Does Tween Tech Study Prove Jonathan Haidt Right?

Nope, but it does show how complicated the issue is.

"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 of these traits?

It seems highly plausible that the state of being depressed or anxious and/or whatever causes anxiety and depression symptoms may also lead to more social media posting. We should not assume that the relationship between these two must be a matter of social media causing the issues rather than the issues causing heavier social media use.

If reverse causation is so important to note with parts of the study (and it is!), why not apply that same logic across the board?

Poor Little Rich Kids 

A big component of Stein's complaint is that some kids in the study who do not own smartphones still report accessing smartphones and other forms of technology. "Comparing kids who own a smartphone with those who don't own one but use one anyway is not a reliable method to evaluate the harms of smartphone use," he writes.

But it's not unreasonable to presume that kids without smartphones of their own would use them less or differently than those who own one, even if the former are sometimes using shared devices. And this suggests that some horror hype about smartphone ownership could be overblown.

After all, it would be a strange mechanism by which some smartphone use was linked to worse outcomes than even greater smartphone use, if indeed it was the phones causing the negative outcomes.

A perhaps more plausible mechanism of action here is that not having a phone somehow triggers feelings of disconnectedness or isolation that then trigger other issues.

But I don't think that's it either. I think the most plausible reading of the results is that the kinds of kids and parents in the opt-out group are fundamentally different from those who opt in, and these differences—not the phones—explain at least a large portion of the differences in well-being.

This is something that Stein gets at, too, noting that "kids with higher-income and better-educated parents seem to have by far the worst wellbeing outcomes and, at the same time, the lowest rates of smartphone ownership. Once these and other demographic factors (like gender and age) are properly taken into account, it may easily turn out that smartphone owners have worse wellbeing outcomes than would be expected in view of their demographic characteristics and circumstances." (Emphasis mine)

It may. Or it may not. Without a more full analysis, we don't know. And in the absence of this information, it's especially strange to insist that the study shows either benefits or harms from smartphones. Not drawing unwarranted conclusions should go both ways.

Stein's strongest critique of the survey does center on demographics and unknowns.

These results show that only about 16% of lower-income kids do not own a phone compared to 30% of kids from higher-income families. The 'non-owners' group is therefore disproportionately from higher income families.

At the same time, the report reveals that kids from higher-income families—as well as kids with more educated parents—are far more likely to agree that life feels meaningless: 31% in households making $150,000 or more vs. 10% in households making less than $50,000 and 29% among children of a college graduate vs. 5% among children whose parent has a high school degree or less.

But the use of "lower-income" and "higher-income" is a bit slippery here. On the question of smartphone ownership, the report only tells us the difference between kids in the two lowest-income groups combined (households with incomes less than $100,000) and kids from the highest-income households ($150,000 or more). We get no breakdown of the first category, and no word at all about kids from households in the second-highest income group, which is also the group with the second-highest number of survey participants. And on the "life feels meaningless" question, we get different data breakdowns: only the lowest income households (less than $50,000) vs. the highest, which were also the two groups with the lowest number of survey participants. Meanwhile, we get no breakdown on phone ownership by parents' education, and only a very small proportion of those surveyed (87 kids) had parents with a high school degree or less. A large proportion had parents who had attended some college but did not graduate, and we don't get any info on the life-meaning answers among this group.

Based on what we know, it's really hard to say how much of the difference in phone vs. no phone outcomes might be attributable to socioeconomic differences in these kids' households. The data Stein mentions might give us reason to pause—and ask for further analysis—but it merely complicates the picture; it's in no way conclusive about anything.

Besides, we—once again—do not know for sure which way these links flow. Maybe the richest kids are depressed for all sorts of reasons and also just happen to be less likely to have phones, making the effects of being unhappy rich kids appear to be about phone ownership. But maybe part of the reason for these kids' ennui is not having access to phones and whatever connective potentialities they bring. One explanation might sound more plausible to you than the other, but the point is that we can't know from the data we have.

A Smartphone by Any Other Name

Of course, brands built around a maximalist vision of tech's harms to children require a simple narrative: that social media and smartphones are bad for kids, period. And pushing such a simple narrative requires minimizing research that complicates the picture. But the actual evidence on young people and tech, in its totality, suggests the picture is complicated.

That's why I like to cover surveys like this one from Florida. I'm not invested in kids having phones or using social media, per se. I think these are calls that families need to make for themselves, and calls on which reasonable people can differ. But I am invested in trying to move us beyond deceptively simplistic narratives.

So let's get back to one complicating aspect of the Florida survey: tech use by kids without their own phones, either through other types of tech or through shared devices.

Stein seems to suggest that this renders this survey meaningless or, at least, deceptive. In the survey, "a majority owns a tablet and a vast majority use a tablet," he points out. "The consideration of tablets is important because these devices are similar to smartphones in the ways they facilitate harm."

Some 854 respondents owned tablets; 656 did not. We do not know how much the tablet-owning group overlapped with the phone-owning group. It's possible most of those without phones did have tablets, and it's possible that tablet ownership was largely concentrated among those who also owned phones.

In any event, this discussion is often framed as a matter of whether or when we should allow kids to get their own smartphones, not whether we should stop them from ever looking at any type of screen. And tech critics often single out smartphones for debate, ignoring other ways that kids can get online. So the differences between kids who own smartphones and those who don't still seem relevant to the discourse.

Even if kids in the no-phone group are still using tablets, it at least suggests that some smartphone-particular fears and solutions are misguided.

Remember Stein's assertions about cyberbullying and the finding that kids with their own phones experienced less of it than kids without their own phones? "It is more plausible that being bullied leads to delayed smartphone ownership than it is that smartphone ownership protects kids from being bullied," Stein writes.

But we need not believe that smartphone ownership somehow protects kids from cyberbullying to find the disparity here interesting.

I found it notable not because I believe phones are some sort of magic protector against online bullies but because it suggests that you can't stop cyberbullying simply by restricting your own kids' smartphone use. And in discussions about stopping online bullying, that's probably an important point.

No Magic Bullets

The cyberbullying conundrum gets at a bigger issue with the way we tend to think about young people and technology. So much of the discourse around teen tech troubles focuses on simply restricting access to particular types of devices or particular apps.

In the Florida survey, 87 percent of kids surveyed said they at least sometimes used a laptop or computer and 85 percent said they at least sometimes used a tablet. Maybe kids without phones simply replace phone time with other tech time. Maybe they're on these devices even more than kids with phones are on their phones. We don't know; surveys often ignore or gloss over certain sorts of screen time.

It's not crazy to assume kids carrying around their own phones pull them out more than kids lugging around a laptop whip that out. But let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that we know kids without phones get as much or more screen time and that this is what is triggering their problems. Or that they get less screen time, but it's still somehow the root of their issues. That this isn't just about phones and too much time on them, but basically all forms of modern technology.

What would that mean? Unless we're prepared to totally take away access to the internet and technology until kids turn 18, solutions based on the idea that we can simply remove the technology won't work. And if we did manage to take it all away—the laptops, the desktop computers, the smartwatches, all of it—until kids turned 18, that may just leave young adult tech virgins extra vulnerable to any potential harms, not to mention ill-prepared for studying and working and communicating in the world that exists. It would also leave minors without any of the positive benefits of technology, of which even the most ardent tech skeptics tend to admit there are some and which teens themselves have reported in survey after survey.

This is not an argument for giving smartphones to 8-year-olds, or even for giving them to 11- or 13-year-olds. I think it's reasonable for parents to restrict tech use at younger ages and to keep setting certain limits at older ages. But we should also be preparing kids and teenagers to be more savvy online, and helping them to deal with underlying issues, rather than pretending that if we can just restrict the right combination of devices for a long enough time we will magically solve all the problems of adolescence.

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Today's Image

Gemini, this morning (ENB/Reason)