Primera etapa de la preocupación del uso de celulares: suena la alarma. Transcript: Cal Newport So as I looked into this question of when did researchers become concerned about kids and phones and why, the whole story seemed to break up into three acts. That’s why I called this in my talk, a saga in three acts. The first act we can start, I’m going to call it roughly 2012 to 2017. That’s the first act of the story. I call it an alarm is sounded. So this is the period where people first began to notice warning signs. This was actually the period in which the potential issues with smartphones young people was first brought to my attention. (Time 0:03:51)
adolescencia celulares evidencia salud_mental
adolescencia celulares evidencia salud_mental
2012 fue el año que marca la transición en salud mental en EEUU. Transcript: Cal Newport I have a chart on the screen here for those who are watching. This is from the American College Health Association annual survey. It’s showing percentage of US undergraduates diagnosed with a mental illness. And what do we see? At 2012, forward a very sharp uptick in anxiety and depression, which are of course quite interlinked by anxiety. So the dark vertical line, if you’re watching this online, is 2012. (Time 0:05:56)
adolescencia celulares evidencia salud_mental
adolescencia celulares evidencia salud_mental
Artículo de Jean Twangy en The Atlantic aviva la discusión. Transcript: Cal Newport I think Jean Twangy really helped make this a national issue in her 2017 cover article for the Atlantic that was titled, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation. Now the thing about Twangy is that her expertise is in studying differences between demographic generations. That’s what she does. How is this generation different than that generation? She’s very good at teasing out what’s real and what’s not. And as she said in this article, and I have it on the screen as well, she’d been doing this for 25 years. She says typically the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually and along a continuum. But then I began studying Gen Z. Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs. And many of the distinctive characteristics of the millennial generation begin to disappear. In all of my analyses of generational data, some reaching back to the 1930s, I had never seen anything like it. So this demographer was thrown by how different Gen Z was and not just Gen Z in general, but Gen Z starting in 2012. She began to make the connection that I think this has to do with smartphones. (Time 0:06:45)
2min adolescencia evidencia salud_mental
2min adolescencia evidencia salud_mental
Segunda etapa: la guerra de datos. Transcript: Cal Newport This brings us to the second act, the data wars. This takes place roughly between 2017 and 2020. This is when researchers began to seriously try to gather or study the data to get a stronger, more data-driven conclusion on this question of a smartphone somehow involved in these Increases in anxiety that we’re seeing. This was a period of both proposals and critiques, which is good. This is how new sciences emerge, especially in social psychology, which is by definition, a complicated field that rarely has super strong signals. There was proposals and critiques and responses to the critiques. And so that’s why I call this the data wars. This was the period in which almost any New York Times article on this issue would say with big caveats, there is some data, but it’s contested. It’s because this data war period is when the science was actually happening. (Time 0:09:15)
adolescencia celulares investigación salud_mental
adolescencia celulares investigación salud_mental
Hipótesis alternativa de sensibilidad generacional no se sostiene. Transcript: Cal Newport This critique says it was that this new generation was coming of age and they’re more comfortable talking about mental health. They’re like, that’s, so this was a big critique in the early part of the data wars. You see rises in depression and anxiety because more people are willing to say, I’m anxious or I have depression. This quote from the New York Times in 2018 is sort of typical of this period. Here’s Richard Friedman writing the Times. He says, look, there are a few surveys reported increased anxiety and adolescence, but there’s self-reported measures from kids or their parents and they’re overestimating rates Of discord because they’re detecting mild symptoms, not clinically significant syndromes. This was claimed a lot during the early period of the data wars. So as good science does, it said, well, how can we look into this counter hypothesis? And the right way to look into this counter hypothesis is to say, let’s find stronger proxies for anxiety that have nothing to do with self-reporting. In particular, I put two charts on the screen here and these are both tragic, but they also give us deep insight. The first chart is US teens admitted to hospitals for non-fatal self-harm, ages 10 to 14. This gets around the self-reporting process. These are people who tried to harm themselves due to anxiety and these are from hospital records. Look at girls, 180% increase between 2010 to 2020 with the increase getting particularly stark around 2012. Even more tragically, we look to the right. We see suicides among US teens. In 2012, jumps up, 134% increase among girls starting around that 2012 point. So it was a reasonable hypothesis that well, maybe around 2012, we’ve got more comfortable talking about anxiety and we were just picking up mild self-reported symptoms. Unfortunately, the hospital records show these indications rose at the exact same rate. So there really was an increase here. These are starting around this period having worse mental health. The second strand of troubling evidence was the correlational studies. (Time 0:13:32)
adolescencia celulares evidencia salud_mental
adolescencia celulares evidencia salud_mental
Correlación entre horas de uso de redes sociales y depresión en mujeres adolescentes. Transcript: Cal Newport So they did this. They said, let’s start looking at this data. We’ll look at young people and we’ll look at correlations between these technologies and negative outcomes. And they began to find lots of strong connections. Here’s just one of many, many graphs that were produced in this period. This particularly one looked at UK adolescents with clinically relevant depressive symptoms. The x-axis is number of hours per weekday on social media. The y-axis is percentage of teens who used them on social media that were diagnosed as depressed. And as you see, when you increase from no time on social media to five plus hours, you get a significant increase in percentage of teens that are depressed. This is particularly high for girls where you go from a 11% depression rate for girls who don’t use social media to almost a 40% depression rate for girls who use four to five hours of social Media. (Time 0:16:11)
2min adolescencia depresión efectos evidencia mujeres salud_mental
2min adolescencia efectos evidencia mujeres salud_mental
The Potato Study Transcript: Cal Newport So we saw a lot of studies of this type. This generated critiques. So other researchers came along and said, yeah, you’re finding these correlations, but you know, it’s easy to find correlations between things. The effect sizes are small. And perhaps the most famous of these papers was published in 2019 by Przbilski and Amy Orbin. This is known by researchers in the field colloquially as the potato study. They went in and looked at one of these big data sets and said, and I’ll read them here, the connection is negative but teeny, indicating a level of harmfulness so close to zero that it Is roughly the same size as they find for the association of mental health with eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses. So they said, look, we looked and found these. Yeah, you use more digital technology. You’re less happy, but the effect is the same we found for eating potatoes on your happiness or wearing eyeglasses on your happiness. Their point being these are so small that they’re basically arbitrary. You’re finding artifacts in the data. This article, the potato article was cited a lot. Even until very recently, you would see major newspapers like the New York Times often saying, because this was very influential, studies show a potential connection between these Technologies and negative mental health, but the effects are small. This is the type of paper that caused that. (Time 0:17:08)
adolescencia celulares correlación efectos evidencia salud_mental
adolescencia celulares efectos evidencia salud_mental
Crítica fulminante al Potato Study Transcript: Cal Newport Now, here’s a response to the potato paper, co-authored by Jean Twangy and John Hite. It was published in Nature Human Behavior, and it was called Under-Estimating Digital Media Harm. In this article, Hite looked at Przbilski and Orban and said, well, wait a second. Wait a second. And I’m going to read his words here. The first issue to note is that the potatoes comparison was what they reported for all digital media use, not for social media use specifically. Digital media includes all screen-based activities, including watching TV or Netflix videos with a sibling, which are not harmful activities. In their own published report, when you zoom in on social media, only the relationship is between two and six times larger than for digital media. Also, crucial is that Orban and Przbilski lump together all teens, boys and girls, while many studies have found that the correlations with harm are larger for girls. So Hite is saying, it’s almost like you’re intentionally trying to reduce the negative impact. And you’re only showing the connection between all possible digital media use and negative social harms, even though your data set you were using had social media broken out. And all the discussion has been about social media. And Hite and Twain, he said, so we looked at your same data set and just looked at social media, and you had a much, much bigger response. A response that especially if you break out girls was six times worse than eating potatoes, a very significant response. (Time 0:18:34)
2min adolescencia crítica depresión evidencia salud_mental
2min adolescencia evidencia salud_mental
Consensus Emerging on Negative Connection Between Smartphones and Mental Health In the period from 2020 to 2023, a consensus has emerged in the field indicating a strong negative connection between smartphone use and mental health, especially for girls. The main critiques from the data war have been debunked, and multiple independent sources of investigation have pointed towards the same conclusion. Natural experiments, such as the arrival of high-speed wireless internet in Canada, have provided evidence supporting the negative connection between smartphones and mental health. Transcript: Speaker 1 All right, so let’s get to the third act of this story, this research story on smartphones and kids. I call this third act a consensus begins to emerge. This covers the period of 2020 to 2023. So until today, essentially what has happened in the past two or three years is the critiques have largely fallen away. And a consensus is emerging in the field that yes, especially for girls, there is a strong negative connection between these technologies and mental health. The reason why this consensus emerged is first of all, the critiques as we talked about before, the main critiques from the data war were pretty thoroughly debunked. After the potato paper, it’s not like there was a lot of more stronger papers that said really made a strong case that there wasn’t a strong connection there. And the timing argument really seems to have been one for the people who were worried about smartphones. So that happened, but then what we began to get, and this is how a lot of emerging literature’s began to coalesce around a consensus, we began to get multiple other independent sources Of investigation that pointed towards the same conclusion. We have multiple different types of threads that all begin to weave around the same answer. That’s often what happens in complex literature’s that points it towards a conclusion. And that really began to happen in the last couple of years. So one of the threads was natural experiments. Here’s a cool paper written by an economist Elaine Gu. And she looked at in Canada, I believe, the arrival of high speed wireless internet in a given province from town to town. And high speed wireless internet arrived, heavy social media use became possible. Then you could have a smartphone and you could use it on the app. (Time 0:20:32)
Tercera etapa: el consenso Transcript: Cal Newport All right, so let’s get to the third act of this story, this research story on smartphones and kids. I call this third act a consensus begins to emerge. This covers the period of 2020 to 2023. So until today, essentially what has happened in the past two or three years is the critiques have largely fallen away. And a consensus is emerging in the field that yes, especially for girls, there is a strong negative connection between these technologies and mental health. The reason why this consensus emerged is first of all, the critiques as we talked about before, the main critiques from the data war were pretty thoroughly debunked. After the potato paper, it’s not like there was a lot of more stronger papers that said really made a strong case that there wasn’t a strong connection there. And the timing argument really seems to have been one for the people who were worried about smartphones. So that happened, but then what we began to get, and this is how a lot of emerging literature’s began to coalesce around a consensus, we began to get multiple other independent sources Of investigation that pointed towards the same conclusion. We have multiple different types of threads that all begin to weave around the same answer. That’s often what happens in complex literature’s that points it towards a conclusion. And that really began to happen in the last couple of years. (Time 0:20:32)
2min adolescencia evidencia investigación mujeres redes_sociales salud_mental
2min adolescencia evidencia investigación mujeres redes_sociales salud_mental
Experimentos que respaldan hipótesis de que redes sociales afectan salud mental adolescente. Transcript: Cal Newport Here’s a cool paper written by an economist Elaine Gu. And she looked at in Canada, I believe, the arrival of high speed wireless internet in a given province from town to town. And high speed wireless internet arrived, heavy social media use became possible. Then you could have a smartphone and you could use it on the app. And so she looked at if we have nearby towns, demographically and culturally very similar, but we end up in this natural experiment situation where one town gets wireless high speed Internet between before the other. Can we compare what’s happening with teenage mental health in these two towns and see if there’s a change? Yes, there was. Total teen girl severe mental health diagnoses increased by 90% when the wireless internet arrived. So it was a nice natural experiment. We also had some direct randomized control trials experiments. Here’s a good paper by Melissa Hunt et al. They just took 143 undergraduates and randomly assigned them to either stop using social media or keep using it as normal. So it’s a randomized prospective control trial. What did they find? The group that was told to limit their social media use showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression as compared to the control groups. So that’s interesting. (Time 0:21:49)
2min adolescencia evidencia experimento redes_sociales salud_mental
2min adolescencia evidencia experimento redes_sociales salud_mental
The smoking gun: adolescentes identifican claramente la relación entre RRSS y salud mental Transcript: Cal Newport I think maybe one of the strongest forces in helping a consensus come together was self-reporting, just talking to teenagers themselves. So when Francis Hagen leaked all of those data from meta a couple years ago, what was known as the Facebook files, that’s what the Wall Street Journal called it. One of the big interesting findings in these leaked documents from meta was the fact that they had done survey on teens and had found that I’m quoting here, teens blame Instagram for Increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups. So the teachers themselves are saying, yeah, this is why we’re more anxious and depressed. This app, these phones, other data began to find the same thing. I put on the slide, I put up here a slide from research out of Australia. These are Australian teens. By far the number one reason they give for why they think youth mental health is getting worse is social media. I think this was the final smoking gun is the teens themselves are saying, this is hurting me. This is causing a problem. It is really hard to be a potato study-style skeptic in the face of the teens themselves saying, yes, this is causing me harm. We’re not teasing out subtle epidemiological effects, a slight increase in the background cancer rate for the towns that were using a different type of pipe in their water where the Individuals themselves have no way of detecting this change. This is not that. This is a huge, loud, self-observable macro signal. (Time 0:23:09)
2min adolescencia evidencia experiencia redes_sociales salud_mental
2min adolescencia evidencia experiencia redes_sociales salud_mental
Impact of Social Media on Loneliness and Mental Health Researchers believe that social media can cause negative impacts on mental health due to factors such as loneliness. Increased use of social technologies can lead to less in-person interaction, resulting in a paradoxical outcome where individuals feel less social despite using social media extensively. This is because purely linguistic communication through texting and social media lacks the social cues that our brain interprets as genuine social interaction, leading to increased feelings of loneliness. This phenomenon, known as social snacking, involves lightweight digital socialization as a substitute for genuine in-person interaction, ultimately resulting in increased loneliness among teenagers. Data also shows a correlation between increased time spent on phones and reduced in-person interaction, leading to higher levels of loneliness among young people. Transcript: Speaker 1 On it. Why does it do this? Let’s look in particular at social media first and then we’ll broaden out the smartphones. Why do researchers think social media is causing these negative impacts on mental health? There’s a few reasons to come up. One is loneliness. Readers of my book, Digital Minimalism, this will sound familiar because I talk about this in Digital Minimalism. It’s paradoxical at first, but using these social technologies more will actually lead you to feel less social. What’s going on here is young people replace in-person interaction with texting and social media back and forth. This purely linguistic communication, just sending texts back and forth to each other or commenting on each other’s post is not interpreted by the social circuits of our brain as being All that social. There’s no voice modulation. There’s no body language. You’re not in the presence of another person in the same room. You’re in your room as a 14-year-old all day on text messages and you tell yourself, wow, I’m so social because all I’ve been doing is talking to people. As far as your brain is concerned, you’re incredibly lonely because you haven’t seen anyone all day. Just psychologists call this social snacking. Lightweight, easy digital socialization. We do that instead of having the real meal and we end up more lonely. We see this in the data. I have two charts up on the screen now. One shows loneliness among teenagers and you see again 2012 goes right up. The other chart shows daily average time spent with friends starting in 2012 for the ages 15 to 24 goes straight down. More time on the phone meant less time interacting in person meant loneliness went up. (Time 0:25:24)
Mecanismo: “social snacking” Transcript: Cal Newport What’s going on here is young people replace in-person interaction with texting and social media back and forth. This purely linguistic communication, just sending texts back and forth to each other or commenting on each other’s post is not interpreted by the social circuits of our brain as being All that social. There’s no voice modulation. There’s no body language. You’re not in the presence of another person in the same room. You’re in your room as a 14-year-old all day on text messages and you tell yourself, wow, I’m so social because all I’ve been doing is talking to people. As far as your brain is concerned, you’re incredibly lonely because you haven’t seen anyone all day. Just psychologists call this social snacking. Lightweight, easy digital socialization. We do that instead of having the real meal and we end up more lonely. We see this in the data. I have two charts up on the screen now. One shows loneliness among teenagers and you see again 2012 goes right up. The other chart shows daily average time spent with friends starting in 2012 for the ages 15 to 24 goes straight down. More time on the phone meant less time interacting in person meant loneliness went up. (Time 0:25:53)
2min adolescentes cerebro mecanismo redes_sociales salud_mental teoría
2min redes_sociales salud_mental
Mecanismo: performativity Transcript: Cal Newport Another issue here is performativity especially with social media especially with girls. Let me read something here from Gene Twangy. Girls use social media more often giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. You’re constantly worried about what other people are doing and how people are perceiving you. Combine that with a teenage brain. Come on. No way that’s going to be positive. (Time 0:27:49)
2min adolescencia mecanismo mujeres redes_sociales salud_mental teoría
2min adolescencia mujeres redes_sociales salud_mental
Efecto del uso de smartphones en el desarrollo de habilidades cognitivas superiores. Transcript: Cal Newport I want to just briefly mention that even if you aren’t using social media on a smartphone, if you’re a teenager, there’s other harms we know are there. Impeded thinking skills is critical. I talked about this in a somewhat recent episode of the podcast. It’s talking about Marianne Wolf’s work on the development of young minds when they spend more time on screens. The short version of this is deep critical thinking skills require training. Training requires things like reading analog books that you struggle with. You can take time to pause and make sense of what you just read before moving on. Training requires self reflection, the ability to hold thoughts in your working memories and work on it. Having that time alone and that familiarity with it. Smartphones get in the way of that training because it teaches your brain to instead move very quick. Look like an L-shaped skim for things that are going to give you in text a quick hit of dopamine or excitement. Be boredom if you have any moments of downtime. Have something right on your screen. I was watching, Jesse, I was watching this on the flight. It’s not my flight to San Francisco. It’s my flight to Utah a few weeks ago. I’m maybe like a 20 year old guy sitting a row up in the aisle. I was watching him use TikTok. I mean, it was crazy. It’s like, because he had his phone out. They’ll just be like some weird video. He was watching on average six seconds and then he swiped and another video would come up. That’s just all he was doing the whole time. The whole time. Well, the whole time before a while. Yeah. I was watching over his shoulder. Man, glad I’m reading my Ellen Lightman book about transcendentalism and the human brain made me feel good. But you know, the point is, it’s so rewarding in the moment that you don’t do the activities that would otherwise give you critical thinking skills. So you’re just not good at thinking deeply and that’s a huge harm. (Time 0:29:29)
2min capacidad cognición desarrollo efectos ejercicio
Efectos del uso de smartphone en el sueño y descanso adolescente. Transcript: Cal Newport Teenage deprivation is a big deal for teenagers and these smartphones. Look, you give a 13 year old boy a smartphone. They’re going to YouTube until four in the morning. When I gave this talk, someone in the audience said there’s a lot of middle schoolers there. And one of the middle schoolers was talking about how all of her friends who have these smartphones are on them all night. And then they come in the class. They’re completely tired. They can’t function. They’re doing really poorly on their tests, but they can’t help themselves because if you have this, it’s hard to turn it off. So teenagers are having a huge sleep deprivation issue. It’s YouTube video games and social media scrolling. (Time 0:31:21)
2min adolescencia celulares efectos sueño
2min adolescencia celulares efectos
Tenemos que subir la restricción legal de uso de RRSS a los 16 años Transcript: Cal Newport Here’s the surgeon general earlier this year. He said, wait until your kids are 16 to let them use social media. This conclusion, I think, is something that a lot of researchers are coming to. I talked to John Hyde about this and he agreed with that as well. If you’ve made it through puberty, the development as an individual, as well as the social development and everything that happens in that period, if you’ve made it through all of that Before you then get unrestricted access to the internet and social media, you’re in a much better position to succeed because you know who you are, who your friends are, what you’re Interested in, what you’re about. You’ve done all that work. And now if you get exposed to this, it’s going to have a much less negative impact than if you get it at 12 or you get it at 13. So if you can wait until 16, this seems to be an emerging consensus. This might possibly be made in the legislation. (Time 0:34:05)
2min adolescencia ley política_pública redes_sociales salud_mental
2min adolescencia ley política_pública redes_sociales salud_mental
Efectos prácticos sobre la parentalidad de regular mediante legislación. Transcript: Cal Newport When you have your 13 year old again and again saying, all my friends have this, I want this, why can’t I have it? All my friends have this, I want it, why can’t I have it? For the parents to be able to say, because it’s illegal is a very strong defense. And you’re not putting these parents in this situation of having to be a social psychology researchers and understand this literature. They can say it’s against the law. I’m not going to break the law. You’ll just have to learn not to have those friends, I guess. It would be helpful. So something like that may happen. (Time 0:36:05)
adolescencia efectos ley límites padres
adolescencia efectos ley límites padres
El uso de las RRSS en adolescentes debe encuadrarse cómo el consumo de tabaco. Transcript: Cal Newport There is the one thing I’ll also point out is I’ve heard before when I’ve been on the road or talked about my book is often sort of socially elite people have this storyline that less socially Elite or less economically elite people need these technologies and it’s somehow a classic to talk about this that somehow having a 14 year old not use a smartphone is like a yoga thing. It’s like a luxury thing. And I can say having worked with lots of different groups from lots of different backgrounds on this issue, they would say nonsense to them. Everyone is worried about the kids with this. Kids are worried about this and all sorts of different backgrounds. All sorts of different economic classes. So I don’t think this is a yoga issue. This is like a teen smoking issue. No team should smoke. So we said you should wait until you’re 18 to do it. I think it’s closer to that than it is to it would be nice to do meditation if you have the time for it. (Time 0:40:12)
consumo encuadre ley redes_sociales tabaco