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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.