Associate Professor of Psychology. Adolescent development and the transition to adulthood; mental health and alcohol use; quantitative psychology. She/her.
Nov 21, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
As @cjsewall9 says, the preponderance of evidence is that social media/screens *does not* harm. One of the critiques in the op-ed is that we haven't studied this problem in specific apps.
In this preprint I mentioned the other day, with @Ahmb94, we (our awesome volunteers actually) wrote down the names of frequently-used apps on undergrads' Screen Time screenshots.
Facebook may be horrible, but they're right: evidence that social media makes people more depressed is very weak. The narrative that screens are killing our kids and teens, however, is strong and persuasive. I'm going to unpack some of the work cited in this NPR post...🧵1/16
First up is this 2019 study showing, according to the politician who marched it out, that depression risk "rises with each hour spent daily on social media"
This whole “transparency leaderboard” debacle encapsulates many reasons some people stay away from open science in the first place. If it’s all just a contest to answer “how metal are you?” as a scientist, then many don’t want to play.
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Open science practices like preregistration and public data haven’t yet taken hold in some areas close to me (developmental, clinical) because it takes *a while* for labs to make the shift when data take years to collect, don’t belong to you, or include private info.
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Mar 29, 2019 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
A THREAD. We've been seeing a lot of academic discussion about whether social media makes kids depressed, and I've joined others in criticizing the conclusion that they are related in a meaningful way. You may have seen a new piece by Jean Twenge out in @TIME magazine... /1
urging parents not to give this any further thought and to just limit screen time because we have enough evidence that an association exists. "If we waited for causal proof, we'd never accomplish anything!" Unfortunately this conclusion overinflates the scope of the problem. /2
