Study: Minimal evidence links social media, gaming to teen mental health issues | Hacker News Reader

Study: Minimal evidence links social media, gaming to teen mental health issues

manchester.ac.uk

Gaming and social media are the symptom, not the cause.

The real issue is real life is NOT friendly to teenagers. Theres few activities they can just go off and do on their own. A lot of places ban any unsupervised minors. My son can’t go to the escape room or several movie theaters without an adult.

Add to that helicopter parents over protective of kids, and kids reach to spaces they can feel more free: social media, gaming, etc

A related problem is other parents. Even if you want to let your kid be free, you can't, because nosey neighbors will report you to the police.

It happened to us. We let our kids stay in the car, during COVID, while we quickly shopped.

After we got home, the cops showed up and told us someone reported us for neglecting our kids. My wife just kept asking "did we do anything illegal?" and finally they admitted that no, we didn't. They just said

"it just doesn't look good, with all the crime out there".

I said "what crime?". Then they had to admit that crime is way down over the last 30 years, and is especially low in our area.

They eventually left, but it has a chilling effect on letting our kids be kids for fear that it will happen again.

You didn't mention the most important variable of the story -- how old the kids are. But I'm guessing over 8, since it wasn't a crine.

That's a rather US-centric view. Teenagers aren't prisoners in some suburban hellscape in all parts of the world.

No but rural isolation is common in almost all countries apart from maybe the extremely tiny ones.

Yes, and that's a problem, but only a fairly small fraction of kids live in rural areas in urbanized countries. Not that we shouldn't care about their well-being, but it's not a general explanation for mental health issues among teens.

They're not prisoners to suburban hellscapes in all parts of the US, either.

That is so difficult to imagine. When I was a teen I was almost never home. I was out at the movies, in a forest, out exploring somewhere, with friends, etc.

I'm curious largely if many teens these days just don't want to go out or like you mentioned, aren't able to. Maybe it's a combo of both.

Just tough for me to imagine being a teen and not wanting to be as far as possible from parents.

The negative-attention seeking assholes (often teens) used to only get "attention" from people in the vicinity. Now they can be anywhere, and get a reaction from everyone.

Honestly this issue isn't inherent to just teens. I want to do be able to do these sorts of activities as an adult even, but there's nowhere that you're allowed to just be or do anything.

The negative effects of social media on teenagers have been researched and are well documented. I have 2 teenagers and honestly don't even need that, I see it with my own eyes.

The study states no conflict of interest, but found it a bit ironic that the next link on HN was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682534 , stating that "Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry"

There are a lot of "foundations" funding their research. I don't have the patience to go searching through them to see if they may be causes of conflict of interest first, second or third hand. I just assume there's a conflict unless other research from reputable sources backs it up.

I have a lovely screenshot right now of both articles on the front page right next to each other.

Ditto. Social Media investigated negative effects of social media and found none. :)

Why on earth are they conflating video games and social media ?

I bet I can write a study that proves that the aggregate of gardening, yoga and crack cocaine only have limited effect on health.

> Why on earth are they conflating video games and social media ?

They aren't. Social media use and gaming were separate measures in the study.

I'm curious to see J.Haidt's take on the study - it kinda contradicts all the studies he cites in The Anxious Generation that focus on social media.

Video games have always been, and will always be, something that gets included in any discourse about "kids these days".

Games these days are different to games "back in my day", of course.

I remember seeing an article that quoted parents complaining about their children/teens spending large amounts of their time wasting it away... reading fictional novels

Very much the same tone as people that disparage children/teens spending time on video games.

Edit: Found an example https://magazine.1000libraries.com/how-fiction-sparked-outra...

> Critics of the time worried that people were slipping into a fantasy realm and losing their grip on reality. Novels were blamed for basically just about everything, from increasing promiscuity in young women to encouraging suicide and self-harm in young men.

One of these critics, Vicesimus Knox, called for the banning of novels altogether, arguing that people should instead read “true histories.” An article in Gentleman’s Magazine put forward the idea of a “sin tax,” with the hopeful notion of dissuading people from wasting their time with frivolous fiction

Not always. I think it will stop being a bogeyman. At the latest this will happen when the last generation that didn't grow up with them is old enough to retire.

I’d think it will just shift to "today’s games" that are bad, as opposed to "good old games".

Here are Jonathan Haidt's counter arguments and evidence:

https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/

He has compiled reviews over many studies which arguably should carry more weight than any single study.

Just because there are more studies doesn't increase their quality. The right way to do a systemic review is to assess studies based on their quality, such as design against bias, their size and method to include a combination of good studies and exclude the poor ones. Then assess those studies. Most studies are very low quality and combining them doesn't increase their value or their chance of being right, high quality studies are much more likely to be of value and ground truth and the better the methods and size the greater the chance of something that we can trust.

There is an awful lot of junk in Psychology in general, it has a serious replication issue and bias due to poor methodology resulting in a high chance of fake and biased results. So no you can't assume the accumulation of many studies is better than one, that is not how systemic reviews work.

That's nice.

What is your critique of Haidt's work, specifically?

This is a bad study. What it actually measured was that heavier social media use is not correlated with mental health.

It DOES NOT say that social media use is, or isn't, correlated with mental health because it did not track teens who did not have access to social media.

Australia will be an excellent natural experiment/study on this: We'll see if things change after their recent law, you can compare the same kid before and after, and you can compare Australian kids to other kids.

How are you going to determine whether the Australian kid actually left social media, or just signed up with his dogs face to bypass age verification?

Ask them. Same way they asked the teens in this study.

"We found no difference in vital functions between someone who had a 100 pound versus a 200 pound weight dropped on their heads. We conclude that heavy blunt impact is not linked to death!"

Yup, that's pretty much it - once they are dead from 100 pounds, going to 200 changes nothing.

Broad brush comment but studies like this kind of seem useless for a couple reasons here

One position I don't see defended as much anymore is an elitist position, i.e. even if social media & games (sm&g) are harmful to a majority of teens, there still might be a minority of teens that thrive with the sm&g and their thriving might be argued to be "worth" the suffering of many (think: geniuses who can make the world much much better)

Another direction to go in is, independent of studies, what kind of world do we want for ourselves and our kids? Do we want them to be able to play some games and access some social media? I could see them for example playing online chess and following chess masters on social media, so these could indeed be a part of something of an ideal vision for our kids. So I guess there isn't often much discussion of trying to pursue the ideals of childhood or adulthood and about crafting that vision of what activities that involves and then connecting our lives to a kind of plan for following such a blueprint. (This requires no social study to establish as far as I can see)

Journal club hat on!

Technical critique from someone who's done these types of statistical analyses (both the psychometric and SEM components): I'm surprised they didn't include between-person random slopes as well for cross-lagged effects.

It's hard to justify the assumption that gaming/social media has the same effect on mental health between individuals (even within genders, and controlling for their choices demographic factors). I'm not convinced that their set of covariates is enough to capture psychological risk factors.

I would be more comfortable with a model that also lets us ask whether there was significant variation between individuals on the effect on gaming/social media on mental health.

> The study tracked pupils’ self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties over three school years

This study is dead in the water. Teens have zero near-term incentives to be honest about any of these events.

For a study with this scope to be effective, parents will have to opt in using existing tracking/monitoring tooling for their child's habits. And even then, you might only be able to establish correlations with events serious enough to warrant mental health medical visits.

I think this is just another case of HN being hyper-critical of studies that don't fit the narrative. Contrast this with, for example, some of the extremely flimsy studies linking psychedelics to mental health improvement that have no control groups and n<30 subjects that are seemingly accepted without question.

Self-reporting is common in studies like this. Everyone knows it's not perfect.

Parental reporting is also heavily flawed. Parents have drastically different ideas about how their own kids are feeling and different children are more or less secretive with their parents. Parental self-reporting would likely be less accurate, not more.

The other flaw of the study is that it doesn't compare populations with no social media, to the ones with.^ Just because you're not on social media, doesn't mean you're not affected, specifically where bullying is involved. You might switch off social media because of this, but have worse mental health outcomes.

^ No-one can do this kind of comparison anymore because no such population really exists, save for the Amish and extant hunter-gatherers who would have plenty of other confounders contributing their mental health measures. However the upward trend in suicide since the late 2000s pretty well correlates with smartphone usage. As does the drop in fertility rates (which are now showing to not necessarily correlate with the oft-cited suspects like wealth, female educational attainment, etc.)

None of this should even be published. Comparing junk science to other junk science doesn't make one more true.

It's sort of funny that the headline right underneath this one on hn right now is about social media research having ties to industry

Since when do we need study for that?? Look around us!!

Gaming isn't and never will be an issue in our society, now, social media??? 100%

* Teens in Western countries don't wanna study because they wanna be "social media influencer" (whatever that means).

* Students at Uni and schools are using ChatGPT to do the thinking for them meaning, they are getting dumber and dumber.

* if you never watched 2006 Idiocracy movie, it was a warning about the future, not a comedy movie. Strongly recommend you to watch it. DO IT!!!!

* Social media is not affecting just teens metal health but everything, look around us, birthrate is all time low and declining. Women no longer need men they say, marriages all falling apart because of social media, they think they deserve better because neighbors grass is greener. Decades old marriages, gone! Dating?? Non existent and not worth anymore so guys are walking away so birthrates is going worse by the day.

* Hollywood got into some insane plastic surgery epidemic right now, social media is allowing it to spread, teenagers are using cosmetics and surgery to blend into the social media trend, something 40s and above used to do, not 15-20s.

Now with the AI, chatbots, fake accounts, fake videos, fake everything, watch our society doomed. It already started, like I said, birthrates is gone, students cannot read, they cannot do anything without asking ChatGPT. Food is nothing but plastic, chemicals and everything in between.

Watch 2006 Idiocracy movie, you won't regret.

> Since when do we need study for that?? Look around us!!

> Gaming isn't and never will be an issue in our society, now, social media??? 100%

It's notable to see gaming and social media blended into the same study, but it's even more interesting to see how the study's results are being rejected in favor of everyone's own pre-conceived conclusions anyway.

>Since when do we need study for that?? Look around us!!

>Watch 2006 Idiocracy movie, you won't regret.

Having anecdotal evidence, and a fictional film is exactly the issue with the consensus that social media is bad.

It feels weird to like "literally go read 1984" but this is kind of exactly the plot of Idiocracy so I can only agree

I think you should watch the 2006 film of Idiocracy. You will certainly not regret watching 2006 documentary, isocracy

https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/advance-article/doi/10.1...

“The study tracked pupils’ self-reported social media habits”

Self-reported? Even if study is accurate its list a lot of credibility through its methods.

This is tricky. Anecdotally, social media has made my cousin much stupider - seriously, he’s begging me for help with stuff as basic as calculus (admittedly, I can’t help him here since I’m not good at math, but still…)

I wish there were free online resources for adults with remedial math needs…

This might cover what you are looking for: https://www.khanacademy.org/

Oh this is awesome. I think I remember using this guy's stuff for remedial biology (or chemistry?) in HS. Thanks for the link.

I haven't searched, but I'm 100% confident that there's plenty of such math resources on the interent…

> calculus

> remedial

thought the same. it's definitely tertiary level and above

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