You are being sold a bill of goods. A social panic has set in over how smartphones and social media are destroying us and ruining our children. In Australia this week the hysteria reached its zenith, with a ban on all social media for kids under the age of 16.
These claims are especially difficult to defuse, because there are some pretty clear costs to these technologies. The thing is, after much rigorous investigation, the harms are relatively small. Yet in headlines they are reported as major negative effects.
Let’s consider one recent study of video watching. This study did show some costs, as the core result was that for each daily hour of video watching, a child experiences (on average) a reduction of non-cognitive skills of 0.091 standard deviations on average.
