Does Tween Tech Study Prove Jonathan Haidt Right?
“This study…does NOT show that smartphones are beneficial to children,” Jonathan Haidt told me on X last week. He was responding—in a somewhat baffling way—to my post about a new survey of 11- to 13-year-olds in Florida.
Baffling, because I did not write—not on X, and not in my Sex & Tech newsletter about the survey—that smartphones are beneficial to children, even if that’s how some of the folks promoting the survey framed it. In fact, I was very careful not to overstate what the study found: Kids who had their own smartphones scored better on certain measures of well-being than kids who did not.
I was careful, in part, because saying smartphones caused these positive outcomes in their owners would be unwarranted, as would saying that not owning a smartphone triggered negative effects in the nonowners. There are some demographic differences between the groups, and probably less quantifiable differences at play here, too. It could be these differences, rather than phone ownership, driving the differences in attitudes (something I pointed out in my original post about the survey).
I was careful not to overstate things, in part, because of people like Haidt, who is the author of The Anxious Generation and one of the United States’ leading crusaders against kids and teens using smartphones and social media. He’s probably the most prominent symbol of a tendency in today’s tech doomerism to draw unwarranted conclusions based on links between technology usage and other issues. Haidt and his ilk will pay lip service to the idea that correlation isn’t causation—that, for instance, mental health issues rising alongside social media adoption in the 2010s doesn’t mean social media caused these issues. But they almost do it with a wink and a nod, as if everyone knows what’s really going on and it’s sort of silly and pedantic to leave open the possibility that it’s not. There’s an air of “correlation doesn’t imply causation—but come on.”
So, what happens when a study linking technology with positive outcomes starts getting attention? Suddenly these folks are super psyched to remind us that we can’t jump to any causal conclusions here.
Reverse Causation for Me, but Not for Thee
Haidt’s Substack, After Babel, has now published a piece about the Florida study. It was penned by David Stein, who writes The Shores of Academia newsletter and also collaborates with Haidt’s Tech and Society Lab. Much of Stein’s critique is devoted to lambasting a Tampa Bay Times op-ed, written by two of the study’s authors, that he sees as drawing unwarranted conclusions from the survey data, but he also pokes around at the survey’s usefulness and implications as well.
Stein has three main beefs with the authors of the study, whom he accuses of ignoring demographic influences, “ignor[ing] reverse causation as a partial explanation of the results,” and “ignor[ing] the actual usage of smartphones and similar devices, especially tablets.” He suggests that “if properly analyzed, the wellbeing results in the survey may be consistent with smartphones being harmful” and suggests that the survey results confirm “that social media use—especially posting—is associated with profound risks.”
The report about the survey is quite clear that smartphone usage wasn’t universally positive. And the study authors who penned the op-ed Stein is objecting to are also clear about this.
“Repeatedly in our data, we found that posting publicly on social media was associated with negative outcomes,” write lead researcher Justin D. Martin and his colleague and co-researcher Logan T. Rance in the op-ed. “Children who often post publicly to social media were much more likely than kids who never post to report severe symptoms of depression and anxiety. Kids who post publicly were also more likely to report poor sleep quality compared to those who don’t.”
Stein treats this like some sort of gotcha for the whole idea that smartphones may not be dangerous. But it’s hard to see why some smartphone activities being linked to negative traits should be an indictment of all smartphone activities.
It’s also hard to see why we should take this link between heavy public posting and depression and anxiety as more indicative of simple cause (phones) and effect (bad things) than other findings might be.
Stein rightly warns that “reverse causation” could be at play with parts of the survey, such as the finding that kids who didn’t own smartphones experienced more cyberbullying. He notes that parents of kids experiencing cyberbullying may be less likely to get them a phone of their own because of it—the bullied condition triggers no phone rather than no phone triggering the bullying.
That’s very plausible! So why should we take for granted that more public posting to social media is a cause of anxious and depressive tendencies rather than a symptom o
Article from Reason.com
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