Others factor (see Figure 3). Similar
to Item 5, Participants in the Self–Call condition
were the most forgiving (i.e. did not agree that
not answering the call was impolite, m = 1.65).
Participants in the Self–Receive condition tended
to agree the most that not answering calls while
in important meeting is impolite (m = 2.93). The
 Behaviour & Information Technology
(a)
Figure 4. (a) Answering incoming calls is impolite towards people attending the meeting (country × role × gender interaction) and (b)
answering incoming calls is impolite towards people attending the meeting (country × perspective × gender interaction).
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difference between these means was statistically
significant (p < 0.001). There were no statistically
significant differences between the Others–Call
and Others–Receive conditions.
(7) Answering incoming calls is impolite towards
other people attending the meeting. Overall,
people see answering incoming calls while in
important meetings as impolite (m = 6.02). Ger-
man respondents considered it more impolite
(m = 6.24) than did the participants from Israel
(m = 5.79). Several interactions were significant;
including the triple interaction of Call–Receive,
Country and Gender (see Figure 4(a)).The group
that felt most strongly about the impoliteness
of this practice were German females under the
Call condition. A triple interaction of Self–Others,
Country and Gender revealed that Israeli males
under the Self condition felt least strongly about
the impoliteness of answering a call under this
scenario (see Figure 4(b)).
The next group of items assessed whether peo-
ple were frustrated by lack of information about
certain aspects of a call.
(8) Frustrated about not knowing the identity of the
caller. This item was presented only to partic-
ipants in the Recipient condition. The partici-
pants expressed mild frustration if the identity of
the caller is not known (m = 4.46). There were
no significant differences due to main effects or
interactions.
(9) Frustrated about not being able to inform/know
the importance of the conversation. Under the
Self condition, the participants (as recipients) indi-
cated modest frustration about not knowing the
importance of the call or (as callers) about not
being able to inform the recipient about the call’s
importance (m = 4.51). However, the participants
thought that Others would be more frustrated
under such circumstances (m = 5.18).
9
(b)
(10) Frustrated about not informing/knowing the sub-
ject of the conversation. Main effects of Self–
Others and Call–Receive were mainly due to
an interaction effect between these factors. In
general, people expressed moderate frustration
about this topic (m = 4.20, 4.16 and 4.15 in
the Self–Call, Self–Receive and Others–Receive
conditions, respectively). However, frustration
attributed to others in the Call condition was
significantly higher (m = 5.11).
(11) Frustrated about not informing/knowing the
urgency of the conversation. The participants’
frustration about this issue under the Self con-
dition (m = 4.74) was lower than the frustra-
tion they attributed to others (m = 5.24). This
main effect was mitigated by the interaction with
the Call–Receive factor. Specifically, the partic-
ipants thought that others who are calling are
significantly more frustrated (m = 5.60) than the
other groups (m = 4.69, 4.81 and 4.89 in the
Self–Call, Self–Receive and Others–Receive con-
ditions, respectively).
(12) Frustrated about not informing/knowing the
expected duration of the conversation. Basically,
this was the type of information that appears to
cause least frustration when uncertain (m = 3.29).
There were no main effects in this item. How-
ever, several interactions involving Gender were
found – most notably, a triple interaction Self–
Other × Call–Receive × Gender. Under the Self
condition, females were more frustrated about not
knowing the duration of a received call (m = 3.57)
than about informing others about the duration
of an outgoing call (m = 2.96). Males expressed
the opposite pattern: they were more frustrated
about not being able to inform the recipient about
the duration of an outgoing call (m = 4.03) than
about knowing the duration of incoming calls
(m = 2.53). In the Others conditions, there were
 10 O. Inbar et al.
no gender differences or differences between the
Call–Receive conditions.
Overall, the highest level of frustration was expressed
regarding the lack of information about the urgency of the
call (m = 4.99), followed by lack of information about the
call’s importance (m = 4.84), caller identity (4.46), the sub-
ject of the call (m = 4.40) and its duration (m = 3.29).
Paired sample t-tests showed significant difference between
Urgency and Importance (t284 = 2.10, p < 0.037). The dif-
ferences between Importance and Urgency and the other
information items were stronger (p < 0.001).
5.3. Part III – attitudes towards contextual information
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in the application
Finally, we asked the participants to assume that there is
an application for mobile phones that allows the caller to
define a few short items of information to be presented to
the recipient and serves as additional information s/he can
use when considering whether to answer the call or not. We
asked the participants to state, given the situation presented
in Part II, to what extent they would like to have the fol-
lowing features. Overall, the participants expressed most
interest in previewing information about the urgency of the
call (m = 5.69), followed by information about the call’s
importance (m = 5.44), the subject of the call (m = 5.03), a
personal comment (m = 4.73) and the call’s expected dura-
tion (m = 3.80). Paired sample t-tests showed significant
differences (p < 0.001) between each pair of items.
Overall, the desired information as expressed in Part III
was consistent with the frustration expressed about lack of
information found in Part II. Figure 5 shows the means for
information items that appeared in both parts (II and III) of
the questionnaire – indicating the call’s duration, subject,
importance and urgency. As can be seen, the level of frus-
tration expressed in Part II regarding uncertainty about each
of these items fully corresponded to the order of expressed
interest in having those items displayed as part of the TaCa
application.
Figure 5. Mean ratings of frustration if item is not displayed
(front row) and of information items they would like to have
displayed (back row).
Following are the results of the four-way, between
groups analysis of variance of the individual items of Part
III of the questionnaire.
(13) The subject of the call. There were no significant
main or interaction effects for this item.
(14) The urgency of the call (e.g. urgent/not urgent).
This was the most desired piece of information
in our study (m = 5.69). Respondents in Israel
were more interested in this feature than those
in Germany (m = 6.23 vs. 5.29, respectively).
Women were interested in this feature more than
men (m = 6.03 vs. 5.48, respectively).
(15) The expected duration of the conversation (e.g.
very short/long). Overall, this was the least
desired item (m = 3.80). There was more interest
in this feature in Israel than in Germany (m = 4.10
vs. 3.62, respectively). This difference was mod-
erated by an interaction with the Call–Receive
factor: German residents were less interested in
this feature as recipients of calls (m = 3.19) com-
pared with as callers (m = 4.04). Subjects living
in Israel were similarly interested as callers (m =
4.00) and as recipients (m = 4.20).
(16) Adding a personal comment to the call (e.g.
‘regarding the project’). Participants in Israel
were more interested in this feature than those in
Germany (m = 5.26 vs. 4.34, respectively).
(17) The importance of the conversation (e.g. very
important/not very important). Females were
more interested in this feature (m = 5.74) than
males (m = 5.21).1
5.4. Summary of the study’s results
We have accumulated a rich set of results regarding vari-
ous Caller–Recipient aspects. Significant main effects and
interactions are indicated in Appendix 2. Due to space lim-
itations, we only discuss major findings from the survey
and their implications for further development of mobile
phone interruption management tools, which emphasise
considerations of social norms and politeness.
In general, people tend to answer calls when they are
aware of them. This tendency was quite uniform, regard-
less of the participants’ role (caller or recipient), point of
view (self or other), gender or country of residence. How-
ever, the tendency to answer calls drops significantly when
people are presented with an important meeting scenario.
Again, this was a universal trend across roles, viewpoints,
genders and countries. This reported behaviour is congru-
ent with people’s attitudes towards politeness in the social
context and the potential offensiveness of this act. Thus, in
general, politeness in the virtual social context dictates that
people answer incoming calls. However, as the importance
of the physical social context increases, politeness in that
social context prevails over politeness in the virtual context.
 Behaviour & Information Technology
These results echo the findings from the pre-study (Joost and
Buchmüller 2009) regarding the tension between adhering
to conflicting social norms when people are at work and, in
fact, re-establishes the need for mobile phone contextual-
based interruption management tools (such as TaCa).
In general, it appears that the most important informa-
tion that people would like to know (or to inform people)
about relates to the urgency and the importance of the call.
To a lesser extent, people are also interested in the call’s
topic, but much less in its expected duration – perhaps
because they have more control over this aspect of the call.
The participants were consistent in expressing the same
order when asked which features they would like to see
implemented in future tools. However, it is interesting to
note that while there were no country or gender differences
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in the degree to which the participants expressed frustration
about the lack of information (Parts 1 and 2 of the question-
naire), such differences did arise with regard to suggested
design solutions to this problem (Part 3 of the question-
naire). Thus, while the inherent conflicts of mobile phone
usage and etiquette appear universal, there seem to be cross-
cultural differences with regard to the preferred actions or
design solutions intended to mitigate it.
The opposite can be said about the effects of role (Call–
Receive) and point of view (Self–Other). Here, there were
differences between the groups regarding frustration over
lack of information or inability to inform the other party.
However, no such differences were found in Part 3 of the
questionnaire regarding proposed design solutions.
On several occasions, Self–Others differences indicated
that people perceive others’ attitudes as different from their
own. For example, people perceive themselves as less
offended and less frustrated than others given a certain
behaviour or situation (e.g. their call was not answered).
At the same time, it seems that participants set higher stan-
dards for themselves than for others: they perceived their
own behaviour to be more impolite and offensive, compared
with the same behaviour shown by other people, when such
behaviour conflicts with social norms (e.g. not answering a
call or answering during important meetings). These find-
ings may reflect the ‘better than average’ effect, according
to which people perceive themselves positively (e.g. less
offended, holding higher politeness standards) relative to
others (Pronin, Lin, and Ross 2002).
6. General discussion and conclusion
We described a survey-based study aimed at supporting
tactful mobile phone usage. Our work is motivated by a
pervasive and practical socio-technical problem: mobile
phone interruptions during social and cognitive activi-
ties are becoming an increasingly prevalent and annoying
phenomenon. Recipients of phone calls face a constant
dilemma between ignoring calls at the possible expense
of offending the caller, missing business opportunities or
neglecting family members on one hand; and answering
11
them at the expense of interrupting their train of thought
or appearing rude and impolite towards others with whom
they share a social activity on the other hand.
Our study contributes to a growing stream of research
on the social aspects of mobile phone usage. Grandhi and
Jones (2010) have proposed a research agenda to the study
of mobile phone interruption management that include ‘a
number of fundamental research questions: What relational
context information do interrupters use and/or desire to
reduce uncertainty of an interruption? What relational con-
text information do they use and/or desire to predict the
value of an interruption? How does the need for relational
context information vary with other social and cognitive
contexts?’ (302). In this study, we examined the first two
questions, while adding several others. We turn now to
discuss each of those questions.
First, does the role in the conversation – callers vs.
recipient – change the view on problems associated with
interruptions? We observed that, in general, social aspects
of mobile communication become more and more impor-
tant in times of communication overload based on today’s
massive distribution of mobile phones. These aspects create
tension when they conflict with the call’s relational context.
Moreover, from an informational viewpoint, the social and
the relational contexts often pose a mirror image. Whereas
the social context of the call is clear to the recipient but
often uncertain to the caller, the relational context (e.g. the
call’s subject, importance and urgency) is clear to the caller
yet uncertain to the recipient. The survey’s results indi-
cated that, in general, the recipients of calls are ‘harder on
themselves’ for not answering calls, while callers are more
forgiving if their call has not been answered. However, in
many cases, this main effect was augmented by interactions
with the Self–Other dimension, further stressing the intri-
cate social nature of mobile phone usage and the need for
uncertainty reduction applications such as TaCa.
Grandhi and Jones (2010) suggest that one of the major
challenges for designing interruption management technol-
ogy is the variety of relational context information provided
by the medium. Indeed, given the trade-off between the need
for contextual information on the one hand and the need
for easy-to-use applications on the other hand, our second
research question, which tried to identify the most important
information needed for TaCa-like applications provided a
fairly clear answer: the urgency and the importance of the
call were rated as most important. This finding was not
affected by the respondents’ role (caller or recipient) but
was significantly more pronounced among female respon-
dents. This interesting finding corroborates the finding of
the case study reported in Section 1.1, further stressing
this neglected perspective in the development of new ICT
services (Oudshoorn, Rommes, and Stienstra 2004).
As mentioned above, the third research question –
regarding the Self–Other contrast – was answered partially,
with the findings that the callers vs. recipient perspectives
on problems of mobile phone interruptions and solutions to
 12 O. Inbar et al.
them were moderated by the self–other contrast. In addition,
we found some evidence to support a ‘better than aver-
age’ effect, according to which people perceive themselves
positively (e.g. less offended, more polite) compared with
others (Pronin, Lin, and Ross 2002). This was exhibited
in the fact that our recipients reported that, compared with
others, they tend to more rarely call people who are cur-
rently in an important meeting (see Item 4a) and also to be
less frustrated than others when the importance of a call is
not known. However, as with the caller–recipient dimen-
sion discussed above, most of the self–other effects were
mitigated by interactions with other factors.
Finally, we examined whether gender and cultural dif-
ferences play a role in attitudes towards interruptions. As
mentioned above, the need to study gender differences in
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response to relational situations stemmed from Joost and
Buchmüller’s (2009) case study and from suggestions in the
literature that women place more emphasis on maintaining
personal relationships when using mobile phones, whereas
men treat mobile phones as more instrumental (Castells
et al. 2006). We conducted a cross-cultural study because
different cultures may represent different approaches to
politeness and to the social acceptability of answering
mobile phone calls in various circumstances (Hoflich 2006;
Campbell 2007). The results show that although gender and
country differences had no main effects on expressed frus-
tration regarding mobile phone usage (Part 2 of the survey),
they did have an effect on the type of solutions preferred by
the participants. This suggests that such solutions should
be flexible and personalisable to accommodate individual
and cultural differences, as opposed to a ‘one size fits all’
approach.
6.1. Limitations and future research directions
The study’s results are qualified by the relatively young and
homogeneous age group of the participants. Still, we find
those results important, given that they converge with the
issues that surfaced during the case study, and given the
prevalence of this age group among mobile phone users.
Another limitation to this study is its ‘retrospective’
nature: while asked about their typical use of their phones in
various situations, participants had to recall these instances,
leading to potential biases (e.g. availability bias). Observing
people use their phones as part of their daily tasks, as demon-
strated by Ljungberg and Soerensen (1998), would clearly
contribute to and balance our impressions in terms of under-
standing the role of politeness and social considerations in
studying interruptions in mobile phone communication.
Overall, while the results have theoretical implications
regarding the problem of handling incoming phone calls
while being engaged in other activities, they also provided
guidance in further designing contextual-based interruption
management tools for mobile phone.
Our study can also guide developers in making more
general design decisions. For example, it could indicate
that recipients and callers share the same view of the most
important information required for the initiation of the con-
tact and that some information items that were thought to
be important can safely be left out of the contact initiation
process. Thus, the number of information items the caller
has to provide the recipient can be kept minimal to safely
evade the problem of featurism often found in applications.
Future research should focus on two intertwined themes
to better understand and to improve politeness in mobile
phone communication. The first theme includes the need to
better understand real-world settings which involve real-
world relationships while carrying out real-world tasks
(Harr and Kaptelinin 2007). Thus, researchers should inves-
tigate how contextual information about a call is used in
everyday life, e.g. in what situations people indicate a call
as being urgent. In addition, future work should focus on
aiding both callers and recipients: Callers could be aided
by being allowed to differentiate the purpose of a call and
the level of urgency; recipients could benefit from being
able to inform the caller why their call cannot be answered
at the given moment and by leaving the option to sched-
ule a time for calling back later on. Indeed, some of these
options have been included in latest mobile operating sys-
tems and we see them as a step towards a more polite future
of mobile communication. The second theme is even more
ambitious. It pertains to extending the notion of politeness
in phone calling and conversations to the more general issue
of ethical behaviour and civility in the connected world of
the future. Such research should tease out issues and yield
new insights about, and solutions for, people’s needs, prac-
tices and modes of interpersonal connectivity in public and
private setting and spaces.
Note
1. There was a four-way interaction, which can be explained by the
responses of the Israeli respondents, whose views differed based on
gender, Self–Other and Call–Receive conditions.
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Appendix 1. Questionnaires
Note: Participants indicated their level of agreement on each item
throughout the questionnaire on a 7-point scale (1 = ‘strongly
disagree’ to 7 = ‘strongly agree’). Item 8 was administered in the
Recipient scenarios but not in the Caller scenarios.
Questionnaire regarding use of mobile phones
In this questionnaire we would like to learn about your attitudes
toward various situations related to calls on mobile phones. These
questions do not have ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers. We are interested
in your personal opinion only. The questionnaire is anonymous and
your answers cannot be linked to you in any way.
Part I
Please state to what extent you agree or disagree with each of the
following statements:
Ver. 1 – Self, Caller
(1) People who know me will usually answer my calls
(2) I am usually offended when people I know do not answer my
calls
(3) Generally speaking, it is impolite when people do not answer
my calls
Ver. 2 – Others, Caller
(1) People will usually answer incoming calls from people they
know
(2) People are usually offended when people they know do not
answer their calls
(3) People believe that generally it is impolite when people they
call do not answer their calls
Ver. 3 –Self, Recipient
(1) I usually answer calls from people whom I know
(2) If I don’t answer a call from a person that knows me, this
person might be offended
(3) If I don’t answer a call, the person calling me might see this
as impolite
Ver. 4 – Others, Recipient
(1) People will usually answer incoming calls from people they
know
(2) Most people usually believe that if they don’t answer a call
from a person they know, this person will be offended
(3) Most people believe that not answering a call is impolite to
the person calling
Part II
Ver. 1 – Self, Caller
Imagine a situation in which you urgently need to speak to some-
one who is important to you (e.g. your boss, friend, partner, family
member). You know that there is a chance that the person is in
an important meeting. You call and the person doesn’t answer
your call. You are certain that the person identified you as the
caller.
Given this situation, please state to what extent you agree or
disagree with each of the following statements:
(4a) When I know that a certain person is in an important
meeting I try not to call his mobile phone
(5) I am usually offended when people I know do not answer
my calls, even if they are in an important meeting
(6) In general, it is impolite when people do not answer my
calls, even if they are in an important meeting
(7) I understand that if the person I’m calling answers
my call it would be impolite toward the other people
attending the meeting
(9) I am frustrated that I cannot inform the person I’m calling
about the importance of the conversation I would like
to have
(10) I am frustrated that I cannot inform the person I’m calling
about the subject of the conversation
(11) I am frustrated that I cannot inform the person I’m calling
about the urgency of the call
(12) I am frustrated that I cannot inform the person I’m calling
about the expected duration of the conversation
Ver. 2 - Others, Caller
At times there are situations in which people urgently need to
speak to a person who is important to them (e.g. their boss, friend,
partner, family member). They know that there is a chance that
the person is in an important meeting. They call and the per-
son doesn’t answer their call and they are certain that the person
identified them as the caller.
Given this situation, please state to what extent you agree or
disagree with each of the following statements.
 Behaviour & Information Technology
(4a) When people know that a certain person is in an
important meeting, they will try not to call his mobile
phone
(5) People are usually offended when a person they know
do not answer their calls, even when this person is in an
important meeting
(6) People believe that generally it is impolite when a person
they call do not answer their calls, even when this person
is in an important meeting
(7) People understand that if the person they are calling
answered their call it would be impolite toward the other
people attending the meeting
(9) Most people are frustrated that they cannot inform the
person they are calling about the importance of the
conversation they would like to have
(10) Most people are frustrated that they cannot inform
the person they are calling as to the subject of the
conversation
Downloaded by [Ben Gurion University of the Negev] at 07:46 09 July 2014
(11) Most people are frustrated that they cannot inform the
person they are calling about the urgency of the call
(12) Most people are frustrated that they cannot inform the
person they are calling about the expected duration of
the conversation
Ver. 3 - Self, Recipient
Imagine a situation in which you cannot or are not interested in
accepting incoming calls (e.g. during a business meeting or on a
date). However, you know that you might be receiving an impor-
tant call (e.g. from your boss, friend, partner, or family member),
and so you do not turn your phone off. As a result, if you do not
answer the incoming calls, people who call you might think you
are ‘screening’ their calls.
Given this situation, please state to what extent you agree or
disagree with each of the following statements.
(4b) I try to answer calls from people that I know, even when
I’m in an important meeting
(5) If I don’t answer a call from a person that knows me,
this person might be offended even if I’m in an important
meeting
(6) If I don’t answer a call, the person calling me might see
this as impolite even if I’m in an important meeting
(7) If I do answer a call during an important meeting, it
would be impolite toward the other people attending the
meeting
(8) I am frustrated that I cannot know the identity of the
person calling me
(9) I am frustrated that I cannot know the importance of the
conversation
(10) I am frustrated that I cannot know the subject of the
conversation
(11) I am frustrated that I cannot know the urgency of the call
(12) I am frustrated that I cannot know the expected duration
of the conversation
Ver. 4 – Others, Recipient
Imagine a situation in which someone cannot or is not interested
in accepting incoming calls (e.g. during a business meeting or on
a date). However, the person knows that they might be receiving
an important call (e.g. from their boss, friend, partner, or family
member), and so they do not turn their phone off. As a result, if
they do not answer the incoming calls, people who call might think
their calls are being ‘screened’.
15
Given this situation, please state to what extent you agree or
disagree with each of the following statements.
(4b) Most people answer calls, even when they are in an
important meeting
(5) Most people usually believe that if they don’t answer
a call from a person they know, this person will be
offended, even if they are in an important meeting
(6) Most people believe that even if they are in an important
meeting, not answering the phone is impolite toward the
caller
(7) Most people believe that answering a call during an
important meeting is impolite toward the other people
attending the meeting
(8) Most people are frustrated that they cannot know the
identity of the caller
(9) Most people are frustrated that they cannot know the
importance of the conversation
(10) Most people are frustrated that they cannot know the
subject of the conversation
(11) Most people are frustrated that they cannot know the
urgency of the call
(12) Most people are frustrated that they cannot know the
expected duration of the conversation
Part III
Ver. 1 – Self, Caller
Assume there is an application for mobile phones that allows
you to add a brief description of the call you are about to make.
This description is presented to the person you call and serves as
additional information s/he can use when considering whether to
answer the call or not. Given the situation presented above, please
state to what extent you agree or disagree that you would you like
to share each of the following with the person you are calling?
Ver. 2 - Others, Caller
Assume there is an application for mobile phones that allows peo-
ple to add a brief description of the call they are about to make.
This description is presented to the person they call and serves as
additional information s/he can use when considering whether to
answer the call or not. Given the situation presented above, please
state to what extent you agree or disagree that people would like
to share each of the following with the person they are calling?
Ver. 3 - Self, Recipient
Assume there is an application for mobile phones that allows the
caller to add a brief description of the call. Given this situation,
please state to what extent you agree or disagree that you would
want each of the following in order to decide whether to answer a
call or not
Ver. 4 – Others, Recipient
Assume there is an application for mobile phones that allows the
caller to add a brief description of the call. Given this situation,
please state to what extent you agree or disagree that other people
would want each of the following in order to decide whether to
answer a call or not.
(13) The subject of the call
(14) The urgency of the call (e.g. urgent/not urgent)
(15) The expected duration of the conversation (e.g. very
short/long)
(16) Personal comment (e.g. ‘regarding the project’)
(17) The importance of the conversation (e.g. very impor-
tant/not very important)
 16 O. Inbar et al.

Appendix 2
The study’s items, overall means (SDs), main effects and interaction effects (denoted by the column numbers of the factors)

1 2 3 4
Item Mean (SD) Self-others Call-receive Gender Country Interactions

Part 1
1. People usually answer calls from 5.80 (1.18) .02
known people
2. Offended when people do not 3.64 (1.74) < .001 1 × 2∗∗
answer calls
3. It is impolite to not answer calls 3.53 (1.72) .015 2 × 4∗
Part 2
4a. Try not to call people who are in 5.89 (∗∗∗ ) .013 NA (Call only) .029
an important meeting
4b. Try to answer calls while in an 2.58 (∗∗∗ ) NA (Receive only)
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important meeting
5. Offended when people do not 2.63 (1.61) .009 .02 1 × 2∗
answer calls even if they are in
an important meeting
6. It is impolite for people to not 2.34 (1.56) .007 1 × 2∗∗∗
answer calls, even if they are in
an important meeting
7. Answer incoming calls is impolite 6.07 (1.26) .004 .020 .002 2 × 4∗
towards other people attending 1 × 3 × 4∗
the meeting. 2 × 3 × 4∗
8. Frustration about not knowing the 4.46 (1.93) NA (Receive only)
identity of the caller
9. Frustration about not inform- 4.84 (1.71) .001 2 × 3 × 4∗
ing/knowing the importance of
the conversation
10. Frustration about not inform- 4.40 (1.76) .031 .017 1 × 2∗
ing/knowing the subject of the
conversation
11. Frustration about not inform- 4.99 (1.65) .013 1 × 2∗
ing/knowing the urgency of the
conversation
12. Frustration about not inform- 3.29 (1.79) 2 × 3∗
ing/knowing the expected 1 × 3 × 4∗
duration of the conversation 2 × 3 × 4∗
1 × 2 × 3∗∗
Part 3
13. The subject of the call 5.03 (1.75)
14. The urgency of the call (e.g. 5.69 (1.66) .004 <.001
urgent/not urgent)
15. The expected duration of 3.80 (1.88) .031 2 × 4∗
the conversation (e.g. very
short/long)
16. Personal comment (e.g. ‘regarding 4.73 (1.74) < .001
the project’)
17. The importance of the conversation 5.44 (1.63) .007 1 × 2 × 3 × 4∗
(e.g. very important/not very
important)
∗ p < .05.
∗∗ p < .01.
∗∗∗ p < .001.