Do smartphones and social media use negatively impact adolescent mental health?
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his high-profile work The Anxious Generation, published last year, certainly thinks so. So do policymakers across a range of jurisdictions, who have variously banned smartphones in schools (New Zealand), made it illegal for under-16s to have social media accounts (Australia), and proposed preventing app stores from allowing downloads to under-16s’ phones without parental consent (United States). Policymakers are responding to an avalanche of parental pressure to act on the supposed mental health crisis spawned by the widespread use of smartphones and social media.
One might have supposed that the rush to regulate would be supported by a raft of evidence conclusively demonstrating a direct causal link between smartphone and social media use and deteriorating adolescent mental health. This standard of proof is typically required to justify regulation of other devices. But does such evidence exist?
One major challenge is that, since smartphones and social media are relatively new phenomena, there has not yet been time to conduct the necessary research. Another is that it is nearly impossible to conduct gold-standard randomized controlled trials when these applications are already in widespread use. Not to mention the ethical concerns involved in experimenting on children.
However, this does not preclude the rigorous collation of expert views on the subject—provided the process ensures, as much as is possible, that the views expressed are grounded in the best possible scientific evidence available, not anecdotes and opinions. Such evidence would offer stronger support for policymakers seeking to enact regulations than merely responding to (parental) voter pressure.
Fortunately for policymakers, such a study has been undertaken. A consensus statement on the potential negative impacts of smartphone and social media use on adolescent mental health was released last month. While it has not yet been peer-reviewed, it is currently undergoing that process.
The authors convened a panel of over 120 international researchers from 20 countries and 11 disciplines—including psychology, communication and media, health sciences, business and management, economics, social sciences and psychiatry—representing a broad range of views. They conducted a Delphi method study evaluating 26 claims drawn from Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, covering international trends in adolescent mental health, causal links to smartphones and social media, and policy recommendations.
The Delphi method is a group technique designed to obtain the most valid and reliable consensus from a panel of skilled and knowledgeable experts. It involves multiple rounds of questionnaires with a controlled feedback process. This method allows experts to refine their responses based on information revealed in prior rounds, and is generally regarded as the gold standard for forming expert consensus.
After four survey rounds, the experts were able to agree that there is evidence of a decline in adolescent mental health over the past two decades in several countries—including the US—with some variability across countries and measures. Moreover, 97.6 percent of experts agreed that there is evidence that heavy smartphone and social media use can cause certain sleep problems.
The consensus process identified several domains warranting further investigation. Although the majority of experts believed that heavy smartphone and social media use can cause attention fragmentation and behavioral addiction, 97.4 percent and 92.2 percent of experts, respectively, agreed that the evidence is only correlational. While most experts also believed that smartphone and social media use can cause social deprivation, 96.7 percent agreed that the magnitude and direction of this effect are likely influenced by individual and social moderators. Moreover, although 97.4 percent of experts agreed that heavy social media use may cause some sleep problems, the extent to which it specifically causes sleep deprivation remains unclear.
Regarding gender-related impacts on girls, over 94 percent of experts agreed there is evidence suggesting that social media may be associated with body dissatisfaction (96.5 percent), perfectionism (96.9 percent), exposure to mental disorders (96.4 percent), and increased risk of sexual harassment and predation (94 percent). However, this evidence is primarily correlational. Additionally, over 93.9 percent of experts agreed that the evidence linking social media to relational aggression among adolescent girls is preliminary. Furthermore, more than 93 percent agreed that the current scientific evidence is too preliminary to support or refute claims that delaying smartphone access and limiting social media use to under-16s benefits overall adolescent mental health.
While policymakers must often make decisions in rapidly changing environments with limited data, commissioning further research currently appears to be more constructive than crafting additional regulations.
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