Last week, juries in two different states delivered multimillion-dollar verdicts against Big Tech. A New Mexico jury handed down a $375 million verdict in a case brought by the state’s attorney general against Meta for enabling child sexual exploitation. The next day, a California jury awarded a young woman a combined $6 million in damages from Meta and YouTube for the allegedly addictive and mentally distressing properties of social media apps, including algorithmic curation and so-called infinite scroll, where the app continually provides you with new content as you scroll down the page.

These verdicts have catalyzed a "tidal cultural shift" toward viewing social media companies not just as content platforms, but as manufacturers of products that require regulation, similar to classic legal cases against "Big Tobacco". In fact, this parallel is exactly how some Meta-employees felt about their attempts to target kids:

The focus of the public has shifted from the content posted on platforms and content moderation policies to the deliberate design decisions made by these platforms—such as infinite scrolling, algorithmic recommendations, and push notifications—that are engineered to maximize engagement, even at the cost of individual or collective well-being.

This is hardly news to us. We have been studying and writing about the challenges posed by social media for the past decade. In this newsletter, we have written about the Facebook papers shared by a prominent whistleblower and why schools should ban smartphones.

This should also come as no surprise to anyone who has been following these issues. A majority of people believe that social media is harming children—and this has now been the case for several years. It is also a rare case of bipartisan consensus, with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all on the same page.

In many cases, the research and safety teams are deeply aware of these problems. But the senior management in the companies is often unwilling to implement changes. The pursuit of profit is a difficult temptation and they have focused on harvesting the attention of teenagers, rather than ensuring their safety. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2017 internal memo: “Teen time spent [should] be our top goal of 2017”, even after safety concerns were raised by employees.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen was one of the first employees to bring these concerns to the attention of the public. Her testimony and public interviews provided a better understanding about how Facebook engineers their platform and the consequences this has for spreading misinformation and fostering social conflict.

“Facebook is optimizing for content that gets engagement or reaction. Its own research is showing the content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing—it is easier to inspire people to anger than other emotions.” — Frances Haugen, on 60 Minutes.

A few days after the whistleblower went public, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, spoke with employees about the revelations. According to the New York Times, he claimed that Haugen’s assertions about how Facebook polarizes people were “pretty easy to debunk.”

Two court cases—and numerous studies later—the data is firmly on her side.

Debate about the potential harms caused by Facebook and other social media platforms is still up in the air on some issues, but findings on the spread of divisive and polarizing content (in the United States at least) seem clear. Before the recent interview with Haugen on 60 Minutes or her appearance before Congress, Jay published an analysis of nearly 3 million posts on Facebook and Twitter with his colleagues from Cambridge University, Steve Rathje and Sander van der Linden.

In our research, the single biggest predictor of social media “virality” was dunking on a political foe. Each word referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67% (see figure below). If a post came from a Democrat, a word like “Republican” or “conservative” led to increased virality. And if a post came from a Republican, a word like “Joe Biden” led to the same. And most of these posts were clearly negative.

One example of a viral post that spread in Republican circles was from Breitbart, promoting a video entitled, “Every American needs to see Joe Biden’s latest brain freeze.” Meanwhile, a post that went viral from Democrats came from The Daily Beast, claiming that Mike Pence was blatantly lying about Covid-19.

When Steve, Sander, and Jay published a report about these data in The Washington Post, Facebook published a fierce rebuttal. They argued that “Extremism is bad for our business” and presented a limited set of studies that focused largely on the impact of Facebook in other countries.

Yet their own internal research, shared by this whistle-blower, contradicts their rebuttal. According to a disturbing new analysis of the Facebook Papers by The Atlantic, employees at Facebook have long known that the social media giant amplifies extremism, spears misinformation, and encourages political polarization. And they are growing increasingly angry with the way that company leadership has refused to incorporate these insights.

“Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platform—how Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization. Again and again, staffers reckon with the ways in which Facebook’s decisions stoke these harms, and they plead with leadership to do more.

And again and again, staffers say, Facebook’s leaders ignore them.”

It also turns out that people don’t like this type of content. We asked a diverse sample of Americans how they feel about the content that spreads on social media. As you can see below, people believe that divisive content, moral outrage, negative content, high-arousal content, and misinformation are all likely to go viral online. However, they wish this type of content would not go viral on social media. Instead, they want to see far more positive content spreading online, such as accurate, nuanced, uplifting, and educational content.

The aversion to social media extends well beyond specific topics. About half of Gen Z wishes TikTok (47%) and X (50%) didn’t exist. That’s despite—spending four hours a day on social media, as more than half of respondents to a new survey say is normal.

Scholars have been sounding the alarm about these problems for several years. Indeed, we devoted an entire chapter to toxicity online in our book “The Power of Us“. In the book, we describe a clever experiment that offers causal evidence that Facebook increases polarization and reduces well being. A group of economists led by Hunt Allcott decided to find out what would happen if they paid people to leave Facebook for four weeks in advance of the 2018 US midterm elections. They paid more than a thousand volunteers to log off the social network for a few weeks and compared them to a control group of volunteers who continued using Facebook.

This experimental design allowed the researchers to detect the influence of using Facebook on polarization and other potential harms…or, more accurately, whether ceasing to use the platform reduces these problems.

Not only did the volunteers who logged off Facebook report an increase in their psychological well-being, but they became less politically polarized (across a variety of measures). Remarkably, the reduction in polarization from logging off Facebook for a single month was equivalent to nearly half the amount polarization has increased in the US since the mid-1990s!

In defense of Facebook, they are certainly not the only platform exacerbating social conflict by amplifying polarizing content and misinformation. We recently published a review of the research on the topic and found that Twitter/X is even more polarized than Facebook or WhatsApp in some countries. And the effects are mixed—one study in Bosnia, for example, suggests that Facebook might help expose people to different perspectives if their real life social networks are homogenous.

But when this social media technology was introduced to the Marubo tribe deep in the Amazon via access to Elon Musk’s Starlink it revealed the same basic pattern we have seen over and over again in many studies. Members of this small community quickly became obsessed with social media to the extend that the community had to shut down access to the internet each day to ensure they would hunt and gather enough food for their own survival.

More strikingly, it also spurred the kind polarization we saw in our American samples. According to the NYT “Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.” I described this natural experiment a few months ago on Andrew Yang’s podcast, which you can watch below:

In the United States, where antipathy toward out-group partisans is at a 40-year high and often seems like a sectarian conflict, social media amplifies existing disagreements, facilitates the spread of conspiracy theories, and allows for the organization of anti-democratic activities (like the January 6th insurrection). But the Amazon example also illustrates that this technology can have a massive disruptive influence even in a community without these political dynamics.

This technology poses a serious problem for public health, as well. As Biden’s Press Secretary noted in July, twelve people produced 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. At the time, all of them remained active on Facebook despite some being banned on other platforms (including ones that Facebook owns!). Indeed, news exposure from Facebook was one of the single biggest predictors of vaccine hesitancy in the United States—with people who only got their news from Facebook expressing greater vaccine hesitancy than Fox News viewers.

New research suggests that there may be some alternatives. A group of researchers from Stanford developed a novel method for reranking social media feeds. They found that increasing exposure to antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity posts in the newsfeed increases affective polarization and negative emotions, whereas decreasing exposure reduces them (see figure below). These changes were comparable in size to 3 years of change in United States affective polarization.

As political polarization and societal division become increasingly linked to social media activity, these findings provide a potential pathway for platforms to address these challenges through algorithmic interventions. These interventions may result in algorithms that not only reduce partisan animosity but also promote greater social trust and healthier democratic discourse across party lines.

It’s unlikely that everyone would be willing to take a four week vacation from Facebook. But this research suggests that changes to algorithmic feeds can mitigate some of the harms of social media. There is a growing awareness that people need to take this research more seriously and think about the potential costs to society given the impact of Facebook, X, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms.

The problem with social media platforms is that many of their design features and algorithms are optimized for engagement, rather than accuracy, cooperation, or other civic values—including the values that promote a healthy democracy. It is increasingly clear that denying the body of internal and external research about these issues is simply no longer an option for Meta or the rest of us.

Catch up on the last one…

If you missed our live event last month, read on to hear more about our advance screening to the AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist!

The Power of Us

Reflections on The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

“This is the last mistake we’ll ever get to make” — Aza Raskin…

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2 months ago · 13 likes · 6 comments · Center for Conflict + Coop., Jay Van Bavel, and Anni Sternisko

“This is the last mistake we’ll ever get to make” — Aza Raskin

This week, we curated a diverse audience of over 150 experts—ranging from academics, journalists, and tech—to join us for a special screening of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (which is now out in theaters!). We also included several newsletter subscribers who joined us in person.

After the screening, Anni hosted a panel discussion with Jay, the author of The Anxious Generation Jonathan Haidt, and Academy Award-winning producer Jonathan Wang. The room was buzzing afterwards and we decided to share a recap of the discussion to share with the rest of the world

While much of today’s conversation focuses on how AI (Artificial Intelligence) will shape the future. We took a step back and asked a different question: How can we guide AI toward a future we want, and how do we keep that future human?

“The rare feeling of being in a room assembled with real purpose, where the aim was not simply to generate more noise around AI, but to think more carefully about what this moment demands of us.” — Event attendee, Paul Gimenez

Our Key Take-aways:

1) Watch the documentary, but don’t watch it alone

Is it a super accessible primer on the promise and perils of AI that your family should see? Yes. — Event attendee

We have been studying the psychology of technology for over a decade, but the documentary rattled many of us in a new way. Watching together, we were on a roller coaster of despair, excitement, and hope. Jay said his first reaction was existential terror. His second reaction was hope—especially when people spoke about collective action.

This is a huge problem that will require a lot of collective action (…) hearing everyone react to it made it feel like we were all (…) reaching a common ground. — Event attendee

2) AI will supercharge the good and the bad

AI can potentially help us solve climate change, find a cure for cancer, and offer children around the globe access to individualized, high-quality tutoring. Yet, the same powerful technology can advance bioweapons, feed children sexualized content, and erode our shared understanding of truth. The two outcomes are intrinsically intertwined.

Jay and Jonathan Haidt have written a lot about how tech companies are incentivized to maximize attention because this keeps users on their platforms and engage more. But this can have a number of downstream consequences, including: polarization, distorted norms, and declining adolescent mental health. Meta just lost two trials this week: A $370 million lawsuit over child sexploitation and another $4.2 million for creating addictive design features that harm users.

I expect it will become essential viewing for anyone trying to think seriously about artificial intelligence and its human consequences.— Event attendee

AI may perpetuate this problem: In a set of studies, led by Steven Rathje, Jay finds that people enjoy interacting more with sycophantic chatbots (chatbots that validate beliefs indiscriminately) vs. more balanced chatbots which led to more extreme political beliefs. And a new study came out this week showing that AI chatbots are 50% more sycophantic than humans. The authors concluded “that seemingly innocuous design and engineering choices can result in consequential harms”. This is a recipe for disaster.

3) Misaligned incentives and the psychology of AI arms races

The documentary explains that there is no good AI vs. bad AI. The promise and peril are inextricably linked and it is therefore the underlying incentive structures that we have to understand and guide. And these incentives are currently steering us in the wrong direction, creating a race similar to the nuclear arms race during the cold war; companies and countries are incentivized to cut corners in AI safety to avoid losing the race.

What future should we thrive for and how do we get there?

The documentary challenged us to reflect on what future we want and what it means to be human.

As we have seen with social media, it is difficult to predict the impact of new technology. Social media played a key role in democratic movements such as the Arab Spring, but it was also linked to the Rohingya genocide. We need to learn from that and design the technology to avoid these risks, rather than dealing with the damage to individuals and society in hindsight.

Jonathan Haidt urged us to create resilient societies with a strong immune system to buffer unpredicted stressors. Societies that have institutions that can react fast and civilians that have moral maturity and wisdom. This is a tall order for our current political leadership so the burden will fall on each of us to advocate for better solutions.

Psychological research can help us get there. For instance, the study by Jay and Steve also found that engaging with sycophantic chatbots did not increase belief extremity among participants who scored high in intellectual humility—these individuals were more receptive to chatbots who gave them critical feedback and a well rounded view of an issue.

The documentary producer, Jonathan Wang, spoke about the need to focus on human beauty and creativity. In a world that gets more and more complex and noisy from the abundance of content, people are craving meaning, beauty, and genuine social connections—uniquely human experiences. Human-made art and story telling rather than synthetic and hyperpersonalized content may be one way to get there.

4) The psychology of collective action

Changing incentives and institutionalizing alternatives requires coordination and collaboration at an unprecedented scale. As the world is entering an era of democratic instability, intergroup conflict, geopolitical isolationism, and distrust this may seem impossible. But psychological research and practical experience can help us come together.

We have studied intergroup conflict for several decades and found that a shared sense of identity and superordinate goals can encourage people to collaborate instead of compete. Research also finds that changing social norms may be a powerful tool to mitigate selfish behavior. For instance, a study conducted in Finland found that Finish students were less susceptible to selfish behavior, likely because Finland scores high on social norms of cooperation.

One of the biggest contribution of the movie is that it gives us a common language and knowledge around AI and how it affects us personally and society at large. Common knowledge is essential for breaking pluralistic ignorance and coordinating action. Jay noted that our own research finds that the overwhelming majority of people want transparent algorithms and they want control over these algorithms (see figure below).

If we are largely on the same page, you may ask how we can possibly rally people? The PhD student in our lab—Danielle Goldwert—is studying this question for her dissertation. She finds that a feeling of collective efficacy is critical to mobilize people. This sentiment is echoed in historic events like the civil rights movement:

Agency and hope

Claiming our agency was one of the biggest themes of the movie and the panel discussion. Hopelessness is the enemy of change. Indeed, one study finds that sense of agency predicted collective action, but only among groups that also scored high in hope.

How do we find hope?

A recent poll finds that 80% of U.S. adults believe the government should maintain rules for AI safety and data security, even if it means developing AI capabilities more slowly. Recently, the U.S. Congress voted 99-to-1 to strike down a bill proposal that would limit state-level regulation of AI In such a deeply polarized country this should give us hope. We can agree on things, we just need to find the same language and collaboration to get things done.

Our panelist Jonathan Haidt said that it is the most exciting time to be a social psychologist. We couldn’t agree more. Our field has all the tools to study these issues. Understanding these dynamics may prove very helpful for taking action. You can build your own understanding by watching the movie, talking about it with your friends and family, and becoming a part of the conversation.

The documentary will be released nationwide in theaters March 27. Catch it in your local theater and find out where you are on the Apocaloptimist Scale.

We thank the NYU Arts and Science Office of Research and Focus Features for their partnership in making this event possible.

Notes of the week

This screening was the first in a broader series of events we’ll be opening up to newsletter subscribers, including online courses for premium subscribers led by Jay and Dom, so keep your eyes peeled for more to come.

In the meantime, Jay was interviewed on NPR's Hidden Brain about the power of social identity. We often think of beliefs and decisions as individual choices. But in many cases, they are shaped by our social identities. When people join groups, they don’t just coordinate behavior—they begin to see the world through a shared lens.

This has profound implications for: leadership & conformity, organizational culture, intergroup polarization, and collective action. The themes we discussed in this very newsletter about AI. But social identity also helps explain why changing minds can be so difficult: you’re often engaging with identity, not just information.

If you’re interested, you can listen to the full discussion here.

Catch up on the last one…

After the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at a university rally in Utah last week, Spencer Cox, the state’s Republican governor, called social media companies a “cancer.”

Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat of Delaware, blamed the internet for “driving extremism in our country.”

President Trump, who helped found the Truth Social platform, also pointed fingers at social media on Monday and said the accused gunman had become “radicalized on the internet.”

The aftermath of Mr. Kirk’s killing reveals how inflammatory and hateful online content has become. Countless people have been fired for their comments on social media, misinformation and conspiracy theories are running rampant, and the companies themselves are no longer even promising to solve it. Mentions of “civil war” have surged on X and Elon Musk seems committed to fanning the flames of conflict himself.

F…

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While working on their undergraduate degrees, Roy and Neel Shanmugam invented Interview Coder: an AI-powered, undetectable app that helps interviewees pass coding interviews for computer science-related jobs. Their plan was to “use it themselves, get offers from top companies, film everything, and ride the shock factor”.

Roy focused more on distribution and virality than the product, so he and Neel built it in 10 days using open-source AI and launched it on LinkedIn. He then filmed and posted his entire Amazon recruitment process where he used InterviewCoder from online assessment to final offer to show how it works. After an Amazon employee saw the video, they reported it to Columbia which resulted in Roy’s dismissal from the university. Now, they are building Cluely, a tool that aims to help people cheat on everything. Eventually, they allegedly want to embed Cluely via micro-chip form into human brains.

As a Silicon Valley resident, it’s hard not to hear about the actions and ambitions of local start-ups. I actually have some mutuals with the exec team at Cluely and their “frat house” office is nearby. But still, their reach beyond tech without a polished product is impressive. Earlier this year, they recieved a $15 million seed from A16z just months after their initial fundraising round of $5.3 million. The translation from online clout to cash is real.

Most people have an intuition about why a 21-year-old CEO and his start-up’s unique culture is so notorious. But here’s what social psychological factors play into it:

How Roy Lee became a “king of distribution and virality”

1. Activating morality: Research has found that content with moral underpinnings is more likely to go viral on social media. Specifically, posts that use moral-emotional language to talk about social transgressions tends to spread quickly on social media. Words that can activate both morality and emotion are “abuse”, “honor”, “spite” and “greed”. Thus, Cluely’s tagline, “Cheat on everything” is highly effective in capturing attention, controversy, and clicks.

2. Negative content: Roy’s understanding of Twitter/X users is that “They love controversy, drama, and attention; they love to either dog on people or watch people get dogged on.” In an interview, he explained that if half the people in the world wouldn’t feel very negatively about a post, it probably won’t go viral — most viral content requires a controversial twist. He is correct. Content that is divisive, negative, and controversial tends to get more engagement compared to positive or educational content.

   Notably, Cluely’s ads have depicted scenes of violence and verbal aggression to game the attention economy. High-arousal, negative content tends to attract attention. Arousal refers to the intensity of an emotion, regardless of its valence (negativity or positivity). Anger and excitement are high-arousal emotions, sadness and calm are low-arousal emotions.

   

   Being keen to high-arousal, negative information likely has evolutionary origins. It can be valuable for people to pay attention to these types of information because it can signal threats to wellbeing. However, social media environments are an example of evolutionary mismatch, because many people pay too much attention to negative information online that doesn’t help in real life.

3. Acknowledge a shared sense of reality: Hiring in tech has slowed down in recent months/years. Computer science and engineering majors are now among the top 10 majors with the highest unemployment rate. Interview Coder’s popularity likely stemmed from a shared frustration among job seekers who struggle in coding interviews. While the questions are meant to evaluate problem solving and critical thinking, success often relies on familiarity with the problem and the ability to memorize (sort of like studying for the SAT). These interviews are an obstacle for fresh grads, and Roy’s marketing created a sense of shared reality in a tough job market.

   

   Content that rallies people around a solution to a collective problem is more likely to be shared because people see it as potentially beneficial to their communities.

4. Being unhinged: Unhinged marketing has worked for Cluely because it increases brand awareness, which ultimately increases conversions in the long-run. In an interview, Roy explained, “If I say extremely crazy shit online, it will make more people interested in me and the company and drive more downloads and conversions for Cluely. If anything, I need to become crazier online so that people will keep funneling attention towards the core product.” In another article, he shared his plans to throw a $1.5 million dollar rave in September which would promote Cluely.

   

Overall, the strategies that Roy and his marketing team have employed are prime examples of types of content that use human cognition to go viral on social media. Social media algorithms are designed to promote this content because they too, understand social psychology. All this to say, be mindful of your social media consumption and take notice when trolls like Roy Lee are ragebaiting for clicks.

News and Updates

Today is the last day to enter our book giveaway! Check out our interview with about his new book, Misguided to leave a comment and enter the giveaway. Paid subscribers are automatically entered. Good Luck!

*Closes Aug 5th, 11:59PM PST

The Power of Us

How misguided beliefs are formed: Interview + book giveaway with Matthew Facciani

Since 2020, the number of people who regularly get their news from social media has risen—particularly for TikTok and Instagram. While these platforms offer convenience and rapid, bite-sized updates, they also breed rampant misinformation that’s hard to detect and even harder to stop…

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10 months ago · 5 likes · 7 comments · Matthew Facciani and Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

Catch up on the last one…

More on the funhouse of social media in last week’s newsletter. Ideas on social media do not reflect people’s beliefs in real life.

The Power of Us

How social media distorts our perceptions

The experience of interacting with others on social media is becoming more and more distant from reality. Jay recently wrote an article for the Guardian exploring this disconnect. He explains how social media creates a deeply distorted picture of society, amplifying outrage and division far beyond what most people experience in their daily lives…

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10 months ago · 5 likes · Center for Conflict + Coop.

The gap between the inflammatory tone of online discourse and the relative calm of everyday life has grown more pronounced over time. A recent article from our lab by Claire Robertson, Kareena del Rosario and Jay explains how social media functions less like a neutral reflection of public opinion and more like a funhouse mirror—creating a distorted reflection of reality.

A small, hyperactive group of users—just 10%—produces about 97% of political content on platforms like X (formerly Twitter). Even more striking, only 0.1% of users are responsible for 80% of fake news. This small group of "super-users" skews public perception by flooding social…

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We decided to share a column from Annie in which she talks about the real world challenges of moral decision making in the modern age of artificial intelligence. In particular, she describes fascinating research about the moral programming people want in driverless cars. This turns out to be a really critical issue because no one wants to buy a driverless car that will make a moral decision they wouldn’t make (e.g., smashing them into a pole to save a stray cat). Annie explains how deeply human moral intuitions inherited from the selective pressure…

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I was recently invited to discuss my research on the profound impacts of social media on our psychological makeup and social behaviors on the podcast “Plain English with Derek Thompson”. He distilled my research into a "devil's playbook" of online engagement and we discussed four dark laws on online engagement that are shaping our social relationships.

The fundamental aspects of group psychology—our ability to join and identify with groups—is among the most unique human traits. Indeed, we are the only primate who will engage with prosocial behavior with in-group mem…

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I’m not normally prone to such sweeping statements, I prefer to understand modern challenges and social problems through a much larger cultural and evolutionary lens. But I feel like I stand I solid ground on this one. Check your phone right now and see how many times you’ve picked it up this week (click settings/screen time/see all app & website activity on an iPhone).

I average 101 pick ups per day (with a peak of 130 on Sunday, when I should have been paying more attention to my family). This is particularly problematic for someone whose livelihood hinges on thinking deeply about topics. I often feel like Sugriva, the poor chimpanzee in this video, scrolling mindlessly through my apps.

Unfortunately, we are now held captive to an onslaught of content engineered to appeal to our social instincts. We respond to the various notifications because for many reasons, but chief among them is the desire to stay connected with our friends, family, colleagues, and communities. This is what makes this technology uniquely difficult to escape: if everyone we know is using it, disengaging feels like a form of social suicide.

This is why social media is a collective trap. Users feel compelled to stay engaged, even if they hate it. A recent paper from a group of economists found that the majority of people would prefer to live in a world without Tik Tok or Instagram (which currently have 3.5 billion users). Indeed, nearly 60% of Instagram users wish the platform wasn’t invented.

In fact, these social media users were willing to pay $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate Tik Tok and Instagram, respectively. Yes, they would pay their own money to delete these apps from existence.

Yet they stay online because they feel socially compelled to use social media despite how awful it makes them feel. This is what the authors refer to as a collective trap, where people are stuck in an inefficient situation due to a collective coordination failure. They are driven by a sense of anxiety about being social excluded or a fear of missing out.

In collective traps, it’s often impossible to escape with individual solutions. This explains why all my attempts to minimize screen use—from deleting my social media apps to removing my iPhone from my room—ultimately fail. It is not a lack of willpower, but an issue of collective action. Like the participants in the study, I would probably be better off if the apps were simply removed from the world.

There is currently a fierce discussion about the potential harms of these technologies and how to regulate them. For instance, Jon Haidt’s new best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” has sparked a heated discussion about how harmful this is to kids and what might be done about it. I bought a copy but haven’t read his book yet, so I don’t want to weigh in on his specific claims. But his writing on the topic—and the response from many scholars in the field—has led to a critical discussion about these issues.

(FWIW I’m largely convinced that social media has a number of harms to society, but I’m still not sure how much they contribute to several mental health problems. The data I’ve seen offers a clear correlation and some causal evidence that social media reduces well-being—but the effect size tends to be pretty small. Of course, this doesn’t seem to account for social network effects which means it might be an underestimate. To get a better handle on this topic, my lab is about to launch a global experiment on the impact of social media so stay tuned for the results).

The collective trap posed by social media and technology is something I face in my own classroom—where I teach Introduction to Psychology to over 300 undergraduate students. Over the years, it’s become increasingly difficult to hold their attention long enough for me to deliver a lecture. Of course, my problems pale in comparison to high school teachers who have to hold the attention of middle schoolers all day, every day.

The internet is now full of stories of teachers who have painstakingly counted the number of disruptions in class. For instance, a math teacher in Hillsborough County asked her class of 23 students to put their phones on the corner of their desks, and every time they received a text or a notification to mark it on the board. Can you guess how many times they were disrupted in 30 minutes?

This is what the board looked like after half an hour:

For those doing the math at home, there were:

• 58 texts

• 182 social media notifications

• 28 other notifications

That's 268 disruptions in a half an hour! Can you imagine trying to teach or run a meeting with that many distractions? Can you imagine how hard it is for the kids to pay attention? This is the new normal. Instead of learning, we are either peaking at our phones or feeling a sense of FOMO because no one is pinging us.

Even setting aside the potential costs for our mental health or social connection with the people around us, this has to be extremely damaging for learning and memory. There is extensive evidence that divided attention, task switching, and cognitive load are associated with inferior cognitive performance. At a minimum, we are distracting ourselves into stupidity.

This is the type of problem that requires collective solutions. As it turns out, my kids were recently part of a pilot experiment at their local school that provided one clever solution.

My kids go to a public middle school in NYC where they lock up their phones for the day. The kids need their phones to commute through NYC (including the subway system) and coordinate social events with their friends. But once they arrive at school, the phones instantly become a distraction.

To address this problem, last year the school gave each kid a Yondr Pouch. Every morning, all the kids lock up their phones in the pouch and the teachers unlock the pouches at the end of the school day. Naturally, the kids hated this policy. A few managed to break into the pouches, but they were forced to pay a small fee for every broken pouch. Eventually they got used to it.

After a year, the school finally emailed parents the results of the pilot project last month. This is what the school observed:

“Overall, the program has been a massive success. We are happy to share that we continue to see the benefits of using Yondr, with increased student engagement in the classroom, less time spent in the bathrooms and hallways, more genuine connections within the community and a decrease in reports of cyberbullying.”

These pouches provided a collective solution: by making all the kids put their phone in the pouch, they were forced to interact with one another which fostered genuine social connections. No kid was forced to be the first mover or face social isolation if they didn’t own a phone.

Of course, I haven’t seen the raw data so I don’t know how the school tested these effects. I would also love to see a large experiment across several schools with a proper control condition to look at the long term educational and social impact of this policy. But given everything I’ve read, this seems like a great step in the right direction and I’d love to see more schools and organizations employ (and study!) similar solutions.

The bottom line is that we should start to think of more issues in terms of collective problems—and solutions. Many solutions fail because we have a tendency to understand these issues through a narrow individualistic lens. But many problems are fundamentally social and require coordinated solutions. As our society grapples with the impact of social media, smart phones, and other technology, we should bear this in mind. Otherwise we are doomed to a form of Sisyphean futility—failing over and over again until the end of eternity.

News and Updates

The Guardian recently recommended our book, The Power of Us! Read “The big idea: do our political opponents really hate us?” here.

Last week, John Miles emailed us to let us know that Jay’s episode on his podcast, The Passion Struck Podcast was the most downloaded episode in the last year! It’s also available on YouTube if you want to watch the video instead of listen to the podcast.

Catch up on the last one…

Last week, we shared summaries for every chapter in The Power of Us! This post is for paid subscribers only, but free subscribers can see the preview.

Why is it that this content constantly goes viral if no one we know actually likes it? Jay wrote an op-ed this week on this paradox of virality with his Postdoc Steve Rathje for the Boston Globe. You can read the full article here, but we will summarize some of the key points in this newsletter.

Lots of research suggests that negativity is more likely to go viral than positive posts. And we have found that this is especially true when people post negative stories about their political opponents: For each individual term referring to the political out-group was used, it increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%!

It might seem like people take a bit too much pleasure in the suffering of others—especially their enemies. But a new study we published in the journal Perspectives on P…

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In our experience, it feels like much of the world rewards bullshit and other forms of misinformation. For instance, there are nearly 5 billion people on social media and the primary incentive structure is about capturing attention–regardless of accuracy. This is why it is often called “the attention economy” rather than “the accuracy economy” or “the trust economy”. In the words of Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen:

"Facebook is optimizing for content that gets engagement or reaction. Its own research is showing the content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing—it is easier to inspire people to anger than other emotions."

It turns out that people are sick of this incentive stru…

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"Facebook is optimizing for content that gets engagement or reaction. Its own research is showing the content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing—it is easier to inspire people to anger than other emotions."

— Frances Haugen, on 60 Minutes.

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“The past few months have brought a hurricane of horror stories about social media sites gone haywire. Facebook and Instagram hijacked by Russian trolls. YouTube struggling to fight an army of conspiracy theorists. Twitter coming to terms with its own fake news problem. Even Pinterest isn’t safe from misuse by bad actors.

They put together this short video on some of our research, along with an interview with Jay:

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