You Leave Your Phone On Mute or Vibrate?

So I have this nephew that is starting to get to that age where he's too cool to hang out with his lame uncle. I remember that age. I remember thinking "I don't want to hang out with these old people." It's natural... but all the same, I'm pretty awesome. I'm always finding something funny, topical, or awesome to pass along to him, but as he enters his "Nothing" stage of adolescents where he just wants to either hang out with friends or by himself, I'm bound and determined not to give up on him. I always ask him "Why don't you ever answer your phone?" and his answer is always "I leave it on silent 24/7." Which I know isn't true, but I'm the cool uncle that will always give him a pass.

The reason I bring it up is, there was a study done of almost 15,000 people asking that exact question about leaving a phone on silent, and the answers were surprising. According to them, one in every nine people keep their phone on silent all day long. A slightly larger percentage of people said they keep their phone on vibrate all day long so it doesn't ring. Why is that?

I understand, there are certain times you don't want your phone going off, so the silent options are useful tool, but who leaves their phone on silent all the time? How are you supposed to catch a call and respond to texts in a polite, timely manner? Do these people have so little telecommunications throughout the day they don't see it as a priority? Or maybe they get so many they just want an easy excuse of why they missed a call... Perhaps it's the current trend of people wanting to feel like victims, so they intentionally miss calls and texts just so they can sit around feeling miserable about missing those texts and calls later... It's not the wildest theory I've ever read.

I don't get it. I guess I just don't get enough calls and texts to wish I could turn off the greatest tool humanity has ever given itself. I mean, if a caller ends up being someone I don't want to talk to, there's a reject button right? So why leave your phone on silent all the time? Why not just man up and be like "I don't want to talk to you right now."