The debate about whether social media has a causal negative impact on mental health, recently inflamed by Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation (see here and here), continues to rage. In the latest contribution, Peter Gray posted:
When I read, at Jon’s request, a pre-publication draft of the book, I told him I could not support it, and I explained why. I had at that time already looked quite broadly and deeply at the research pertaining to questions about effects of screens, Internet, smartphones, and social media on teens’ mental health and found that, despite countless studies designed to reveal such harmful effects, there was very little evidence for such effects. If you survey the research literature selectively, with an eye toward finding studies that seem to show the effects you are looking for, and if you don’t analyze them critically, you can make what will seem to readers to be a compelling case. But people who really know the research and have examined it fully and critically will see through it.
Gray summarises several previous posts he has written on the topic, which seem to go against Haidt's evidence that social media caused an increase in teen mental health problems. Gray then focuses on one key part of the evidence base of Haidt's book, which is the sole randomised controlled experiment that Haidt uses:
On pages 147-148 of The Anxious Generation, Jon claims that random assignment controlled experiments have shown that social media is a cause (not just a correlate) of teen suffering. He cites just one example of such an experiment, so I looked it up and read the article. The reference, if you want to look it up, is this: Melissa Hunt et al (2018), “No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37, pp 751-768.
The research participants in this experiment were 143 undergraduate students randomly assigned to either limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat use to no more than 10 minutes per day, per platform, or to use social media as usual for a three-week period. Self-report questionnaires were used to assess various indices of subjective well-being, namely their sense of social support, fear of missing out, loneliness, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, autonomy, and self-acceptance before, during, and after the three-week period. The researchers also assessed the participants’ actual social media usage throughout the study by requiring them to submit screen shots showing accumulated use of these media.
The most damaging flaws with this study, which should be obvious to any social scientist, is there are no controls for demand effects or placebo effects. I’ll describe these separately.
Social scientists have shown repeatedly that when research participants can guess the purpose of an experiment and guess the researchers’ hypothesis, they are generally motivated, consciously or unconsciously, to support that hypothesis. In other words, they are likely to believe, or at least claim, they are experiencing what they assume the researcher expects them to experience, to prove the hypothesis correct. This is called the demand effect...
Now the placebo effect. This refers to the simple fact that when people believe they are doing something that will make them feel better, that belief by itself makes them feel better.
Gray points out that the sole study that Haidt relies on to show causal effects of social media on mental health is highly likely to be subject to both the demand effect and the placebo effect, and therefore cannot be relied on as strong evidence of what it claims to be showing. The debate on this book and its thesis is looking increasingly like resolving against the book's claims, or at the very least against the strength of its claims.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
Read more:
- Quitting Facebook might make you happier
- The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel
- Does the Internet make people happier?
- What happens when you disconnect from Facebook?
- The latest NZ research on social media and mental health is nothing special
- Online social networks, social capital, and wellbeing
- Jonathan Haidt and Candice Odgers debate the relationship between social media and mental health
- Mike Masnick on the social media-mental health debate
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