Why we should keep phones out of schools: Solving a collective trap

Issue 115: Why people hate social media, but can't stop using it.

When I give a talk to a large audience, one of the first things I often ask them to do is put their smartphones away. I tell them we face more distractions than any humans in history—we are constantly bombarded by a constant string of beeps, buzzes, notifications, and a bad habit of reaching for our phone every three minutes.

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.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

―Edward O. Wilson

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.

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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.

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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.