It's funny how predictable all these comments are. It doesn't seem to matter how many studies say the same thing.
"It's probably not the smartphone; they're probably not considering [age, parental competence, socioeconomic variables, literally-anything-that-lets-me-pretend-my-beloved-smartphone-doesnt-hurt-my-mental-health]"
Y'all can't help but upvote the skeptical comments.
I wish I'd been saving all the articles I've read about this over the last several years. These studies are not rare and they don't disagree. Seriously. Go look right now and find a single study that says folks' mental health is improved by smartphones.
Social media definitely amplifies it, but consider the economic and social environment[...]
Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem[...]
The first one I read was one back in 2017 by Jean Twenge that documented a cliff-face-leap of depression, loneliness, and anxiety and correlated it to the release of the first smartphone.
Ask yourselves - why are you all so desperate to deny this research?
I've done literature reviews after seeing posts from Haidt come up here and elsewhere. If you go to semanticscholar.org for instance, type in "social media wellbeing meta-analysis", you will get something like [0]. (found a free link by searching the study title)
This and most other meta-analysis I have read on the subject seem to indicate that the effect of social media is pretty neutral. This one in particular does look at the effect on adolescents and depression specifically, and finds that it effects adolescents the same way it effects adults.
That being said, there is a small but statistically significant effect on anxiety and depression. This is cancelled out in overall wellbeing by other positive effects. However, given Haidt is saying we should implement age gates on social media, I would want the evidence to indicate something a bit more catastrophic and not cancelled out by positive effects.
So if you read the research, you will find there is good reason to be skeptical.
I think I actually failed to respond properly in this comment. You were talking about smartphone use while the article was talking about social media use. I think Haidt and implicitly both of us were conflating the two, but they are separate topics.
I did a search for the effects of smartphones, trying to avoid meta-analysis describing only "overuse", and [0] came up. This seems to indicate somewhat larger effects of smartphones on anxiety. I can't access the article easily right now, but from the titles of other studies, it seems like sleep disruption might be a factor.
Why are some so desperate to blame smartphones? As far as I am aware, smartphones are used globally but the symptoms described are not. Of this is an indictment of those societies that are destroying their children’s’ mental health and perhaps futures, it’s nice to have a relatively simple scapegoat upon which to pin the blame (though I suspect smartphones are as irrevocably embedded in our culture as all the other problems are at this point), and imagine solving the issue by removing.
Researchers really need to get serious about separating smartphones from social media and drawing conclusions about one with the other one properly controlled.
> It's funny how predictable all these comments are.
Indeed they are, and that is why I come here. I like to see research being questioned and critiqued. If I am interested in simply taking everything I read on the internet for granted, I'd visit Facebook or LinkedIn, instead.
Most of us are well aware that too much phone usage is probably bad for you in one way or another. There is no need to acknowledge that on this forum.
So what you have here is a typical case of confirmation bias, no need to get upset about it :)
Questioning research is good. Asking naive, obvious questions the researchers clearly predicted and accounted for is just adding noise and reducing signal.
Comments
It's funny how predictable all these comments are. It doesn't seem to matter how many studies say the same thing.
"It's probably not the smartphone; they're probably not considering [age, parental competence, socioeconomic variables, literally-anything-that-lets-me-pretend-my-beloved-smartphone-doesnt-hurt-my-mental-health]"
Y'all can't help but upvote the skeptical comments.
I wish I'd been saving all the articles I've read about this over the last several years. These studies are not rare and they don't disagree. Seriously. Go look right now and find a single study that says folks' mental health is improved by smartphones.
Here's a post on HN I saved a while back, check out its top comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222
top two comments:
The first one I read was one back in 2017 by Jean Twenge that documented a cliff-face-leap of depression, loneliness, and anxiety and correlated it to the release of the first smartphone.
Ask yourselves - why are you all so desperate to deny this research?
I've done literature reviews after seeing posts from Haidt come up here and elsewhere. If you go to semanticscholar.org for instance, type in "social media wellbeing meta-analysis", you will get something like [0]. (found a free link by searching the study title)
This and most other meta-analysis I have read on the subject seem to indicate that the effect of social media is pretty neutral. This one in particular does look at the effect on adolescents and depression specifically, and finds that it effects adolescents the same way it effects adults.
That being said, there is a small but statistically significant effect on anxiety and depression. This is cancelled out in overall wellbeing by other positive effects. However, given Haidt is saying we should implement age gates on social media, I would want the evidence to indicate something a bit more catastrophic and not cancelled out by positive effects.
So if you read the research, you will find there is good reason to be skeptical.
[0]: https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/technology/2022-hancock.pdf
I think I actually failed to respond properly in this comment. You were talking about smartphone use while the article was talking about social media use. I think Haidt and implicitly both of us were conflating the two, but they are separate topics.
I did a search for the effects of smartphones, trying to avoid meta-analysis describing only "overuse", and [0] came up. This seems to indicate somewhat larger effects of smartphones on anxiety. I can't access the article easily right now, but from the titles of other studies, it seems like sleep disruption might be a factor.
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smi.2805
Why are some so desperate to blame smartphones? As far as I am aware, smartphones are used globally but the symptoms described are not. Of this is an indictment of those societies that are destroying their children’s’ mental health and perhaps futures, it’s nice to have a relatively simple scapegoat upon which to pin the blame (though I suspect smartphones are as irrevocably embedded in our culture as all the other problems are at this point), and imagine solving the issue by removing.
Researchers really need to get serious about separating smartphones from social media and drawing conclusions about one with the other one properly controlled.
> It's funny how predictable all these comments are.
Indeed they are, and that is why I come here. I like to see research being questioned and critiqued. If I am interested in simply taking everything I read on the internet for granted, I'd visit Facebook or LinkedIn, instead.
Most of us are well aware that too much phone usage is probably bad for you in one way or another. There is no need to acknowledge that on this forum.
So what you have here is a typical case of confirmation bias, no need to get upset about it :)
Questioning research is good. Asking naive, obvious questions the researchers clearly predicted and accounted for is just adding noise and reducing signal.
Not all questions are good questions.