Why do people yell into their cell phones?

Virtually everyone owns a cell phone these days, and with the great advantages of cell phones also comes responsibility. Certainly, there is proper and inappropriate cell phone etiquette, and unfortunately, improper cell phone etiquette is still widespread among the general population.

A good example of bad cell phone etiquette is people yelling into their cell phones. Have you ever noticed how people talk much louder on the cell phone than on a regular phone? It is very common and can be extremely annoying to everyone around it. Many people will excuse themselves to another room when taking a call, but there are times when you just can’t leave. For example, when you’re in a car with someone, you may have a call to take and there’s no “other room” you can go to. It is at times like these when cell phone etiquette is of the utmost importance.

So why do people with a normal voice volume yell into their cell phones? It’s a pretty simple explanation, actually. Home or landline phones have a microphone on the receiver that amplifies your voice into the earpiece. When you speak on a landline phone, your voice is captured and played back through the earpiece, so you hear your own voice loud and clear. It’s very similar to how a radio DJ wears headphones, then speaks into a microphone and hears his own voice in the headphones. With cell phones, your own voice isn’t amplified in the earpiece, so the only sound you hear is from your mouth. It sounds like this wouldn’t be much of a difference, but the volume level of words leaving your mouth through the air and reaching your ear is a pretty big difference from the sounds coming from a phone’s speaker being pressed directly against your ear.

Cell phones are very common in society, but relatively speaking, they are still quite new. Unless you’re a teenager, you probably grew up in a time when home phones were the norm, and therefore you’re subconsciously trained to act as if every phone works like a home phone. So it’s no surprise that when most of us switch from landlines to cell phones, we pack a lot of clothes. We now hear our own voice much softer when we talk on our cell phones, and the natural reaction is to speak.

It’s important to avoid this tendency in situations where you’re trying to be polite. Remember, people want to hear you scream into a cell phone as much as you want to hear them scream into a cell phone. So keep in mind that while talking on the cell phone, you should only use your normal voice, as if the person were standing next to you.

Perhaps one day cell phone companies will decide to incorporate the same voice amplification technologies into cell phones that were commonly used on landlines. But it probably won’t happen. Cell phones are here to stay, so we all need to adapt and start practicing proper cell phone etiquette.