Only half of Americans think texting during a movie is rude

July 11, 2011, 5:38 PM GMT+0

The debate on what constitutes good text message etiquette is still an open book. To take a stand for manners, we decided to ask a series of questions on when it was and was not appropriate to send or receive text messages.

We began by questioning respondents, “In which of the following situations is it rude to send text messages.” The following percentages of respondents said texting in these situations was rude:

We then asked our respondents if they had ever been offended by someone texting in a situation they considered inappropriate. Nearly 60% said that they had been at some time offended and 17% admitted to having been offended in the last week.

Next, we analyzed how our respondents would deal with receiving a text in a specific situation. If given the situation, “You are casually chatting with a friend and receive a text message,” our respondents said they would react in the following ways:

Finally we tried to see how rude texting was in comparison with other actions. For this, we provided a list of potentially offensive actions, such as texting or talking on a cell phone, and then asked which of these actions were rude to do in a movie theater, while the movie was playing. A slim majority condemned texting, but our respondents were far more unanimous about other things that you should most definitely not be doing this summer at the cinemas:

Over the course of the questions, a stalwart minority surfaced—a consistent 4% of what may be called extremely insensitive individuals—who replied it was never rude to text in any situation and deemed any action with a cell phone—including speaking at full volume—acceptable during a movie.

Image Source: Press Association