Bias fuel
Few things are tastier to our own minds than evidence supporting our own biases. Such evidence surrounds us all the time, ready to be selected. Often it pertains to things we’ve long suspected were true, until someone toiling away in the annals of Science! leaps forth with the proof that we all knew with abounding confidence would assuredly be there, if only someone would bother to study it. No, no: not superficially. I mean really study it, you know? All serious like.
Thus, as we all know by now, the plague of technology and the social media riding on it are producing epidemics of sadness, depression, and attempted suicide—particularly among the young. Because…well? Just look around! Isn’t it nauseating? Isn’t it awful? Don’t the kids all have their noses poked in it relentlessly, their usage rising in tandem with their falling spirits? How depressing.
Perhaps so. But perhaps the Science! is not quite as solid as it looks on the surface. Perhaps the causes and symptoms aren’t so easy to tell apart after all. Inews’s science writer Stuart Ritchie examines the research referenced by Jonathan Haidt and finds it lacking. It turns out that the support for the hypothesis is surprisingly weak—also contrary to your faithful correspondent’s preferred explanation, having been a determined social-media curmudgeon from the outset.
The message of the new articles is broadly the same: a few years ago, it would’ve been acceptable to remain agnostic about the effects of smartphones and social media on young people’s mental health. But now the evidence is in – and to quote Burn-Murdoch – it makes an “overwhelming” case that they’re having a “catastrophic” effect.
I don’t agree. Having read all the relevant studies in this area, I think a lot of the evidence is shaky and unclear – and it’s okay to still be undecided. This article explains why.
Now, it’s possible that social media didn’t cause teens and young adults to become more depressed on average, but rather that more depressed teens found social media to be just what their neuroses caused them to want. Or perhaps unhappiness was the result of other overarching societal factors with population-wide effects. Maybe social media and smartphones allow for neuroses to deepen beyond the depths they would descend to absent the technology. Unfortunately, none of the research provided enough detail to rule any of these other possibilities out.
Maybe we’re just the same old boring people we always were, eager to conclude the things we always wanted to believe anyway.
Stuart Ritchie published the book Science Fictions exploring the problems in modern scientific research and reporting in 2020. Summary reviews at Goodreads here.
I'm old enough to remember when the single strongest bias I had was in the plies in the tires on my car. Then those new radicals started to catch on and all my priers went out the window.
Fear not, the government will subsidize several studies to tell us what we already know instinctively.