Episode 25: Is it the phones?

Everyone seems to have decided that it’s the phones. That is, they’ve decided that heavy smartphone and social-media use is to blame for the current wave of mental illness, despair, and depression that’s affecting young people - teenage girls in particular.

Except… we need to ask how strong the evidence is. What do the studies actually show about what’s causing the mental health crisis? And, wait - is there actually a mental health crisis to begin with? In this extra-long episode of The Studies Show (it’s a big topic after all), Tom and Stuart attempt to find out.

The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. Do you like reading about science and technology? Do you like learning about the drivers of human progress? Then this is the magazine for you. You can find all their beautifully written and illustrated articles for free on their main website, along with some excellent shorter pieces on their Substack.

Show Notes

* UK MP calls for a ban on social media “and perhaps even smartphones” for under-16s; Prime Minister is considering it

* Jonathan Haidt’s upcoming book The Anxious Generation

* His November 2023 interview with The Spectator on the “rewiring of childhood”

* His big Google Doc of all the relevant studies in this area

* Jean Twenge’s famous Atlantic article, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?”

* Her book iGen

* One of Twenge’s studies, which the book is based on: n = 500,000 analysis of depression traits and “new media screen time”

* Amy Orben’s critique

* Flurry of articles by well-respected writers in 2023 expressing some degree of confidence that “it’s the phones”: John Burn-Murdoch; Noah Smith; Matt Yglesias (though he’s more interested in other reasons)

* Haidt’s 2023 article arguing we can now say it’s a cause, not just a correlation - and “a major cause” at that

* Evidence that the US suicide rate is increasing

* Evidence that the suicide rate in other countries is not increasing: Norway, Sweden, Denmark; the UK - see below for the heatmap of age-group vs. year and suicide rate for the UK:

* 2023 NBER paper cautioning that some of the rise in the US suicide rate might be due to measurement differences

* Chris Ferguson et al.’s 2021 meta-analysis that concludes there’s a lack of evidence to suggest that screen time affects mental health

* Przybylski & Vuorre’s 2023 paper - across 168 countries, internet connectivity is correlated with better wellbeing

* Orben & Przybylski’s 2019 “specfication curve” paper (the “potatoes” one)

* Twenge & Haidt’s own specification curve paper suggesting social media use is a stronger predictor of poor wellbeing than is hard drug use

* Stuart’s article for the i going into detail on some of the causal studies of phones/social media and mental health

* Dean Eckles criticising the “Facebook arrives at universities” study

Credits & Acknowledgements

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. We’re grateful to Chris Ferguson and Andy Przybylski for talking to us about their research.