The Coddling of the American Mind
Page 17
Antisocial Media?
What is driving this surge in mental illness and suicide? Twenge believes that the rapid spread of smartphones and social media into the lives of teenagers, beginning around 2007, is the main cause of the mental health crisis that began around 2011. In her book, she presents graphs showing that digital media use and mental health problems are correlated: they rose together in recent years. That makes digital media a more likely candidate than, say, the global financial crisis and its associated recession, which began in 2008. By 2011, the economy and the job market were steadily improving in the United States, so economic factors are unlikely to be the cause of deteriorating adolescent mental health in the following years.19
Simple correlations are suggestive, but they can’t tell us what caused what. Lots of things were changing during that time period, so there are many opportunities for what are called spurious correlations. For example, the annual per capita consumption of cheese in the United States correlates almost perfectly with the number of people who die each year from becoming entangled in their bedsheets, but that’s not because eating cheese causes people to sleep differently.20 That correlation is “spurious” because it’s just a coincidence that both numbers rose steadily over the same period of time.
To avoid getting fooled by spurious correlations, we need to consider additional variables that would be expected to change if a particular causal explanation were true. Twenge does this by examining all the daily activities reported by individual students, in the two datasets that include such measures. Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
Notice anything about the difference between the two lists? Screen versus nonscreen. When kids use screens for two hours of their leisure time per day or less, there is no elevated risk of depression.21 But above two hours per day, the risks grow larger with each additional hour of screen time. Conversely, kids who spend more time off screens, especially if they are engaged in nonscreen social activities, are at lower risk for depression and suicidal thinking.22 (Twenge addresses the possibility that the relationship runs the other way—that depression is what causes kids to spend more time with their screens—and she shows that this is unlikely to be the case.23)
Part of what’s going on may be that devices take us away from people. Human beings are an “ultrasocial” species. Chimpanzees and dogs have very active social lives, but as an ultrasocial species, human beings go beyond those “social” species.24 Like bees, humans are able to work together in large groups, with a clear division of labor. Humans love teams, team sports, synchronized movements, and anything else that gives us the feeling of “one for all, and all for one.” (Ultrasociality is related to the psychology of tribalism that we talked about in chapter 3. The trick is to satisfy people’s needs to belong and interact without activating the more defensive and potentially violent aspects of tribalism.) Of course, social media makes it easier than ever to create large groups, but those “virtual” groups are not the same as in-person connections; they do not satisfy the need for belonging in the same way. As Twenge and her coauthors put it:
It is worth remembering that humans’ neural architecture evolved under conditions of close, mostly continuous face-to-face contact with others (including non-visual and non-auditory contact; i.e., touch, olfaction), and that a decrease in or removal of a system’s key inputs may risk destabilization of the system.25
This idea is supported by Twenge’s finding that time spent using electronic devices was not generally harmful for highly sociable kids—the ones who spent more time than the average kid in face-to-face social interactions.26 In other words, the potentially negative impact of screens and social media might depend on the amount of time teens spend with other people. But electronic devices are harmful not just because they take kids away from face-to-face interactions; there are more insidious effects, which are felt more strongly by girls.
Why Is It Mostly Girls Who Suffer?
The previous graphs show that mental health has deteriorated much further among iGen girls than among iGen boys. Furthermore, to the extent that social media seems to bear some of the blame, that may be true only for girls. For boys, Twenge found that total screen time is correlated with bad mental health outcomes, but time specifically using social media is not.27 Why might social media be more harmful for girls than for boys?
There are at least two possible reasons. The first is that social media presents “curated” versions of lives, and girls may be more adversely affected than boys by the gap between appearance and reality. Many have observed that for girls, more than for boys, social life revolves around inclusion and exclusion.28 Social media vastly increases the frequency with which teenagers see people they know having fun and doing things together—including things to which they themselves were not invited. While this can increase FOMO (fear of missing out), which affects both boys and girls, scrolling through hundreds of such photos, girls may be more pained than boys by what Georgetown University linguistics professor Deborah Tannen calls “FOBLO”—fear of being left out.29 When a girl sees images of her friends doing something she was invited to do but couldn’t attend (missed out), it produces a different psychological effect than when she is intentionally not invited (left out). And as Twenge reports, “Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.” The number of teens of all ages who feel left out, whether boys or girls, is at an all-time high, according to Twenge, but the increase has been larger for girls. From 2010 to 2015, the percentage of teen boys who said they often felt left out increased from 21 to 27. For girls, the percentage jumped from 27 to 40.30
Another consequence of social media curation is that girls are bombarded with images of girls and women whose beauty is artificially enhanced, making girls ever more insecure about their own appearance. It’s not just fashion models whose images are altered nowadays; platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram provide “filters” that girls use to enhance the selfies they pose for and edit, so even their friends now seem to be more beautiful. These filters make noses smaller, lips bigger, and skin smoother.31 This has led to a new phenomenon: some young women now want plastic surgery to make themselves look like they do in their enhanced selfies.32
The second reason that social media may be harder on girls is that girls and boys are aggressive in different ways. Research by psychologist Nicki Crick shows that boys are more physically aggressive—more likely to shove and hit one another, and they show a greater interest in stories and movies about physical aggression. Girls, in contrast, are more “relationally” aggressive; they try to hurt their rivals’ relationships, reputations, and social status—for example, by using social media to make sure other girls know who is intentionally being left out.33 When you add it all up, there’s no overall sex difference in total aggression, but there’s a large and consistent sex difference in the preferred ways of harming others. (At least, that was Crick’s finding in the 1990s, before the birth of social media.) Plus, if boys’ aggression is generally delivered in person, then the targets of boys’ aggression can escape from it when they go home. On social media, girls can never escape.
Given the difference in preferred forms of aggression, what would happen if a malevolent demon put a loaded handgun into the pocket of every adolescent in the United States? Which sex would suffer more? Boys, most likely, be
cause they would find gunplay more appealing and would use guns more often to settle conflicts. On the other hand, what would happen if, instead of guns, that same malevolent demon put a smartphone, loaded up with social media apps, into the pocket of every adolescent? Other than the demon part, that is more or less what happened between 2007 and 2012, and it’s now clear that girls have suffered far more. Social media offers many benefits to many teens: it can help to strengthen relationships as well as damage them, and in some ways it is surely giving them valuable practice in the art of social relationships. But it is also the greatest enabler of relational aggression since the invention of language, and the evidence available today suggests that girls’ mental health has suffered as a result.
iGen Goes to College
The first members of iGen started arriving on college campuses in September 2013; by May 2017, when the eldest members began graduating, the student body at U.S. colleges was almost entirely iGen (at least in selective four-year residential colleges). These are precisely the years in which the new culture of safetyism seemed to emerge from out of nowhere.
These are also the years in which college mental health clinics found themselves suddenly overwhelmed by new demand, according to many newspaper and magazine articles profiling the lengthening waiting lists for psychological counseling at universities across the United States.34 At the time, these profiles of crises at individual universities seemed somewhat anecdotal. When we were writing our Atlantic article, there was no nationally representative survey documenting the trend. But now, three years later, there are several.
A 2016 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, using data from 139 colleges, found that by the 2015–2016 school year, half of all students surveyed reported having attended counseling for mental health concerns.35 The report notes that the only mental health concerns that were increasing in recent years were anxiety and depression. Confirming these upward trends with a different dataset,36 Figure 7.3 shows the percentage of college students who describe themselves as having a mental disorder. That number increased from 2.7 to 6.1 for male college students between 2012 and 2016 (that’s an increase of 126%). For female college students, it rose even more: from 5.8 to 14.5 (an increase of 150%). Regardless of whether all these students would meet rigorous diagnostic criteria, it is clear that iGen college students think about themselves very differently than did Millennials. The change is greatest for women: One out of every seven women at U.S. universities now thinks of herself as having a psychological disorder, up from just one in eighteen women in the last years of the Millennials.
Percentage of College Students Who Say That They Have a Psychological Disorder
FIGURE 7.3. Percentage of college students responding “yes” to the question “Do you have [a] psychological disorder (depression, etc.).” (Source: Higher Education Research Institute.)
These years also saw a rise in self-reports of anxiety as the reason for seeking help. One large survey of university counseling centers found that only 37% of students who came through their doors in 2009 and prior years had complained about problems with anxiety—roughly on a par with the two other leading concerns, depression and relationships.37 But beginning in 2010, the percentage of students with anxiety complaints began to increase. It reached 46% in 2013 and continued climbing to 51% in 2016. It is now by far the leading problem for which college students seek treatment. These years also saw substantial increases in rates of self-injury and suicide among college students,38 so while part of the increase may be due to students being more willing to self-diagnose, once again, we know that the underlying rates of mental illness were increasing. Something was changing in the lives and minds of adolescents before they reached college, and when growing numbers of depressed and anxious students began arriving on campus, beginning around 2013, it was bound to have some effect on university culture and norms.
You can see why it was hard for us to make a strong case that universities were causing students to become anxious and depressed by teaching them disordered ways of thinking. Anxiety and depression rates were already rising for all teenagers before they arrived at college, and for those who never attended college as well. Clearly universities were not causing a national mental health crisis; they were responding to one, and this may explain why the practices and beliefs of safetyism spread so quickly after 2013. But safetyism does not help students who suffer from anxiety and depression. In fact, as we argue throughout this book, safetyism is likely to make things even worse for students who already struggle with mood disorders. Safetyism also inflicts collateral damage on the university’s culture of free inquiry, because it teaches students to see words as violence and to interpret ideas and speakers as safe versus dangerous, rather than merely as true versus false. That way of thinking about words is likely to promote the intensification of a call-out culture, which, of course, gives students one more reason to be anxious.
Depression and anxiety tend to go together.39 Both conditions create strong negative emotions, which feed emotional reasoning. Anxiety changes the brain in pervasive ways such that threats seem to jump out at the person, even in ambiguous or harmless circumstances.40 Compared to their nonanxious peers, anxious students are therefore more likely to perceive danger in innocent questions (leading them to embrace the concept of microaggressions) or in a passage of a novel (leading them to ask for a trigger warning) or in a lecture given by a guest speaker (leading them to want the lecturer disinvited or for someone to create a safe space as an alternative to the lecture). Depression distorts cognition, too, and gives people much more negative views than are warranted about themselves, other people, the world, and the future.41 Problems loom larger and seem more pervasive. One’s resources for dealing with those problems seem smaller, and one’s perceived locus of control becomes more external,42 all of which discourages efforts to act vigorously to solve problems. Repeated failures to escape from what is perceived to be a bad situation can create a mental state that psychologist Martin Seligman called “learned helplessness,” in which a person believes that escape is impossible and therefore stops trying, even in new situations where effort would be rewarded.43 Furthermore, when people are depressed, or when their anxiety sets their threat-response system on high alert, they can succumb to a “hostile attribution bias,” which means that they are more likely to see hostility in benign or even benevolent people, communications, and situations.44 Misunderstandings are more likely, and more likely to escalate into large-scale conflicts.
Screen Time: A Caution About Caution
The rise in adolescent mental illness is very large and is found in multiple datasets, but the percentage of that rise that can be attributed to smartphones and screen time is small, and the evidence is more indirect. Twenge uses the data available, and those datasets report crude measures of what kids are doing—mostly the approximate number of hours per week spent on various activities, including using devices. Twenge finds relationships that are statistically significant yet still generally small in magnitude. That doesn’t mean that the effects of smartphones are small; it just means that the amount of variance in mental illness that we can explain right now, using existing data, is small. If we had better measures of what kids are doing and what is happening to their mental health, we’d be able to explain a lot more of the variance. These problems are very new, and a lot more research is needed before we’ll know why rates of mood disorders began rising so quickly in the 2010s.
One conclusion that future research is almost certain to reach is that the effects of smartphones and social media are complicated, involving mixtures of benefits and harms depending on which kinds of kids are doing which kinds of online activities instead of doing which kinds of offline activities. One factor that is already emerging as a central variable for study is the quality of a teenager’s relationships and how technology is impacting it. In a recent review of research on the effects of social media, social psychologists Jenna Cl
ark, Sara Algoe, and Melanie Green offer this principle: “Social network sites benefit their users when they are used to make meaningful social connections and harm their users through pitfalls such as isolation and social comparison when they are not.”45
So we don’t want to create a moral panic and frighten parents into banning all devices until their kids turn twenty-one. These are complicated issues, and much more research is needed. In the meantime, as we’ll say in chapter 12, there is enough evidence to support placing time limits on device use (perhaps two hours a day for adolescents, less for younger kids) while limiting or prohibiting the use of platforms that amplify social comparison rather than social connection. There is also a strong case to be made for rethinking device use in the context of one’s overall parenting philosophy, especially given everything we know about children’s overarching need to play. We take up those topics in the next two chapters.