Screentime Reduction As An Underrated EA Cause Area

The phones are making us miserable.

Originally posted to the Effective Altruism Forum

Summary: There is substantial evidence that spending excessive amounts of time on smartphones and other devices causes worse life outcomes (increased depression and anxiety, increased suicidality, fewer social connections, less productivity, worse educational performance, etc.). This is especially true for minors. There seems to be widespread agreement that this is a cause for concern, but, perhaps due to inertia or lack of imagination, little action has been taken to fix it. So, reducing screentime (especially for minors) could be a cost-effective way to reduce suffering and promote better life outcomes.

Empirical Evidence

Over the last decade, there has been a growing body of research on the effects of smartphones and social media on adolescent mental health, with the most famous researcher in this genre being Jonathan Haidt. Alongside Jean Twenge and others, Haidt has drawn attention to the disturbing correlation between rising smartphone use and declining mental health among teens—especially girls. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt highlights four major trends that began around 2012, shortly after the iPhone and Instagram became widely adopted: increases in rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.

For example, the CDC has reported that from 2011 to 2021, the percentage of high school girls experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness rose from 36% to 57%. Emergency room visits for self-harm among girls aged 10–14 tripled between 2009 and 2015. Researchers like Twenge argue that the timing strongly implicates the rise of smartphones and social media as causal factors. These effects are more pronounced for girls than boys, likely because girls are more vulnerable to the social comparison and relational aggression that platforms like Instagram amplify.

Haidt’s conclusions have faced criticism, particularly around questions of causality. Critics argue that much of the evidence is correlational, and that reverse causation or third variables (like economic anxiety or academic pressure) could explain the trends. However, recent longitudinal studies and natural experiments have begun to strengthen the causal case. For instance, studies using within-person designs—tracking how changes in phone or social media use affect individuals over time—have found that increases in use are often followed by declines in well-being, not the other way around.

In terms of academic performance and productivity, a meta-analysis of 44 studies found that excessive smartphone use was significantly negatively correlated with academic achievement. There is also mounting evidence that heavy smartphone use disrupts sleep quality, reduces face-to-face interactions, increases exposure to cyberbullying, and impairs attention and impulse control—particularly in children and teens whose brains are still developing.

With all this in mind, I’d say there is strong evidence to suspect that smartphones and social media use are having a horrific impact on Gen Z and Gen Alpha mental health. The case may not be totally conclusive — social science research rarely is — but I think there is more than enough cause for concern.

Anecdotal Evidence

I know that it can be fraught to rely on anecdotal evidence and emotional appeals in a post like this, but I think it’s worthwhile to give you some specific stories of how smartphones, social media, and AI are currently affecting Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Unless you yourself are young, or you’re a parent or teacher who frequently comes into contact with people under 20, it can be easy to miss just how bad the situation has gotten. Here’s one high school teacher’s perspective on this situation:

“Screen time check!” I barked out at my health class.

They sighed, took out their phones, and opened up their screen tracking applications.

“Patricia, how much yesterday?”

Patricia said, “12 hours.”

I whistled. “Okay, how about you Larry?”

Larry said, “8 Hours. See. I’m way better than Patricia.”

“Shut up!” Patricia replied.

I patted the air with my hands to indicate they should calm down. “What about you Manuela?”

“17 hours.”

“What?”

“17 hours. Yeah, mista, it was a Sunday. I didn’t have much else to do.”

I sighed and went around the room getting a quick read on how much screen time each student had accumulated. The class average neared 11 hours.

I said, “Guys. Guys. Let’s suppose you sleep 8 hours a day. That means you're awake for 16 hours a day. If you’re on your phone for 12 hours, that means you only spend 4 hours not looking at a two by four inch screen…Is that really how you want to spend your life?”

Most of the kids just shrugged.

Then one kid said, “What else is there to do?”

That’s how I know we’re in deep shit.

[…]

I once watched our dean hand cellphones back to students in the cafeteria. When she rolled the cellphone cart through, it was like watching a crowd of Hyenas catching the scent of stinking flesh. Kids stopped conversations mid sentence and lifted their heads to watch that cart roll by.

The moment a boy got up from his table, a storm of students jumped to their feet to beat him to the cart. The dean started screaming if you come near me without being called up you’ll go to the back of the line. It took ten full minutes to get everyone seated before she felt comfortable enough to call kids up table by table.

And lest you think this is just how high schoolers behave, here’s how one philosophy professor describes the most recent cohort of undergraduates:

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” […] I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success. […]

Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. Actually it was more than that, since I’m not counting excused absences or students who eventually withdrew. A friend in Mathematics told me, “Students are less respectful of the university experience —attendance, lateness, e-mails to me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility.”

Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about some problem. They just pull an Amelia Earhart. It’s gotten to the point that on the first day of class, especially in lower-division, I tell the students, “look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you.”

They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I’ve even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. They can’t make it an hour without getting their phone fix. […]

Pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.

Indifference. Like everyone else, I allow students to make up missed work if they have an excused absence. No, you can’t make up the midterm because you were hungover and slept through your alarm, but you can if you had Covid. Then they just don’t show up. A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.

It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

(I could pull up hundreds of stories just like this, but I’ll leave it at two.)

For reference, I am 20 years old, and I can absolutely confirm what these accounts are saying. Many of my peers are staying inside by themselves for >100 hours per week, barely interacting with the outside world except via the internet. Many of my peers lack even basic social or life skills that would have been seen as necessary 15 years ago. Most of my peers cheat extensively using AI and internet answer sheets, and are totally unashamed about it. Hell, even I cheat most of the time on assignments when I think I can get away with it, and I actually care about what I’m learning. If you think that almost any real learning is going on in schools and universities across the country, then you are sadly mistaken.

In short, we as a society are cultivating an entire generation of chronically anxious, chronically depressed screen addicts who lack critical thinking or attention spans longer than 5 seconds. And from my interactions with Gen Alpha, it seems like this problem is only getting worse over time. I shudder to think what society will look like in 20 years if this trend continues.

Possible Solutions

Hopefully I’ve sold you on the importance and neglectedness of this problem, but how about tractability? Is it possible to fix this problem, or are we doomed to live in chronically online slopworld forever?

I think that we can fix the problem, or at the very least, mitigate the damage. The first step is to conduct more research. Right now, the fiercest debates about this issue aren’t between people who think it’s a problem and those who don’t. The real division is between those who think the evidence is strong enough to justify immediate action, and those who think it’s too ambiguous to base policy on. That’s not a trivial concern. If we’re going to start designing policies that affect millions of kids, we want to be sure we’re not chasing a moral panic. But that’s exactly why we need more high-quality, independent, longitudinal studies—ideally using experimental or quasi-experimental designs—that can test how specific interventions (like phone-free schools, algorithm design changes, or parental control tools) affect real-world outcomes. Right now, we’re flying half-blind: We suspect smartphones are doing serious damage, but we don’t yet know which levers to pull that would actually make things better.

Obviously it’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle and prevent the mass adoption of smartphones, and we probably wouldn’t want to do that even if we could. But on the margins, it would likely be beneficial to reduce people’s screen times when we can. In particular, banning smartphones in middle and high schools seems like a common-sense way to improve student behavior, social health, and learning. Many schools have already adopted this policy, with some success. Returning to the high school teacher I quoted above:

[W]hen I compare the 7 years I had battling the cellphone in the classroom, vs almost an entire year of phone free schooling, there is no comparison. Our kids are smarter, more social, and more motivated to do the things they actually want to accomplish in this world when they don’t have a pavlovian vibration derailing their attention every 20 seconds.

Bring on the phone free school legislation.

(That being said, the empirical evidence on school smartphone bans is inconclusive, and some studies have found that they have little effect.)

Part of why I am optimistic about this cause area succeeding is that we already have natural allies in parents and teachers across the country. Parents and teachers are seeing the negative effects that technology is having on their children, but they feel powerless to stop it. Underage screen addiction is so pervasive that it’s easy to adopt an attitude of shrugging and saying “that’s just how things are nowadays”. But it doesn’t have to be this way! I think that if we began a movement calling for things like phone-free schools, laws against addictive algorithms, and interventions against screen addiction, you would be surprised at how much grassroots support such a movement could get.

I even think that many of the screen addicts themselves would get on board, albeit begrudgingly. Most of the people my age who I’ve spoken to about this issue admit they have a problem. They admit that they spend too much time online for their own good. They admit that they would rather be out with friends, or following their passions. But then they go back to playing video games, or watching porn, or gambling online, or doomscrolling through Instagram Reels. In other words, many people who are addicted to screens are not exactly loyal to them. They just lack the willpower or agency to escape their addiction.

I think that with the right approach, we can help these people.

Conclusion

I hope that this post does not come across as anti-technology. I love technology! I think that when used appropriately, smartphones, social media, and AI all have the potential to improve people’s lives and wellbeing. When there are doubts about the potential risks of a new technology, I am inclined to take a laissez-faire approach that lets people make their own decisions without excessive government intervention or social pressure. But in this case, the harms of excessive screen use (especially for minors) are so overwhelming that I think some level of paternalism is justified.

I’ll put it this way: Imagine a society where crack cocaine was not only legal, but where it was widely distributed to children and teenagers as young as 5 years old. Imagine that these children were on crack for upwards of 8 hours every day, in some cases as much as 16 hours per day. Imagine that these children neglected to do schoolwork, play with friends, or go to sleep at night, instead choosing to spend their time consuming more and more crack cocaine. Imagine that these crack-addicted children then had elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and academic failure. Would any parent stand for this? Would any government official willingly let this happen? Clearly not. Even a libertarian like myself would try to put a lid on this as soon as possible.

(And lest you think the above analogy is outlandish, I’ll note that that several leading tech figures have explicitly compared smartphones to cocaine.)

I know that this post has been less data-driven than an EA Forum post should ideally strive to be, and that’s because this is not my area of expertise. I’m just a guy who sees an urgent problem around me, and thinks we should do something about it. Hopefully this post will inspire others who are better-versed in the subject to provide a more rigorous analysis and a broader range of solutions.