The most reliable but also the most disempowering sentence ever uttered has to be, “It’s not that simple.”
There was an outpouring of “At last!”at the publication of bestselling psychologist author Jonathan Haidt’s latest book, The Anxious Generation, which proclaims that screen time is damaging young people’s mental health.
Putting aside whether neurological research was even needed to confirm this hypothesis, the excitement was palpable. Science had spoken. Might society finally do something about a phenomenon that everyone – save possibly Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – agreed was now a vicious scourge?
Within weeks, however, this most intuitive, self-evident of truths was being challenged – even rather convincingly countered. Academics and researchers at least as well qualified and experienced as Haidt are now presenting other, disconcerting findings, the general gist of which is: it’s not that simple.
The actual screen time itself may be close to neutral in its impact, say some learned critics. Other eminences have poked holes in the assumption that there even is a mental health crisis, noting that terminology and diagnoses have changed and that, as can happen in criminology studies, it’s not the incidence that’s increased, but the awareness and/or reporting of it.
While it’s essential academics rigorously test one another’s processes and conclusions, the social sciences have a special problem with what is termed “replication”. Even the revered Thinking, Fast and Slow author Daniel Kahneman – among the least debunked of bestselling academics – has had his work doubted by others who could not get similar results to his. Hilariously, the very shortcuts taken by the human brain that Kahneman elucidated may be partly to blame.
“Screen time equals mental harm” seems so logical. But there are so many co-and counter-factors. Screen time with bullying brings off-the-chart harm; screen time reading about animals or watching sport is likely benign.
One eminent critic of Haidt’s work asked, among “control” questions, whether study participants had eaten potatoes in the given time frame. Potato ingestion turned out to have a comparable correlation with mental health impacts as screen time.
All this rigorous science is terrific but the time between the fascinating new theory and the answering wave of “yes, buts” has now accelerated beyond the layperson’s comfort zone.
Time was when the latest bestselling new theory about human peculiarity could make a person feel superior for years after reading it. Populist but scholarly undertoned titles last century like I’m OK ‒ You’re OK and Games People Play empowered people to recognise manipulation and passive aggression. Perhaps less usefully, zoologist Desmond Morris’s inspiring socio-biological scholarship was hijacked for lucrative cod theories about body language.
Later, more sophisticated offerings, including Thinking, Fast and Slow, which deconstructed the brain’s sometimes useful and sometimes self-deluding shortcuts, and Outliers, which posited that outstanding achievement demanded 10,000 hours of practice, further bathed people in a sense that not only were they getting new insights, but insights with a comfortable sense of recognition. So intuitive were these ideas, they felt like certainties.
Naturally, as for Haidt, doubters emerged. But it took time, often years, for the doubts to percolate – making long-time adherents feel defensive. Even lucrative, well-established franchises like Freakonomics – beloved for making unexpected links between politicians’ actions and resulting human behaviours – have begun falling out of favour.
Only those of iron constitution would risk even the shallows of debate over The Spirit Level, and any utterance by Thomas Piketty can provoke fear and loathing possibly unrivalled since the Spanish Inquisition.
For now, the safest course seems to be to try to limit kids’ screen time until further notice. Potatoes are probably still okay.
