Behavioral Change: Observation Report

My Behavioral Change Goals

The behavior I want to change involves reducing the time I spend daily on my cell phone, without actual human interaction.

The operational definition of this behavior is avoiding texting, social media sites plus apps, as well as my email for two hours a day, with a total of 14 hours of limiting phone use a week.

In order to tame my phone addiction, that reduces in-person contact with other people, I could use the method of “classical conditioning” as mentioned in Sdorow, Rickabaugh, & Betz (2015). First, I would have to elicit an “unconditioned stimulus” (Sdorow et al., 2015, p. 238), by asking one of my family members to lock and hide away my cell phone without my knowing. Immediately, after this stimulus, I

Essentially, with the help of observations, since it takes seeing your peers stopping certain behaviors, in order for you to stop your own behavior, like if I saw someone without their phone interacting with others, I will be more likely to put my phone down as well, called “observational learning” (Sdorow et al., 2015, p. 261). Of course, observational learning is not possible without the help of “mirror neurons” (Sdorow et al., 2015, p. 263), in the brain. These special neurons even allow you to “mimic someone’s facial expressions….” (Sdorow et al., 2015, p. 263). For instance, if I saw one of my friends crying, I would automatically put down my phone to find out why he or she is crying, and empathize with them. Unfortunately, there will be times where I lose sight of my phone addiction, even with potential for treats like in the case of making a new friend who I will want to chat with several times a day over the phone, or going somewhere amazing like to a waterfall and wanting to post every single picture on Instagram, so basically I’m “blocking” (Sdorow et al., 2015, p. 260), my ability to stop my phone usage