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Challenges in the Task of Training Children — Part 5
August 19, 2024
Social media usage puts students in what is known as a collective-action problem. It is what happens when everyone in the group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but every member of the group is discouraged from taking that action because, unless others take the same action, the costs outweigh the benefits.
Social media companies such as Snap, TikTok, and Meta offer products that are harmful and addicting. They are often compared to tobacco companies, but there is a significant difference. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use in 1997, nearly two thirds of high school students did not smoke. A teen could be in a group in which some smoked and some did not, and those who chose not to smoke did not incur any harm from within the group. That is not true regarding the use of social media. Consider the following explanation:
“Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.”
A recent study at the University of Chicago captured the dynamics of the social-media trap.
“The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.”
“Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.”
Next time. . . four norms that, if adopted in a community, could help students break out of four collective-action traps.
Challenges in the Task of Training Children — Part 4
August 06, 2024
The transformation of childhood from real-world experiences to virtual experiences has contributed to a number of harms including increased social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. The list, however, does not stop there. Here are three additional harms from the article entitled "The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood", published in The Atlantic, March 13, 2024.
Staying on task is difficult for an adult, but for an adolescent, whose prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed, trying to stay on task while engaged with the nearly constant interruptions of a smartphone is nearly impossible. Studies have shown that the typical adolescent gets well over 200 notifications in a day, over 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for any meaningful, creative, substantive task, yet teens find their attention being divided and diverted by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences. It even happens in the classroom. When students text and check their social media during class, their grades and learning suffer. Fragmented attention and disrupted learning may explain why benchmark test scores in the U.S. and around the world began to decline in the early 2010s.
Social media and gaming platforms are designed to hook users. Most teens do not become addicted, but multiple studies show that the rates of problematic use of smartphones is between 5 and 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that approximately 1 out of every 7-10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that would disrupt various areas of life and look a lot like addiction resulting in increased anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability?
Ages 9 to 15 are crucial years for cultural learning, and that is the age span in which most children get a smartphone and sign up to consume large volumes of content from random strangers, most produced by other adolescents in blocks of a few seconds. This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations. The result is a lack of meaning and direction in life.
“A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70%, to more than one in five.”
Next time . . . how can it be that an entire generation is hooked on smartphones that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using?