602. Is Screen Time as Poisonous as We Think? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Freakonomics Radio

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Episode: 602. Is Screen Time as Poisonous as We Think?

Author: Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher
Duration: 00:40:29

Episode Shownotes

Young people have been reporting a sharp rise in anxiety and depression. This maps neatly onto the global rise of the smartphone. Some researchers are convinced that one is causing the other. But how strong is the evidence? SOURCES:David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College.Lauren Oyler, novelist and cultural

critic.Andrew Przybylski, professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford. RESOURCES:"The Declining Mental Health Of The Young And The Global Disappearance Of The Hump Shape In Age In Unhappiness," by David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, and Xiaowei Xu (NBER Working Paper, 2024)."Further Evidence on the Global Decline in the Mental Health of the Young," by David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, Anthony Lepinteur, and Alan Piper (NBER Working Paper, 2024).No Judgment: Essays, by Lauren Oyler (2024)."To What Extent are Trends in Teen Mental Health Driven by Changes in Reporting?" by Adriana Corredor-Waldron and Janet Currie (Journal of Human Resources, 2024).The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt (2024)."Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age," by Matti Vuorre and Andrew K. Przybylski (Clinical Psychological Science, 2023)."Are Mental Health Awareness Efforts Contributing to the Rise in Reported Mental Health Problems? A Call to Test the Prevalence Inflation Hypothesis," by Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews (New Ideas in Psychology, 2023)."The Association Between Adolescent Well-Being and Digital Technology Use," by Amy Orben and Andrew K. Przybylski (Nature Human Behaviour, 2019).iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us, by Jean M. Twenge (2017). EXTRAS:"Are You Caught in a Social Media Trap?" by Freakonomics Radio (2024)."Are We Getting Lonelier?" by No Stupid Questions (2023)."Is Facebook Bad for Your Mental Health?" by Freakonomics, M.D. (2022)."Why Is U.S. Media So Negative? (Replay)," by Freakonomics Radio (2022).

Summary

In this episode of 'Freakonomics Radio' titled 'Is Screen Time as Poisonous as We Think?', the correlation between increasing smartphone usage and the rise in anxiety and depression among young people is explored. Featuring experts like economist David Blanchflower, novelist Lauren Oyler, and professor Andrew Przybylski, the podcast examines whether smartphone usage is the main factor driving mental health declines or if other elements like social and political changes also play a role. The discussion delves into methodological issues in research linking digital technology to mental health, the societal panic around new technologies, and the benefits and drawbacks of smartphones. It emphasizes the need to address mental health problems through community and healthcare support rather than solely blaming technology.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (602. Is Screen Time as Poisonous as We Think?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_06
I am going to say a dirty word. Screen time.

00:00:09 Speaker_06
That simple and suddenly terrifying word includes all the hours that you spend streaming movies, playing video games, especially the hours you spend caught in the vortex of social media and news and communication that gushes from your phone.

00:00:25 Speaker_06
Everyone seems to have something to say about screen time, from the American Academy of Pediatrics, to religious and educational leaders, to the New York Times opinion section, especially the New York Times opinion section.

00:00:38 Speaker_06
Our own devices scold us with reminders to get off Instagram, to hold the phone further away to avoid eye strain.

00:00:46 Speaker_06
If you have an iPhone, you know that it tracks the hours you spend on it every day and then makes a point to tell you that number, that always surprisingly large number.

00:00:57 Speaker_06
The people we are most worried about when it comes to screen time are children and teenagers.

00:01:02 Speaker_06
Parents around the world are in a full-on panic about the relationship between screen time and mental health, in part because there is new scientific evidence on this relationship.

00:01:13 Speaker_01
What we've observed from around 2014 was high school kids, we were seeing a rise in their use of internet and smartphones and so on, and a big rise in their anxiety levels, depression levels, all kinds of things.

00:01:26 Speaker_06
That sounds terrible. But is the case against screen time really that clear cut? Today on Freakonomics Radio, we will hear the evidence and some challenges to the evidence. It's very easy to fool yourself as an analyst.

00:01:43 Speaker_06
We'll also discuss the incentives at play.

00:01:46 Speaker_02
That's how op-eds work. Like people are desperate for one weird trick to save your life.

00:01:51 Speaker_06
Still, you'd have to be a cold hearted person to think that nothing should change. The question is, well, here's the question.

00:01:59 Speaker_01
What the hell are we going to do about it?

00:02:13 Speaker_03
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

00:02:30 Speaker_06
David Blanchflower — his friends call him Danny after the much-loved British footballer — is himself British, but he has spent the past few decades at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

00:02:40 Speaker_06
He is an economics professor and researcher who has also been involved in economic policymaking.

00:02:45 Speaker_01
The way I would describe it is I'm a data guy, and I look for patterns in the data, and I say, let's kick and poke and punch the data as hard as we can, and let's see if we get an answer.

00:02:53 Speaker_06
Blanchflower is a pioneer of what some people call happiness economics. He is particularly well-known for one key finding.

00:03:01 Speaker_01
In any well-being equation I ever looked at, there was a midlife crisis, there was a U-shape in age in the data.

00:03:08 Speaker_06
This U-shape is known as the happiness curve. It is derived from many studies over the years using survey data from thousands of people of all ages from around the world.

00:03:19 Speaker_06
Now, you may know how we feel about survey data around here, that it's not the most reliable form of data. On the other hand, It's hard to find a better way to measure something as intangible as happiness.

00:03:32 Speaker_06
Anyway, here's what Danny Blanchflower has found.

00:03:35 Speaker_01
Basically, the happiest people are the young. It takes a U-shape, it diminishes down to around 50 years of age, and then it rises again.

00:03:43 Speaker_06
There are a number of stories you could tell about why happiness has a U-shape over the course of a lifetime. For many young people, life is fun and relatively easy.

00:03:54 Speaker_06
Adulthood, meanwhile, brings challenges, obligations, quite possibly offspring, and those offspring, in turn, bring more challenges and obligations.

00:04:04 Speaker_06
But then, happiness begins to rise again at around age 50, an age at which many parents are no longer so obligated to their children. Is that a coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. There are other possible drivers of that upswing in happiness in middle age.

00:04:23 Speaker_06
You might just become more mature over time, more satisfied. You might become more comfortable with who you are or at least better at managing your expectations.

00:04:33 Speaker_06
Danny Blanchflower has written more than 30 papers about this happiness curve, and his findings have been replicated over 600 times. An impressive record when you're trying to measure an emotional state.

00:04:46 Speaker_06
The scientific consensus was so strong that many researchers had come to see the happiness curve as a natural part of human life. At least Blanchflower had.

00:04:56 Speaker_06
But then, one day, he came across the work of Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.

00:05:03 Speaker_01
She was interviewed in the New York Times. I read that interview, and I started to read the papers. And the papers were about things that I had written about. She'd used some of the data that I'd used.

00:05:15 Speaker_06
But Twenge's work didn't fit the happiness curve that Blanchflower had made famous. Her work showed that happiness starts to decline before adulthood.

00:05:25 Speaker_06
She showed that teenagers in particular were reporting much higher rates of unhappiness than in the past.

00:05:31 Speaker_01
I started to look at the data and I realized that I had missed something. I mean, I wrote 30 papers saying there was a hump shape in age or a U-shape. I literally said, this is one of the most phenomenal facts in social science.

00:05:44 Speaker_01
And then I wrote until it wasn't. So what did Blanchflower miss? So now instead of the hump shape, we have a decline.

00:05:51 Speaker_06
Meaning more people reported being unhappy at an earlier age than he had seen before.

00:05:56 Speaker_01
That's only really started since 2015. And I missed it and the world missed it. You know why we missed it? Because a bit of data took a while to come in.

00:06:05 Speaker_01
So we didn't really get data until about 2018, 2019, and then COVID came and everybody said, Oh, look at the effects of COVID.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
Well, it turns out now we have to rethink it because a lot of it was actually occurring prior to COVID and COVID merely extended preexisting trends and we didn't know it.

00:06:22 Speaker_06
Blanchflower, to his credit, became convinced that his famous old happiness curve no longer fit the current reality. So now he began to, as he would say, kick and poke and punch the data.

00:06:36 Speaker_01
The data that I like is from the CDC. People are asked the following question. Over the last 30 days, how many of those 30 were bad mental health days? Most people just say no days.

00:06:48 Speaker_06
But that's most people. One group of people gave the opposite answer. They said that every day of the previous 30 was a bad mental health day.

00:06:57 Speaker_01
So what we've seen over time in America is that that has increased by quite a lot. The group that has increased the most are young women.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
So today, 10% of young women report and 7% of young men report that every day of their lives is a bad mental health day. We basically see this problem of a collapse in the wellbeing of the young in America. And then we see it in the UK.

00:07:19 Speaker_01
So the UN says to me, Danny, we've got to look at the world. Let's go look at the world.

00:07:23 Speaker_06
That's right. Blanche Flower's happiness research had caught the attention of the United Nations. He and other researchers were asked to find out more.

00:07:31 Speaker_01
So off we go. And now basically we find it's true everywhere. And so we're talking about what I think is a huge global crisis.

00:07:40 Speaker_01
But the genie has been released from the bottle and it was released from the bottle a decade ago before we realized what was going on.

00:07:48 Speaker_06
So what happened a decade ago that caused this decline in mental health among young people? For Jean Twenge, the San Diego State psychologist, there is an obvious and easy answer. The smartphone.

00:07:59 Speaker_06
Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 and sold around 1.4 million units that year. These days, Apple sells more than 200 million iPhones a year. And that's just Apple.

00:08:12 Speaker_06
For every iPhone, four or five non-Apple smartphones are sold around the world, a billion a year.

00:08:19 Speaker_06
In 2017, Twenge published a book called, deep breath here, iGen, why today's super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy, and completely unprepared for adulthood, and what that means for the rest of us.

00:08:37 Speaker_06
Twenge also published some related pieces in The Atlantic and The New York Times, which amplified her argument.

00:08:43 Speaker_06
In early 2024, the influential social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who teaches at New York University, joined this argument with a book called The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

00:08:59 Speaker_06
Here is Haidt on MSNBC discussing this epidemic.

00:09:03 Speaker_05
Everyone has a theory about what causes it. There is only one explanation.

00:09:07 Speaker_05
There is no other theory that can make sense of a synchronized global collapse in mental health, other than the fact that in 2010, the great majority of kids had a flip phone, no high speed internet, no unlimited data, no Instagram. And by 2015,

00:09:22 Speaker_05
We all have a smartphone, high speed Internet, unlimited data, Instagram, front facing camera.

00:09:28 Speaker_06
Height makes a compelling argument, as does Jean Twenge. And their argument has resonated with many people, parents especially.

00:09:36 Speaker_06
There have been suggestions that social media and photo sharing apps can be particularly damaging to adolescent girls and young women by amplifying pressure and anxiety around their appearance.

00:09:48 Speaker_06
But is the smartphone really the one explanation, as Haidt puts it? As we often preach around here, correlation does not equal causation.

00:09:59 Speaker_06
Maybe there are some other factors contributing to the anxiety and unhappiness that young people say they are feeling.

00:10:07 Speaker_06
For instance, the last couple of decades have brought wave after wave of political and economic turmoil, sometimes tipping into chaos.

00:10:16 Speaker_06
If you have parents or grandparents who grew up during the Great Depression, you know how much they were shaped by that experience. So have young people today maybe been shaped by all that chaos?

00:10:27 Speaker_06
And let's not forget the widespread anxiety over climate change. And for kids who grew up in the U.S., especially New York, the 9-11 attacks set a tone of fear and anger. There's also this. What about the benefits of the smartphone?

00:10:45 Speaker_06
Anti-phone advocates have done a good job pointing out the costs, but let's not forget the benefits. A smartphone provides connection.

00:10:52 Speaker_06
It facilitates the sharing of interests, helps you navigate to pretty much anywhere and gives access to just about any piece of information or music or whatever else you might want. Of course, this can be overwhelming.

00:11:07 Speaker_06
And if you consume too much of it, you may get sick just as you'll get sick consuming too much of anything that humans consume like food. But just as food is pretty important for humans, so is connectivity.

00:11:21 Speaker_06
And to discount the benefits, especially for young people, may be short sighted. So I went back to the economist Danny Blanchflower to talk through the causality piece of this.

00:11:34 Speaker_06
If I asked you to give the strongest piece of evidence that you're convinced that this is a causal relationship between the rise of, let's call it digital tech use, and the rise of anxiety or depression, how do you know that that instrumental variable is the one that's driving the bulk of that problem?

00:11:50 Speaker_06
Because I could posit a variety of other things. Yeah, of course. And let me throw one at you just off the top of my head. Your Dartmouth colleague, Bruce Sasserdote, has done research on the rise of negativity in media, especially in the US.

00:12:03 Speaker_06
And we know the effect of media on the psyche. So could it be that what we're thinking of as, quote, digital tech being the driver is in fact

00:12:14 Speaker_06
you know, digital tech is in this case more of a delivery system for a massive wave of negativity, also a massive wave of information about mental health that may cause more people to self-diagnose and so on.

00:12:27 Speaker_01
What a great question. Actually, Bruce and I are working on this together. I was just talking to him 20 minutes ago. So obviously, there's a set of questions, what is it? And I sort of posit as a policymaker, well, maybe it is something else.

00:12:41 Speaker_01
But this thing appears to disproportionately impact the young, and above that disproportionately, it impacts young women. This trend started prior to COVID.

00:12:52 Speaker_01
Every piece of evidence we have is that it doesn't appear to have been caused by the Great Recession. So all the things that you've talked about, that is true, but why would it especially be true of women?

00:13:03 Speaker_01
And you have to get the timing right, so the timing fits. The rise we observe in the ill-being of the young starts around 2014. At exactly that time, you see the explosion of digital usage, internet usage, smartphone usage, and so on.

00:13:17 Speaker_01
And I think in the end, the causal question is sort of irrelevant in the sense that here we have a problem, right? The worry is, what do you do about it, right? I mean, I'm obviously concerned that

00:13:28 Speaker_01
This declining wellbeing of the young will translate itself into something bad. We've seen things like rising self-harm, evidence of rising thoughts of suicide. But to this point, thank God, we haven't yet seen lots of bad outcomes.

00:13:43 Speaker_01
The people who have the least incidence of deaths by a drug overdoses are the young. I don't see much evidence of an increase there.

00:13:49 Speaker_01
And the evidence around the world is that suicide in the U S suicides have risen slightly for young men, not in other places.

00:13:55 Speaker_06
Wait a minute, this seems like a pretty big deal here. You're saying this engagement with smartphones is leading to, let's just call it generally, declining mental health among the young.

00:14:05 Speaker_06
Could it be that this is a kind of gantlet that young people now go through and emerge, you know, relatively undamaged and who knows, maybe even stronger?

00:14:15 Speaker_01
Supposing the answer to that is no and we don't do anything. We have to err on the side of caution, right? I mean, I agree with you.

00:14:22 Speaker_01
It may well be that you intervene and you say, well, we were mistakenly intervening to make sure your child wasn't in deep trouble. Who's going to ever object to that? We were wrong.

00:14:32 Speaker_01
OK, but it's much better to be wrong trying to protect them than to do nothing and then suddenly we're overtaken by a huge splurge in deaths from overdoses. In a way, the experience that I had at the Bank of England was interesting.

00:14:46 Speaker_06
Blanchlower is talking here about when he served as an external member on a Bank of England committee that sets interest rates. In October of 2007, the global economy suddenly appeared fragile, perhaps on the brink of a deep recession.

00:15:00 Speaker_01
So I sit there and I make a decision on interest rates every month.

00:15:04 Speaker_06
Blanchflower was the first and at the time only person on the committee to vote in favor of cutting interest rates.

00:15:11 Speaker_01
The hardest thing in the world is to know where you are because you've got no clue. Data doesn't come in for a year. So you sit and you try and make a decision on limited information.

00:15:19 Speaker_06
Being out front on interest rates, Blanchflower would later say, was, quote, not a comfortable place to be. They called me bunkers.

00:15:28 Speaker_01
And always you care about have I made the right decision. I'm used to being in a world of incomplete information where you have to make a decision. You've got to do something.

00:15:40 Speaker_06
A year later, the Bank of England finally did cut interest rates, and in some circles, Danny Blanchflower was praised for his early call.

00:15:49 Speaker_06
So you could say that Blanchflower has a proactive disposition, which, in the case of interest rates, served him well. How about in the case of what he calls the huge global crisis caused by the smartphone?

00:16:04 Speaker_06
I'm sure you've read about the growing number of smartphone bans or other restrictions in schools and elsewhere, but some people think we shouldn't rush to judgment. They argue that the research behind the smartphone panic isn't very solid.

00:16:19 Speaker_06
After the break, we will hear from one such critic.

00:16:22 Speaker_04
If you can't properly diagnose the problem, you can't possibly solve it.

00:16:27 Speaker_06
I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

00:16:41 Speaker_06
The smartphone is a technology that has changed our society dramatically, and many people, including the economist Danny Blanchflower and the psychologist Jean Twenge, argue that the smartphone is causing harm, especially to young people.

00:16:56 Speaker_06
This puts the smartphone in the company of earlier inventions like the telephone, television, bicycle, even electricity. It's really important to acknowledge that new things are scary.

00:17:07 Speaker_04
That is Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at Oxford. new things should cause anxiety.

00:17:15 Speaker_04
If someone or something turns up in your tribe, they try to feed you a novel food, they want to take care of your kids, it makes a lot of sense for your first reaction to be aversion and to be skeptical.

00:17:25 Speaker_04
So it's absolutely all right to be skeptical about new technologies, but what will often happen is that some people will come along and they'll kind of give the panic its skeleton. There's a class of person called a moral entrepreneur.

00:17:37 Speaker_04
What a moral entrepreneur will do is they'll identify an at-risk group for novel technology, and then you need a mechanism. You need a reason to say, this time it's different. Let's say it's Dungeons and Dragons and teenagers and Satanism.

00:17:51 Speaker_04
Then you have a mechanism, and you know, that would be role-playing, or the fact that it's animated, or that in radio serials, there's actually somebody talking through a crime.

00:18:02 Speaker_04
And so when you combine those three things, moral entrepreneurship thrives. There's congressional inquiries, Senate inquiries about comic books or, you know, Lieberman holds up a Nintendo blaster and everyone pats themselves on the back.

00:18:15 Speaker_06
Przybylski is talking about the time in the early 1990s when U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman went on a crusade against violent video games. That may seem like a distant era.

00:18:25 Speaker_04
People get older, they forget. New technology comes along and you have the person who is whipping up today's panic recalling the good old days when people would play video games in their basement.

00:18:37 Speaker_06
In one paper that you've co-authored, this is called Global Wellbeing and Mental Health in the Internet Age, the abstract reads, in the last two decades, the widespread adoption of internet technologies has inspired concern.

00:18:49 Speaker_06
that they have negatively affected mental health and psychological well-being. However, research on the topic is contested and hampered by methodological shortcomings, leaving the broader consequences of Internet adoption unknown.

00:19:02 Speaker_06
We show that the past two decades have seen only small and inconsistent changes in global well-being and mental health that are not suggestive of the idea that the adoption of Internet and mobile broadband is consistently linked to negative psychological outcomes.

00:19:18 Speaker_06
Anyone reading that who's also been paying attention to the news would say, wait a minute, Andy, this is exactly backwards. This is the opposite of everything I've been told.

00:19:29 Speaker_06
So tell me why you think you're right and what the argument that has gotten so much heat lately has gotten wrong.

00:19:38 Speaker_04
I think the reason why your listeners would be confused and say, wait, why, is a factor of two things. The first being, like me, they're intensely skeptical about the role of technology in our lives and in our children's lives.

00:19:51 Speaker_04
That's natural, and that needs to be listened to very closely. And then two, that academic paper that you just talked about, that wasn't accompanied by a massive press campaign, two massive popular press book campaigns.

00:20:02 Speaker_04
And so it doesn't get you in the opinion section of the Times. And so I think that part of that double take is in part manufactured.

00:20:10 Speaker_04
But I think that actually we're at a local maximum in terms of what many people call the tech clash or the backlash against technology. There was kind of a high watermark in the other direction in 2011 with Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring.

00:20:23 Speaker_04
And then through this Snowden period, through Cambridge Analytica, there was a fairly rapid swing that brings us all the way to the kind of scholarship that you were asking about.

00:20:32 Speaker_04
But to get to the why I think that we're quote unquote right here is that the work that I do and others, it is work that is not as glamorous.

00:20:40 Speaker_04
And I would argue that there's an inverse relationship between how well a study is done in this field and how shocking the results might seem.

00:20:49 Speaker_04
When you cross your T's and dot your I's, when you share your code and you share your data, you don't find the kinds of things that you or I would have as kind of a preexisting bias about tech.

00:21:00 Speaker_06
Can you give me an example that a lay person could understand of the methodological shortcomings or failures of the research you're talking about?

00:21:08 Speaker_04
Phones, screen time, social media, these are all catch-all categories.

00:21:13 Speaker_04
And so, unless you're epistemically humble about what you're measuring and what you're not measuring, it can be very tempting to claim that when a parent or a kid is filling out a questionnaire that asks, think back on the last year of your life,

00:21:30 Speaker_04
On average, how many hours a day do you spend with a computer, a smartphone, a game console, and a cell phone?

00:21:38 Speaker_04
And then call that screen time in the methods section of your paper, and then call the title of your paper, social media and its impact on teenage girls.

00:21:49 Speaker_04
And then you also have the measurement problem, and this pains me very deeply as a psychologist, of what the heck is mental health or well-being.

00:21:57 Speaker_04
Because saying you're sad or saying you're satisfied with your life is very, very different than turning up in a therapist's office and being diagnosed as having major depressive disorder or anxiety disorder.

00:22:09 Speaker_04
And all of those little decisions of how you deal with measurement, those actually can be quite consequential.

00:22:16 Speaker_04
If all of these arbitrary choices that are made by a research analyst, if they're consistent with the researcher's pre-existing biases or they're consistent with the topic of their popular book, It's a bit of a red flag, or at least a yellow flag.

00:22:30 Speaker_04
When you think of everyday behaviors as being potentially pathological or potentially addictive, it's a fairly slippery slope to pathologize everything. I mean, video gaming is as damaging to mental health as beds are to mental health.

00:22:45 Speaker_04
You could create a disorder called bed addiction disorder, where people have, you know, low affect and low mobility and get bed sores. And you could try to regulate the sale of beds and haul bed companies in front of Congress.

00:22:59 Speaker_04
A lot of the evidence you'd have that something's bad for you. It's not built on a basis of chemistry or biochemistry or biology.

00:23:06 Speaker_06
You've made a similar argument in the past saying that the effects of digital technology on teenagers are about as big as the effects of eating potatoes.

00:23:15 Speaker_04
Well, yeah. Social scientists will often try to draw inferences about the population-level effects or associations that might link any given activity to a health outcome.

00:23:26 Speaker_04
The problem with that is that if you aren't crossing your T's and dotting your I's, you can interpret the noise in a dataset in a way that's consistent with your pre-existing beliefs or biases. And that's what happens with technology.

00:23:38 Speaker_04
We were trying to make a very simple point, which is that if you don't have your hypotheses before you look at your data, you can be led astray by very small effects, whether it's left-handedness, wearing glasses, enjoying bicycling.

00:23:52 Speaker_04
These are all things that have the same quote unquote effect, which is really just a correlation in a large data set.

00:23:58 Speaker_06
I think one interesting thing about this topic, which is why it's got so many people riled up, is that This is a technology that just about everybody has experience with, so they can sort of fill in the blank for the causal mechanisms, right?

00:24:12 Speaker_06
They can say, oh, I've had the experience on my phone where rather than going to that event tonight at my place of worship or rather than going to play soccer with my friends, I get caught up in my silo of anxiety and depression on the phone.

00:24:29 Speaker_06
And this lets people layer their own experiences onto the moral panic argument. But aren't personal experiences in general a good starting point for a lot of social science research?

00:24:41 Speaker_04
I think that they're a really important starting point, but I think they're a highly invalid ending point. and they shouldn't be where people's thinking stops.

00:24:49 Speaker_04
It's very easy to think that there's a digital world and an analog world and these worlds don't connect. But the problem isn't necessarily that one is good or bad. The problem is that we're putting this wedge between them.

00:25:01 Speaker_04
And when we put that wedge between them, what we do is we cut ourselves off from being able to investigate really interesting questions about actually what is happening to someone if they're depressed and they're using social media.

00:25:11 Speaker_04
There's a gigantic difference between feeling unhappy with how you spent your evening and suffering from agoraphobia, having major depressive disorder, or some form of crippling social anxiety.

00:25:22 Speaker_04
I'm sure you know people who have suffered, and many people who are listening know people who suffered with opioid addiction or depression or anxiety, and claiming that the thing that happens when you play a video game is like what happens when you can't stop taking

00:25:36 Speaker_04
opioids or saying, you know, I don't feel like going outside. Oh, I've had a bad Twitter argument. I feel so anxious. Saying that's the same thing as crippling agoraphobia, where people won't leave their home for years.

00:25:48 Speaker_04
Frankly, that's insulting because there's no reason to think that's the same mechanism.

00:25:56 Speaker_02
Over the last seven or eight years, I have struggled with what I am quite comfortable calling an internet addiction.

00:26:05 Speaker_06
That is Lauren Euler, a novelist and cultural critic in her early 30s. She grew up in West Virginia and now lives in Berlin. Euler has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about life online and off.

00:26:19 Speaker_02
I have met great friends on social media. I've gotten boyfriends on social media. But at the same time, I do strongly feel that it can produce an actual addiction, like a straightforward addiction, like a drug addiction.

00:26:30 Speaker_02
And I know that because since I divested from social media, I've picked up smoking. And it's the same sort of thought process about compulsively wanting to either look at Twitter or smoke a cigarette.

00:26:43 Speaker_02
Like, you train yourself to think, something could be happening on my phone. Someone could have written me. Some news could have broken and I need to see it.

00:26:50 Speaker_06
Euler recently published a collection of essays called No Judgment. One of the pieces is titled My Anxiety.

00:26:57 Speaker_02
I think anxiety does create a barrier around actually doing things that you're sitting and worrying about and sitting and looking at your phone is just kind of externalizing this worrying feeling, right?

00:27:09 Speaker_02
Like your phone is doing the worrying for you because it has this short attention span. My thoughts are like bouncing around and I might be thinking about taxes and then I'm thinking about some guy and then I'm thinking about

00:27:19 Speaker_02
my late article that I need to turn in and I'm thinking about I embarrass myself at a party and all this happens in the span of two minutes, which if you've been on social media, that is exactly what it's like, right?

00:27:29 Speaker_06
So Lauren Euler does see a deep connection between her smartphone and what researchers like Danny Blanchflower call mental ill-being. But again, is the one necessarily causing the other?

00:27:42 Speaker_02
I get anxious that I'll become depressed and depressed that I'm so anxious.

00:27:46 Speaker_02
And if the phone is a kind of conduit for feeling or if it's an extension of your brain, then of course, like the things on your phone might make you depressed just as they might make you anxious.

00:27:57 Speaker_02
So I think on one hand, of course, it's causal, but I do think it's sort of self-defeating and short-sighted to suggest that the phone is the only cause.

00:28:09 Speaker_02
of this mental health crisis among teenagers or among anyone, because that's just not how the world works. That's how op-eds work, like people who are desperate for one weird trick to save your life.

00:28:22 Speaker_02
It's like, I just needed to throw my phone in the river and then everything would end up fine. That's just not how the world works.

00:28:28 Speaker_06
OK, so if there is rising anxiety among young people and if throwing your phone in the river isn't a solution, what is? That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.

00:28:50 Speaker_06
Andy Przybylski at Oxford argues that the panic over smartphones is overblown. But that doesn't mean he thinks everything is fine.

00:29:01 Speaker_04
In the U.S., there are some really worrying trend lines for people across the population.

00:29:06 Speaker_04
And with the most worrying trends, things like self-harm and death by suicide, I would be much more worried as a middle-aged man in Appalachia with access to a gun and with access to West Virginia's social safety net than I would be as a white teenage girl anywhere in the U.S.

00:29:25 Speaker_04
And so I would say that there probably is something broken in America.

00:29:29 Speaker_06
Here's something I also wonder about. There is so much more awareness around mental health now than there was 20, 30 years ago, and so much less stigma. Some people have argued that at least.

00:29:41 Speaker_06
Do you think that that acceptance might be showing up in the data as more young people today saying, yes, I've experienced mental health problems than they used to?

00:29:51 Speaker_04
There's a concept called measurement variance. This is the basic idea that if I asked you how I'm feeling today, and then I compare how I'm feeling today to how I said I felt 10 years ago.

00:30:01 Speaker_04
The way that people answer that question actually changes over time. And so there's a bit of that, absolutely. And then the way that we actually track things like mental health problems in the U.S.

00:30:11 Speaker_04
in particular, it's very, very susceptible to change as a function of changes in insurance and changes in way that diseases can be classified.

00:30:23 Speaker_06
On this note, Przybylski points to a study by two health economists, Adriana Corridor-Waldron and Janet Currie. Their paper is called, To What Extent Are Trends in Teen Mental Health Driven by Changes in Reporting?

00:30:37 Speaker_04
It's a study of clinical intakes of young women in New Jersey across the last 10 years. There's a series of spikes and hospital admissions for different types of serious disorders when a young person shows up in crisis.

00:30:50 Speaker_04
And one way that you could have interpreted the data is to say that there is a mental health epidemic in New Jersey for teenage girls in particular. But the researchers went back and looked at changes to the best practices for clinical intake.

00:31:02 Speaker_04
And the peaks occurred in response to two changes. The first is a special awareness campaign for clinicians for focusing on young women as a target area for intervention.

00:31:13 Speaker_04
And then the second was allowing there to be a second reason for clinical intake. So it used to be when you came in, you would just say the person is schizotypal or depressed, but then you could say schizotypal and depressed.

00:31:26 Speaker_04
And so when that change went through, the amounts went up. But, and here's the rub, it only went up for young people who were on insurance because it created a new billable category. It didn't go up for those who didn't.

00:31:40 Speaker_04
So I would say when you're a hammer, the problems of the world are nails.

00:31:44 Speaker_04
I think it's very tempting to think that the atomization of certain Western cultures is a result of technology and not other things like a decline in religiosity or these other kinds of things. There aren't going to be quick fix solutions.

00:31:57 Speaker_04
Like throw away your phones. Throwing away your phones or putting them in a locker. What you're going to have to do is actually rebuild communities. You're going to have to hire psychotherapists.

00:32:08 Speaker_04
You're going to have to build civil and economic infrastructure to support those in your society who are falling through the cracks.

00:32:14 Speaker_06
What if I say to you, I agree with you, and that sounds smart and sane, but it also is going to take a long time and a lot of money, a lot of resources. And in the meantime, I believe there are millions, maybe billions of people suffering.

00:32:28 Speaker_06
And so I want to do something quick and dirty.

00:32:30 Speaker_04
What would you say to that? law of unintended consequences. I would say that if you can't properly diagnose the problem, you can't possibly solve it.

00:32:39 Speaker_04
I would say that if you take this topic seriously, you would take slow and incremental steps to ascertain exactly what problem you're trying to solve. And so, yeah, I would say that you should not waste energy on patting yourself on the back.

00:32:52 Speaker_06
What if I ask you to make an argument for the benefits of digital tech that are overlooked in the rush to proclaim all of digital technology damaging to young people, especially?

00:33:04 Speaker_04
One of the things that I think everyone can agree is really worrying is content online around self-harm or anorexia.

00:33:11 Speaker_04
And it might seem like a very obvious thing that platforms should be doing absolutely all they can do to take down this content and to scuttle these communities and make sure that it's not on any of the big platforms.

00:33:25 Speaker_04
That might seem like common sense, that might feel like the right thing to do, but you can wind up causing so much more harm than good if you don't pay attention to actually how people who struggle with these disorders use social media platforms.

00:33:39 Speaker_04
There are really good support groups for things like self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and things like anorexia and bulimia.

00:33:47 Speaker_04
One of the things that social media platforms can be really good for is connecting communities in a positive way that self-moderates and they provide resources for people in crisis.

00:33:57 Speaker_04
And what happens if you think that it's the responsibility of these companies to just crush it so that it's not there anymore? Two things will always happen, and they're both very worrying.

00:34:07 Speaker_04
The first is people who are already struggling, they will begin to stop disclosing. They'll button themselves up, they won't reach out, and they'll lose access to the online social environments that have been supported for them.

00:34:20 Speaker_04
And then the second thing is the community moves to other parts of the internet that are more poorly moderated and are far less safe.

00:34:27 Speaker_04
And so you wind up in a telegram group where there's no accountability instead of being in a Facebook or Instagram group.

00:34:34 Speaker_04
And so I think thinking about tools to meet young people where they are is a much smarter idea than just burning everything down and salting the earth.

00:34:44 Speaker_06
As you just heard, Andy Przybylski is more positive toward the big social platforms than many people in this arena. In fact, he recently announced a research collaboration with the Facebook and Instagram parent company, Meta.

00:34:58 Speaker_04
We're going to solicit proposals from researchers all around the globe. They can get data on young people in 40 different countries and combine that with information about their mental health and their well-being.

00:35:09 Speaker_04
But at no point will they have a direct relationship in terms of the selection of their projects or the decision for the projects to go forward with the researchers at Metta.

00:35:18 Speaker_04
We've put in a series of firewalls between the data scientists at Metta and researchers who would be very interested in investigating the idea that Instagram relates to the mental health and the well-being of teenagers.

00:35:31 Speaker_04
Myself and my co-editors will be selecting projects on the basis of their scientific merit, and their proposals will be peer-reviewed in advance of data collection by researchers who are specialists in topics like mental health, topics like online engagement, but also generalists who have a sense of what is good methodology.

00:35:52 Speaker_04
And only when that peer-review process finishes, the data request goes directly to Meta.

00:35:57 Speaker_04
The idea here is you have these firewalls in place, you don't have big tech negatively affecting the process, and you don't have researchers potentially moving the goalposts because they think they've found something interesting after having a rummage through the data.

00:36:13 Speaker_06
It might surprise you that the rigorous analysis Shabilsky is talking about hasn't already been done on Instagram and Facebook and other social media platforms, but it's worth remembering how new this ecosystem is.

00:36:27 Speaker_06
Here again is the writer Lauren Euler.

00:36:30 Speaker_02
The social media era has been really short, right? Like when was MySpace founded? When was Facebook founded? In the early 2000s, right? That's not very long. And already Facebook, nobody uses that.

00:36:41 Speaker_02
They had to buy Instagram and WhatsApp in order to stay relevant. And Instagram is actually quite young, right? I think it's like 20, what, 2010. Yeah, that's really young.

00:36:51 Speaker_02
So I look forward to a day when Instagram doesn't exist, but I'm sure other things will take its place.

00:36:57 Speaker_06
I'm guessing Euler is right that the platforms will change and the way we interact with our phones will change. Some people, like Andy Przybylski, believe that if you can't properly diagnose the problem, you can't possibly solve it.

00:37:12 Speaker_06
And therefore, to rush into a hard anti-phone position isn't the right move.

00:37:18 Speaker_06
Other people, like Danny Blanchflower, say that we can't afford to wait, because if the rise in anxiety and unhappiness among young people is as significant as he thinks, the consequences will be significant too, especially the kind of consequences that economists like to consider.

00:37:37 Speaker_01
I worry about what will happen to these young people as they come to the labor market. And then later on, we're going to worry about their mortality.

00:37:44 Speaker_01
And we're going to worry about their ability to generate savings and investment and buy a house and buy themselves a retirement package. So down the road, these are issues that we care about.

00:37:55 Speaker_06
You are never going to run out of problems to address, are you?

00:37:58 Speaker_01
In a way, that's what I've tried to do. Think about how we address the problems and try and find solutions. I don't know what works. I've been asked that question. We go, we don't know, but we're going to try and find out for you. That's what we do.

00:38:10 Speaker_06
Do me a favor. When you find something, call me and we'll talk about it again. OK? Love to. Love to. Thanks to Danny Blanchflower, Andy Przybylski, and Lauren Euler for their insights today. And I'm curious to know what you think.

00:38:27 Speaker_06
Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. Coming up next time on the show, do you ever watch an NFL game and wonder why, when so many of the players are black, so many of the coaches are white?

00:38:42 Speaker_06
The NFL itself wondered that, and two decades ago, they put in a rule to help.

00:38:47 Speaker_00
The Rooney Rule is really about making sure that you have a diverse slate when you're selecting and hiring people.

00:38:54 Speaker_06
Did it help? We tell the history of the Rooney Rule with the help of an actual Rooney. You know, if he was in the Senate, we'd call him Majority Whip.

00:39:04 Speaker_06
We look at the successes and failures, the lawsuits and the sham interviews, and we ask how the Rooney Rule works outside of football. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too.

00:39:18 Speaker_06
Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. Also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs.

00:39:31 Speaker_06
Our staff also includes Alina Kullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboage, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarrs, Julie Kanfer, Leork Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski.

00:39:49 Speaker_06
Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

00:39:59 Speaker_04
I'm Dr. Andy Shabilsky. I'm the University of Oxford's professor of, oh my God, what am I the professor of? Human behavior and technology? Yeah, exactly. But I was so hung up on if I'm Andy or Andrew.

00:40:11 Speaker_03
The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.