Individuals hold a deep personal connection with their phones, according to researchers. This leads phone users to express their views more freely when using their phones, often in exaggerated ways, and with more honesty, disclosing personal or sensitive information, for example, compared with laptops or tablets, experts say. They are portable and they have haptic properties that stimulate our sense of touch. And we regard them as much more personal than computers, which are closely associated with work.

“Smartphones allow people to be themselves,” says Aner Sela, associate professor of marketing at the University of Florida, whose ongoing research suggests that people communicate with more emotion on smartphones than with other devices, seeing them as a safe space to do so. “When we are engaged with our phones, we feel we are in a protected place. You feel like you are in your own private bubble when you use them. We get into a state of private self-focus, looking inward, paying attention to how we feel, and less attuned to the social context around us.”

Kostadin Kushlev, assistant professor of psychology at Georgetown University and director of its Digital Health and Happiness Lab (the “Happy Tech Lab”), which studies the role of digital technology in health and well-being, agrees, adding that he can easily see how smartphones can become pacifiers for grown-ups.

“What might be going on? We don’t know, but one theory that makes sense to me is that they represent that we have friends,” he says.