Jonathan Haidt

The parents see it, the teachers and principals see it, psychiatrists, psychologists see it.

So the presumption should be something is going on here and it may be related to the technology.

Okay, now, what do we know from the data?

There are two main battlefields.

There are the correlational studies where there's hundreds and hundreds of them.

They're easy to do.

You just look who's more depressed, who spends more hours on social media.

Now, hours spent on social media is the variable that you're correlating with some self-report of mental health.

And then you look at the connection, and the correlations tend to be around 0.1 for boys, 0.2 for girls.

This is what we're fighting about.

Now, Candice Hodgers says that this is a small correlation, and she and others won't be convinced unless we find large correlations, like, say, 0.3 or 0.4.

But in public health, you rarely get 0.3 or 0.4 because you have very poor measurement at both ends.

So that's the correlational studies.

We're sort of at a stalemate there.

The more important battleground is on the experiments.

We all know correlation doesn't show causation.

So we move to the experiments.

And what do the experiments show?

I think we can show that the great majority of experiments do show a benefit from getting off social media.

And very importantly, all of these studies are taking individuals and asking them to get off.