The Science Behind Why Social Media Makes Us Miserable

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This week on the Andrew Yang podcast.

This affects all of us. If this affects our democracy, our kids, mental health. Kids mental health, yeah, then, then it's something that we all have a stake in from a political perspective, right? And it's kind of like we went through this years ago with all these lawsuits against Big Tobacco. And if these companies are profiting from like causing a bunch of people lung cancer that are all taxpayers have to pay for because we have to pay for the medical fees, then those companies have to actually cover that cost. We're going to have to come to some solution like that where we realize we have a voice in this.

It is my pleasure to welcome to the podcast some very, very smart, incisive guys. Professor of psychology and neuroscience at nyu, Jay Van Bavel, an incoming assistant professor of human computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, Steve Rathjay. They work together. They've done a ton of work on stuff. We'll get into social media. Why our brains might not love it. Well, welcome to you both.

Thanks for having us. Yeah.

So first, you guys are both academics. You've been doing research for a number of years into social media and polarization. So, Jay, I think you've been at this a little longer. What got you interested in this particular topic?

Yeah, I mean, I've been studying identities, how people identify with groups and how that makes us treat other people that we trust and like members of our own group. And dislike and don't cooperate with members of out groups. And then about 10 years ago, I was starting to use social media and realizing that the dynamics of social media really seem to make this part of human nature much worse. And so ever since then, we've been analyzing millions of posts on all kinds of social media platforms to figure out what resonates with people, what goes viral, what are the consequences. And then lately also trying to figure out how can we make it healthier for people.

Okay, so you study identities and then you realize, you know what? Social media seems to be activating tribalism to the nth degree. And you might have learned that the hard way because you actually are a user, you were on Twitter and you have a significant following, so you kind of lived it.

Yeah, but part of it was that I actually saw the same dynamic happening to scientists. So scientists who are usually pretty boring and nerdy and nuanced, we get together at conferences and talk about things. I saw that we were doing the same things that you see at the level of national politics, where forming different camps and accusing each other of doing something evil. And then you talk to somebody from the other camp offline and you'd realize, actually they're fine. And I agree with them on 95% of things and they're a nice person and totally normal. But their online version was like this caricature that was seemed super one sided and black and white and aggressive. And I was like, it's social media is bringing this out of us.

Yeah, I had the same experience where you meet someone, you're like, oh, they're fine. And then you go online and you're like, oh, they're terrible.

Or the reverse order seen center structure.

Yeah. So Stephen, you are now an avid TikTok. You've got a big following there. Like, what is it?

I have a million followers on TikTok.

A million followers. So first, how did you come to this work? And second, how did you end up discovering that TikTok could actually distribute scientific knowledge?

Yeah. Well, let's start with how I came to studying psychology. So I was a theater kid growing up. I was really interested in acting and playwriting and everything like that. And I thought I wanted to do that as a career and perhaps that's know why I eventually became a science tiktoker. It was the theater kid in me. But yeah, then I went off to study at Stanford University for undergrad and I thought, you know, maybe I want to major in theater or English or something kind of artsy. But then I Took a intro psychology class when I first got there, and I was like, wow, all the stuff that I was doing in theater, sort of analyzing people from this artistic perspective you can do scientifically. So I got fascinated by psychology and then very quickly by political psychology. I was really sort of concerned about the rising political polarization in the country and around the world, and I wanted to study that. And then I went off to do a PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge, and I started studying topics like political polarization and how it intersects with social media. And that's when I started collaborating with Jay Van Bavel, who's now my postdoc advisor. I'm doing a postdoc with him and we've been collaborating together scientifically for five years and sort of studying the intersection between social media and polarization. So that's how I got into studying, doing this kind of work. In terms of TikTok, it really began at the beginning of the pandemic. So, you know, it was 2020. Everyone was at home sort of on TikTok. TikTok became very big at that time. And I've always been interested in science communication. I was writing about science and psychology today in the Guardian, and I was communicating science with the public. And I think it was the theater kid in me, interested in communication and sharing scientific insights with the public, because I think that science can really help us understand each other. It can help us understand social problems like polarization. So one day I decided to film three TikToks about psychological studies at home. And, you know, a few of them went viral. I got 40,000 followers that first year. And then the second year into filming TikToks in 2021, I quickly that jumped up within two weeks to 900,000 followers. So I just exploded on TikTok. I don't know exactly what happened. And then I reached a million. And I've been filming science TikToks ever since. And it's a really great way to know that the science and the research that you're doing matters because you share a psychology study and you see how excited people get about it. And you see people think and comment like, oh, this really useful for my own life. And that makes me inspired to actually do the research that I'm doing because you can see the actual impact your science has. So that's why I really like it. It's a way that you can kind of keep going, doing the hard work of research because you see the impact of your research in the world.

One thing I'm fascinated By is that so you are applying for jobs and then most candidates don't have a million TikTok followers. So how does that impact the job search, the evaluation? Our department's like, oh my gosh, this guy can actually disseminate ideas to the broader public. Or this guy's unserious, like, you know, we should just be writing white papers for, you know, other academics.

It's more the latter. I was told when I went on the job market and Jay was telling me as well to, you know, not emphasize that part of myself because oftentimes scientists are seen as less serious if they engage in science communication. I think it's changing in some fields and I think the eventual job I got at Carnegie Mellon, their Human Computer interaction department, they were really excited that I was like a tiktoker and they thought it was cool. But I think that's because they study human computer interaction. It's a very modern department. I'm not sure if that's true with some of the more old fashioned.

So Jay, you're laughing at this?

No, I'm laughing because you would think that having someone who can summarize science and share it in a way that a million people are interested in learning about it would be an asset.

Right?

You'd think, you know, but not just. I told Steve it wasn't going to help him, but it's the same thing with me. I, I have like 100,000 followers is nothing. But it's when I write for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, you might think even that might be valued, but when I went up for tenure, I, I was told, delete that from your cv. Yes, because not only is it not valued, it would be held against you. So it's better to make sure that your colleagues don't even know about it.

Wow. The insularity of academia, it's a little.

Old fashioned, but some departments are different. The new department I'm joining, it's very interdisciplinary, it's very modern. But a lot of academia can be old fashioned and you're seen as not focusing seriously on research if you're engaged in science communication.

Well, let me say that you're both very serious scientists and researchers.

Thank you.

I personally think that having popular reach should be seen as an asset because the purpose of this science is to improve people's lives. And so if you can do so directly, that's a win. Also, this, I think most people listening to this know this, but my, my brother is an academic and I'm generally very pro academy Very pro science, saddened by the fact that a lot of stuff's getting called into question, a lot of funding is getting pulled, like a lot of institutions are attacked. Like all that stuff's very, very sad. And I do think that people direct, directly communicating with the public is actually part of the answer. Because if you just have a bunch of people talking to each other, then it's harder for the public to understand what they're doing. The value, the fact that, you know, some of the stuff can actually be important for, for policy. So we were having a con, the academic consensus on social media use. And I think most people listening to this now have some glimmer of the fact that social media is anxiety inducing or like bad for our mental health. But you guys put out a paper to this effect eight years ago in 2017.

Yeah, that was the first paper I published on social media.

Yeah. And so what did that, that paper say? And then how has the research developed since then?

Okay, so the paper is interesting. It's basically at that time we analyzed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of social media posts. And what we were looking for is what language goes viral when people are talking about politics in particular. And what we found is when people use moral emotional words like disgust or outrage. For every moral emotional word you put in a post on social media at the time it was on Twitter, it's 15 to 20% more likely to be shared. And so if you put three or four or five posts, words like this in your post, it is likely to go viral or can double the chances of being shared. Now you might think, okay, well this is great, now you know some tips about language you can use to spread your messages. But when we started to look at who was sharing it, we found something really interesting, which was when people are talking about politics and they're not using that language, there's actual cross talk going on. People are listening and engaging with people who are different than them. But, but the moment that you start using that hyper moralized language, you create echo chambers. So people who are on the left are only engaging and sharing stuff from other people on the left and people on the right are only sharing stuff from people on the right. And we've run other studies and what happens when you use that language. People see you as hyper partisan and they also see you as close minded. And they think, I'm not going to engage with this person because they're so close minded on the issue that they're not even worth talking to. And so the problem of course is social media is we're. When. When you use that language, you're only getting the positive feedback because you only get likes.

Yeah.

The tribalists are like, hey, I love it. I love it.

Yeah, yeah. And you're just seeing it rack up likes and followers and engagement and shares. You're not seeing all the people kind of rolling their eyes at you like you would if you were at a party. Right.

Or if you say, hey, it's actually complicated and nuanced and then everyone's like, yeah, like, you know, let's give that a million. Like, I mean, that's not the way it works. Like, it's if you're engaged in moralizing or condemning or something along those lines. Hello listeners. You like money? I like money. Let's help everyone save some money. So I started Noble Mobile, the first cell phone plan that pays you to use it less. A data dividend. That's right. It's for real. Go to noblemobile.com yang and find out how you can get bonus cash just for signing up. Get months for free, the whole shebang. It's awesome. Go to noblemobile.com yang to find out more. I am good at some things. You know, I'm not very good at cooking healthy food for myself. I'm really not good at all. It's one reason why I'm so excited to share with you. Factor Meals Factor is ready made food for you. Two minutes, real food. It's made by chefs, designed by dietitians, delivered to your door. You heat it for two minutes and eat. I love the cheesy chicken and peppers. I love the roasted veggie and pepper pesto tortellini. If that sounds delicious to you, it truly is delicious. So you know, you should check it out and enjoy food that someone else better than you at cooking has prepared. Like I do tend to FactorMeals.com Yang50OFF and use code Yang50OFF to get 50 off your first factor box plus free breakfast for one year offer only valid for new Factor customers with with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor. So you published this in 2017 and the Science has come a long way since then. At the time, social media companies were like, yeah, that's not really like a problem. But there has been growing evidence that social media use is not great for us and it's particularly bad for teenage girls. I want to say by the fact when did that consensus develop and what else has become fairly. I mean nothing's like cut and dried entirely, but like that 80% plus of academics say, okay, we can't agree on everything, but we can agree that, for example, social media use makes you sleep worse.

Right. So Jay and I, we were recently on a paper with over 100 other academics. These included folks like Jonathan Haidt, who has been vocal about issues of social media. It also included a number of academics who are more skeptical of Jonathan Haidt's claims. So it sort of represented a broad array of academics. And I will say in this area there is polarization amongst academics. Not all academics agree on social media's potential harms, but as part of this consensus statement, we surveyed academics and we did find that there were several statements that around 80 or 90 plus percent of academics agreed with. Some are that social media can be harmful for adolescent girls, as you said, that social media can cause sleep disturbances, that sleep disturbances are negative for mental health. There were also some statements that fewer academics agreed upon, but still over a majority of academics agreed upon, which is that smartphone bans in schools are probably beneficial for mental health. However, academics suggested that there really isn't enough evidence there and we're currently trying to do some studies to look at the evidence for some of these policy perspectives or smartphone bans. So I will say in this area of social media's harms, there is a growing consensus. It's not a full consensus, but there is a growing number of academics who are starting to believe that social media can be very harmful for things like well being and polarization.

Yeah, you guys ran a pilot study in three countries including the US showing, hey, what happens if you restrict your social media use to a really pretty minimal amount, let's call it five minutes a day. And everyone felt better if they use social media that little.

Yeah, so I'll chime in about this. We're currently running this 23 country global study. It's funded by almost $2 million in grants that we earn to look at the impact of reducing social media usage for two weeks in countries and contexts around the world. And we're also.

Okay, two weeks, you don't use social media more than five minutes per day during that period.

Yes, exactly. And we're looking at the impact of this on well being, on polarization, on knowledge of the news, exposure to hostile, et cetera. And we're looking at cross cultural differences. So it's the us, the UK and Brazil. And in general we find that limiting your social media usage improves subjective well being. It makes people feel better. Basically. One of the biggest effects we found is that it improves sleep as well. So if you Reduce your social media and smartphone usage, you sleep better. And other studies, not these studies in particular, but other studies, have found that reducing your social media usage can also reduce. Reduce polarization.

That's pretty compelling given that it's only two weeks.

Yeah, it's pretty short. So you can think about like, what is the impact of 10 years of social media exposure on the world. One of the tricky things about studying social media is it's hard to do a randomized controlled trial or an experimental.

Experiment, Aboriginal tribe somewhere. They haven't gotten it yet, let me tell you that.

So that would be the perfect experiment. You just said it would be to go into some remote tribe who doesn't have the technology, drop it in and see what happened. I'm going to tell you that that actually happened, not as a study, but almost by accident. There is this tribe in the Amazon who has almost no technology, but one or two of the members had access to the public and they got one of those Elon Musk Starlinks. And so they were able to bring it and drop it down in their tiny communities that lives on like fishing and eating roots and stuff. Marubu, the Marubu tribe. And all of a sudden they all got acts, they got smartphones and they all got access to social, social media. So let me tell you what happened in this tribe where you dropped, so you might think utopia.

The New York Times.

It'S exactly what we find in our research.

It's.

The New York Times covered it and they said like the title of it was like it created division and conflict and distrust. It actually got so bad because of the addictive properties of it that they had to turn off the StarLink device from nine to five each day because these people would starve because they're living like they have to hunt and fish each day just to bring in enough. They don't have an abundance of nutrients like we do. And so they had to, first of all, they realized, had to stop it. This is a community, by the way, where public kissing is like non normative. You would never show public displacement affection. Like the young boys are watching porn on their phones. Yes. And so a lot of the elders are like, this is destroying our culture.

Yeah, sure.

But then the reporter always asks them after they talk about all these terrible things and says, would you get rid of it? And they're like, no, please don't take it away. And so they talk about all the ways it's destroying their community, fostering conflict and polarization and porn. They can't eat unless they shut it off, but they don't want to get rid of it because they're all hooked on it.

You know, back in the beginning of the social media age, people imagined that it would be this incredible pro democracy tool, that Arab Spring and there's all this stuff.

I thought that too.

Yeah, no, I mean, you know, you can kind of see why. And now the evidence is out that social media seems to be anti democratic and that it causes backsliding and veering towards authoritarianism or one party rule in the countries that experience it. And the biggest study in my mind as someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s is like, I remember not having these phones. There was like a particular way we lived. It makes me laugh sometimes when they talk about banning smartphones in schools and it's like, well like what are the kids gonna do? Or how are the parents gonna reach them? It's like, well the parents might do something called call the office. And then the office is like, hey, we need to talk to our kid because that's how they got ahold of us. But like, yeah, they did that for.

Decades and decades without any problems.

So you guys have been at the cutting edge of science in terms of identifying some of the negative impacts and what has the result been of your publishing papers, articles in your cases, like, you know, social media posts being like, hey guys, stuff not so good. What has been the response from industry, which is the social media companies themselves and then legislators, if any.

Yeah, I'll take that because we were talking a little bit before about Meta's response to some of our research. So we published an article back in 2021. The title is Out Group Animosity drives Virality on Social Media. And what we found when analyzing nearly 3 million Facebook and Twitter posts is that one of the biggest predictors of virality is when a politician or news media organization is negative about the opposing party. Basically dunking on the out group drives virality. And that's the biggest predictor of virality that we.

Two thirds of social media is like.

Someone dunk on someone else. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that was a huge predictor of virality. Specifically, each additional word a social media post included about the opposing party led to about a 67% increase in the number of shares and retweets a post received. So just talking about the out group and all these posts talked about the out group in a very negative light. That really drove virality and it specifically drove on Facebook angry reactions, haha reactions, shares, specific types of reactions. And it also, it turns out in that point in time, the Facebook algorithm was amplifying posts that received reactions, comments and shares. So the exact reactions that were amplified in the algorithm were the ones that outgroup animosity was predictive of.

Yeah, let me just make that very concrete for people. If you see someone's post on Facebook, there's those little emojis. If you click on the angry emoji because the post makes you angry, that means at the time, according to reports, I think it was going to suddenly appear in five times as many other people's feeds because they were amplifying content, because they knew that type of content drives.

There was this formula that was like one point for a like and five points for a reaction, including the angry reaction. And we found in our research that outgroup animosity, it didn't lead to many likes in group favoritism led to likes, whereas outgroup animosity led to angry reactions and comments and shares, which were all boosted in the algorithm. So you can say that Facebook's algorithms probably played a role. Facebook makes algorithmic decisions. They decide on whether their algorithms will be based on reactions or likes, et cetera. They can do stuff to play around with the algorithms. So yeah, we published this article about out group animosity going viral on social media and then we wrote an op ed in the Washington Post describing our findings and Facebook decided to write a response on their research blog. They called our research simply wrong. They didn't criticize any of the empirical points. They were just like, it's simply wrong. And then they cherry picked a lot of evidence showing, look, there are some other studies that show that social media has positive effects and certainly it's nuanced. Social media does have positive effects. But in our opinion, what they were pointing out was quite cherry picked. They were sort of cherry picking studies showing that Facebook is good for you. And then there were a few lines in their response that really stood out to me. They said that social media is negative and polarizing because people are polarized about politics. Society is negative and polarized. We're just holding up. A mirror is a mirror to society. But our response to that is social media isn't a regular mirror, it's a funhouse mirror that distorts reality.

It's making us all look fat.

Yes, exactly. Because the most negative, angry and extreme posts are amplified, whereas the positive posts are de amplified. They said in their response that social media shows the good, the bad and the ugly of society. But we're like, it shows the bad and the ugly of society. That's what's amplified. The good is not shown on social media.

Good is boring.

Yeah. And a lot of literature across the street, whatever. Yeah. No, it's not.

You dunk on the old lady.

It's not what's gonna grab your attention. And social media is an attention economy. You know, what's shown in your algorithms is what grabs your attention. And extremists are also the most vocal on social media. The research suggests that extremists are most likely to post. However, most of Americans and most of society are moderates. They're in the middle. But you don't see moderates being very vocal on social media. You don't see people being like, I'm undecided about this issue and posting that on social media.

And I would say this is not just about politics. Right. This is like debates about Taylor Swift versus Beyonce. The only people who are going to weigh in on that and then get amplified are the people who are really hardcore fanatics or LeBron James versus Michael Jordan, who's the best ever? You see these, and it's basically because those drive conflict.

And that's why when you go outside and, you know, touch grass, as you like to say, and talk to people in society, most people seem like relatively normal. But when you go on social media, people seem pretty crazy.

Yeah. One thing I've been saying is, look, if you get upset, there's a 90% chance that it wasn't because someone did something to you in real life, that someone ran up to in the street and was like, you jerk. But the odds of that happening online are actually kind of high. Or at least having you watch someone else call someone else a jerk. Maybe they don't point a finger at you that day, though it might be you.

We were talking beforehand about this study about where people witness the most moral wrongdoings, the most moral violations, and people witness uniformly the most moral violations on social media and on their phones.

Way more than violation in real life.

News, way more than on newspaper, and way more on. Than in real life. Yeah. It's just moral outrage is really amplified on social media.

Yes. So you make this case. Meta and the gang are like, yeah, nothing to see here, Nothing to see here. But then the evidence starts mounting and mounting and mounting. You do other studies, articles, you know, more and more people are catching on. Our friend Jonathan Haidt, anxious generation, bestseller for 70 weeks or whatever, 39 states are now saying, hey, social media or smartphones, not so good for minors, thank goodness. And so it feels like there's a Shift. Noble Mobile arrives on the scene saying, hey, let's pay people to use their phones less, you know, which is one reason we connected. We connected at one of the offline parties or one of your colleagues.

Yeah, our colleague Remy.

Yeah. And then you guys will come to another offline party.

We'll go to the next one that, that's coming soon.

So I think, I like to think that we're also part of this rising awareness that people want to improve their relationship with their phones. I mean, you know, I don't think we're that different than the tribe in like, in, what was it, Africa tribe.

The Amazon.

In the Amazon. In the Amazon, you know, our brains are probably pretty similar.

Our brains haven't changed in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years.

That was my point.

Yeah.

And so you guys, because you're at the forefront, must be having like a different set of people reaching out to you. Like, I don't know if some companies. But you have found now that certain social media platforms are actually making it harder to research or like making data less accessible.

Yeah, data is not really available from social media platforms. So the study I talked about about out group animosity going viral on social media, it was based on publicly available Twitter and Facebook data. Twitter and Facebook used to this data available. They've shut down all data access sources. Reddit has really limited it. And I think this is for a few reasons. Well, first of all, social media platforms don't want us analyzing data and publishing negative findings about their company. But also I think this data has become really valuable for training large language models. So I think as a result of the AI revolution, social media platforms are super protective of their data because they realize that that data is super, super valuable. So it's a lot harder to study the impacts of social media. And meta is much less. And all these companies are much less open to data with researchers, to collaborating with researchers, et cetera. So it's becoming harder and harder to study.

There used to be at least the veneer of openness where it's like, hey guys, yeah, here's some data. Yeah, let's figure it out. Like, oh, we don't agree now it seems like they've closed ranks.

They have. Yeah. And we have to think of very creative ways to study the impacts of social media, such as paying people to take a break from social media.

Love it. Nobody's gonna try and do that at scale.

Yeah. And our studies, it boosts well being. So that would suggest that maybe Noble Mobile would boost well being.

That would suggest that.

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Okay, so the social media companies and people listening to this be like, yeah, that makes sense that they'd be kind of, you know, recalcitrant because it does threaten their economics. But I feel like ordinary citizens would be like, oh yeah, like there's like a mini movement around people that are converting to like dumb phones or like devices that don't bombard them in the same way. I mean, Jonathan Heights book obviously struck this very, very powerful chord among not just families but also legislators. So have like. So as the social media companies have closed up, I feel like are other people reaching out to you, whether it's academics, families or policymakers?

Yeah, I'll say a few things. So I just had a meeting yesterday with the ipie and so they're based in Europe, in Zurich, but they study the information environment and they're the equivalent on this topic of the ipcc, which is like the international panel that studies climate change that every few years releases a report that everybody uses to figure out what the heck's going on and what we need to do. They recently started something like that for social media and the information environment, realizing it poses its own set of existential threats to humanity, not just in kids education and our welfare, but conflict threats to democracy. So they're trying. This is the type of thing that's happening is like policymakers are becoming interested in this and realizing they need to get a good information that has consensus in support of a lot of scientists. So it's not just one scientist's perspective. But then they need it to be turned into some policy because if this affects all of us, if this affects our democracy, our kids, mental health. Kids mental health, yeah. Then it's something that we all have a stake in from a political perspective. Right. And that I often think that the companies aren't going to change on their own. In fact, anything they're getting rid of content moderation. They're not letting us analyze data, they're going in the op. I used to at one point have hope. If you interviewed me 10 years ago, I would have said the Arab Spring is really good evidence. It fosters democratic voice and activity. And I would have said it's kind of a cool moment because Maybe you have four CEOs who have the power, with a couple presses of a button, to change the information flow for billions of people. We've never had that before. And I would have said maybe it's good not to have that in the hands of dictators around the world. But if anything, they're going in the opposite direction. A lot of these platforms are cutting down content moderation and information access. So I think it's really going to become an issue of people, citizens to decide, no, I don't want this. I don't want it in my schools, I don't want it at my work. I don't want these in my bedroom to do whatever. Yeah. And it's kind of like we went through this years ago with all these lawsuits against Big Tobacco. If people want to smoke, that's fine, but there is rules. You can't do it on an airplane anymore or in a classroom with kids. And if these companies are profiting from, like, causing a bunch of people lung cancer that are all taxpayers have to pay for because we have to pay for the medical fees, then those companies have to actually cover that cost. And so I think we're going to have to come to some solution like that where we realize we have a.

Voice in this building on that. I do see a bit of a vibe shift in society, especially with part of it is driven by the conversation around the anxious generation. And I think a lot of this issue about the negative impacts of social media, some of the specific sub issues, like the misinformation issue, that's more polarizing. But some of the issues, like the impact on kids, mental health, that seems really bipartisan. When you look at the states that are implementing smartphone bans in schools, everybody, they're both Republican and Democratic states. And I think in America, to pass a movement, something needs to be bipartisan. And this seems to be an issue where people across the political spectrum are really concerned. Yeah.

Let me ask add one thing to this. We had a study on this a few years ago before this was happening, and we surveyed a sample of Americans and said, what things do you think are going viral on social media and what things do you want to go viral? And the things that people, average Americans, see as going viral are things that cause outrage, that are negative, that are spreading misinformation, that are hateful. And then you ask them, what do you want? And they want the exact opposite. On almost every dimension, they Want things that are accurate, things that are positive, things are uplifting, things that don't foster outrage, things that aren't polarizing. And then we looked at, well, is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans? Because they don't agree on anything.

Right. Yeah, yeah, sure.

And that was one thing that we found.

Huge consensus across the political spectrum that.

There'S huge bipartisan support. And there was also huge bipartisan support for, like, making the algorithms more transparent.

Yeah.

People can understand how it's manipulating them and for giving them control over their, their news feeds.

Yeah.

And so these are things that like 90% of Americans kind of secretly all agree on. So this might be one of those rare things that we can get action on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And building on that study, we call this phenomena the paradox of virality, the type of content that goes viral online. So outrage, polarizing content, moral and emotional content, that's the exact opposite of what people want to have go viral. So why is it the content that people don't like at all, why is that the content that's going viral? And there are a couple explanations for this. One is that it's content that grabs our attention. And this is an attention economy. It's the same as eating junk food or looking at a car crash on the side of the road. You just, you can't help but look away.

But I would say the car crash thing just. Yeah, I like to use that as a metaphor for how algorithms work.

Well, there's an old news statement. If it bleeds, it leads.

It leads. Yeah, yeah, but, but because the reason is if you see some. Someone bleeding out on the side of the road or car crash, you can't help but look away. But now imagine if that led to 10 more car crashes down the road.

Yeah.

Just because we look at a car crash doesn't mean we want more of it. We don't want to drive on roads where it's just like a hellscape.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's one explanation. You can't look away. Social media is like a car crash. But another explanation is what we're finding in our research is that it tends to be a very small number of people who are sharing the vast majority of toxic content on social media. So one study on Reddit finds that While only about 3% of Reddit users share toxic content, they account for about 33% of the content shared on Reddit. And there are similar statistics for misinformation that are even more striking. Around 80% of misinformation spread on Twitter can be attributed to around 0.1% of individuals, so it's usually a very small number of active users who are sharing the most toxic content online. And there have also been studies where if you survey people and ask them do you like these polarizing tweets from politicians? The vast majority of people like 90 plus percent of people will say no. But the 7% who are highly active in political conversations on social media will say they love those polarizing tweets. So it's the people who post the most who really like the toxic content, and they're not at all representative of the rest of America. Americans.

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Yeah, I I want to share and you guys probably have your own stories with this is my own personal experience with social media is that I use it every day because I have a following. Thank you for following out there too. And it's a set of tools and I think okay, let me use the tools to try and spread the word about, you know, things I am working on or believe in or want to help. For me it's just part of my job. But I will say that I often feel gross. Like after Spending some time on these platforms that there's just a lot of negativity. It's not great. I wish that I didn't have as much exposure to it. My wife jokes that she. Because she knows it's part of my job, she's like, oh, that. That's like the part of your job that makes me feel. The worst for you is that now you guys also use social media actively, and you probably see it similarly where it's like, part of your job and you also have followings in the same way that I do. So it's like, you know, it's a tool set, and you guys, in my view, use it very positively, very benign, actually spreading, like, objective, verifiable scientific research sort of thing. That used to be more of the norm on Twitter, let's say, because there used. There was a day when, like, Twitter actually was, like a learning environment as opposed to now. You know, it's just like disturbing thing after disturbing thing, and you're like, yo. Like, I like, this isn't what I need to see on Wednesday or whatever. Whatever day of the week it is. So I'm someone who thinks that the average person should be turning down these platforms. This five minutes a day, I think, is a very fine threshold. It's like, in that five minutes, if there's something going on or some event or something needs to reach you, they can get you in that five minutes. Or if you miss it that day, just get it the next day and you'd feel a lot better. And I agree with you that at this point, there are certain places change could come from. It's not going to be the social media companies. I mean, they kind of had their opportunity, and that ship is sailing the other direction. And then it's government, which I have more hope for now than I did because of what they've done with smartphones. But Jonathan Haidt, who's a friend, even said to me over dinner, it's like, look, there are different cases you can make for different populations. But if you say this is bad for minors, like, it's very hard for.

Anyone that's particularly compelling.

Yeah, it's particularly compelling. And then you could be like, look, we can't maybe figure it out for everybody, but we can figure it out for minors of this age in schools. And then they got, you know, 39 states and 50 governors to be like, yo, that. That's right. And in part because they heard from their constituents who are family, you know, family members and have kids that they're concerned about. Now the question is from that jumping off point, like where it can go for the rest of the population. So now I have a little bit more hope in terms of there being the policy end, and then there's the consumer and the consumer revolution, where I think more people are raising their hands and saying, look, I personally am not going to consume as much of this because it's bad for the way I feel. Jay, you posed a suggestion that I love, which is like, if you had groups doing it, then it's much more feasible just the way in the school. If you were to go to school and be like, hey, that kid. Like, no smartphone for you. That kid would freak out. But then if no one has a smartphone in that environment, then that kid's fine in 48 hours because it's like, hey, it's all of us. So if you could get an organization or a friend group or a community to adopt a different habit, then I think things could change.

Yeah. I will say that the point here is that when I mentioned cigarettes before, being addictive, the addictive property is nicotine. The addictive property of social media is the social connection and reinforcement. And so a lot of us are on it because we feel we have to. To you share your business information. For us, our science is our business. That's why we're sharing it. And a lot of people use it to just stay. Like my mom uses it, and she's like a retiree to just see what's going on with her friends and her grandkids and stuff. And so if they. If everybody went off of it, everybody'd be a lot happier is what the data says. But they're on it because of fomo. They don't want to miss out on things. They have the fear of missing out, and they're worried about loneliness and belongingness. I talked to my daughter. She's 13, you know, in that target age range that John Height's book focuses on, of course. And she has the exact same thing. She's like, I only use it because my friends are on. But she says it sucks when we go out for lunch and they're all on it. She actually doesn't like it, but she feels like she has to be on it to stay in touch with people.

Yeah.

And this doesn't mean that all the technology is bad. She loves, like, doing video chats with her friends. I think that's, like, super healthy. It's just like my generation used the phone, but they got video, which is even better. And so there's a lot of benefits of the technology or like Google Maps. One of the studies that found people don't want, like, TikTok or Instagram because of these. It harms their quality of life. But they feel fomo, so they stay on it. In that same study, they asked him, well, what about another app like Google Maps? And everybody likes Google Maps. They don't want that to be deleted. And so there's certain parts of technology that are just, like, universally good.

I'm not the only one that just hangs out on Google Maps.

Yeah, I got here on Google Maps.

Like, sometimes I'm not even going to a place. I just look up Google Maps and.

Being like, just look around. Yeah. And I want to expand on Jay's answer. This is something that scientists call the collection trap phenomenon. So there was a study where they asked college students, how much would we have to pay you to get off of social media to, like, stop using TikTok Instagram? And it was something like 50 to $100 to people just didn't want to delete their social media.

For what period?

I think it was for a month. I don't remember exactly. But they asked.

My daughter said she'd take 500. Would she need 500 delete her TikTok?

The researchers also asked, well, what about if your entire friend group got off of social media? And college students said they would pay money to have their entire friend group get off social media. So college students said that they would prefer to live in a world in which their friend group was all off of social media. So it's exactly the FOMO thing, the collective trap thing. What we're having is a collective action problem. Deactivating social media can feel lonely if you're an individual, because it's isolating. But it might feel great if you get your entire friend group to get off of social media.

I have friends who've deleted their major accounts, and, man, are they happier. Yeah, it is wild. I've got FOMO on that. I got, like.

So all your friends do it. And I guess this gets to the offline parties you're hosting where you have everyone got off your phone. It's a space where, you know, since everyone's off their phone, they can all talk to each other. And it's the same with the smartphone bands and stuff like that.

And by the way, I would want to run a study comparing your party to a party where they don't have to and then see if they actually have better memories, better experiences done. I mean, that's like a.

Let's do a research collaboration for a.

Study because it's like going back, I see this on people talking. They see videos of like the 1990s at a concert or a party and they can't believe it.

Yeah.

That no one's on their phones.

Yeah, because we didn't have them. I remember. You know, I mean it's funny because you have nostalgia blending with in my opinion, reality where I'm like, man, like things were better than. And I genuinely think they were better then. But then that's just something that people always say about whatever their younger days were because maybe we were better than. We might be more energetic, optimistic, et cetera, et cetera.

It's probably a mix of both. I mean there is research showing that we do have more positive attitudes about the past. That's general. But there is research suggesting that there is a rising mental health crisis amongst young people. Gen Z. And this is both in like self reported mental health data as well as like suicide, hospitalization. So some of it is like, you know, objective changes, not just changes in survey metrics. There's increased time spent alone. So there's the combination between the nostalgia and some of the objective statistics about things.

You know, we probably guys, you've seen this in the data but you know, we party half as much as we used to. We socialize. No, as much as we used to.

The data is like this. Yeah, people are not dating as much. They're, they're losing their virginity a lot older age. They are not drinking, they're not partying, they're not even getting their driver's license. So it's like, you know, and a lot of those things you might think, okay, it's better, maybe they're not drinking as much when they're young but, but they're missing out on a lot of social interactions. And so they're not getting married. There's like huge proportion of people unmarried that that was not the case before.

What's wild is like I was, I've never been a big drinker but like even I'm like man, like these kids should drink more.

A lot of people have made that argument.

There's a whole book on drink by Eddard Singerland and he basically says it lubricates social interaction so you don't want to drink too much. Where it becomes, obviously it's something that becomes unhealthy but there is a function for it socially. And it's just like they're missing out on a whole suite of social interaction things.

I mean to me it's objectively terrible that we don't socialize or party as much. And when I was in my 20s, he might not know this about me, but I was a nightclub promoter in my 20s.

I did not know that.

And some of my fondest memories, my wife jokes though, she's like, now I know it's like dating. What it was like dating you in your 20s because, you know, we met a little bit later. Like, those parties are some of my fondest memories of those moments. And there's something magical when people get together, particularly young people, and just like dance cut loose, you know, like have a good time, maybe meet someone, maybe have, you know, like, those are very special experiences. And the fact that kids are replacing that with chilling in their room, you know, like scrolling through something I think is pretty objectively awful.

Yeah. And I think there's also, when you have, when everyone has a smartphone, there's also the fear of like being filmed at all times when you're out in public. So I feel like people feel like they can't like make mistakes anymore because they'll be filmed, they'll be publicly shading. No phones.

You can do whatever you want at the offline party. What happens offline stays offline.

You're supposed to dance like no one's watching. You can't possibly do that if everybody's filming you and you make one embarrassing experience and suddenly it's posted online. Like what? I used to get stressed when I teach a huge class at NYU Intro Psych students. 300, 400 people. And at one point I was stressed that my students are going to find something offensive and take offense. This is like an anxiety a lot of professors have nowadays. But then I realized they were the ones who were anxious about saying something wrong and someone taking a video clip or posting about it.

Yeah, they would be because they are.

Surrounded by that non stop. So I changed on my syllabus. Now I have a policy. You can't share anything on social media about anybody to create a safe environment for people to challenge the professor, but challenge each other or be wrong. And so I have like a. No. I had to have that as part of my policy to make them comfortable. Speaking up.

Yes. And now you can say whatever you want.

Jay.

You're like, none of you can record this. That's funny. Well, guys, congratulations on your awesome work. Certainly look forward to amplifying your research. Maybe having some noble mobile customers be willing participants and how to curb their social media.

That would be awesome.

Use and phone addiction collaboration. If people want to find out about you, your work. Since you guys both do have presence on these platforms, how can they best do. So let's start with you, Jay.

Yeah. So the best place to find me is. Is jvanbavel.com has all our publications, has a link to my book if you want to learn more. And we also have a substack, Power of Us substack which people can read.

Look at that for free. Power of Us. If you have the video, you can see the book. It's very smart.

It's really good. And I'm Steve psychology on TikTok.

Steve psychology what?

Steve psychology on TikTok. So that's my TikTok presence, but I also go to stevenrathj.com as well as my academic presence. If you want to read my research articles, that's there too.

Look at that. Steve's got an alter ego. He's got Steve psychology on TikTok.

Steve psychology and Steve Rathche, the academic.

And the TikTok is like very serious academics. Yeah, yeah. The theater Kid and the PhD. Congratulations to both of you. I look forward to doing what we can together to help humanity triumph over these tools that are really threatening our well being in a way that is much more profound and pervasive than most of us realized. Past tense. Now most of us have figured it out and the question is, what are we going to do about it?

Yeah, yeah. It's exciting to see what you're doing and it's cool to see this consumer movement around this because people now need products to deal with. These social media and smartphone products have become so advanced. People need products to help themselves to stop using it or stop being addicted to it.

These tools are too much.

Yeah, yeah. I'm excited by the movement that you're leading.

Well, thank you, Stephen. Right back at you. Maybe we'll do a TikTok collab.

Let's do it.

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