From the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century, Americans’ average happiness kept rising, and the trend was especially pronounced among teenagers. Steven Pinker gives a detailed analysis of what drove this trend in Enlightenment Now, and we also covered it at length on the show, so I won’t rehash it here.
But strangely enough, starting in 2012, this trend was abruptly reversed. From 2012 to 2016 (the available data only goes up to this year), American teenagers’ happiness declined year by year.
Why did this happen?
One of the most popular explanations is that too much ‘screen time’ (the time young people spend on their phones, tablets, and computer screens) is the culprit—in other words, cherish happiness and stay away from your phone.
However, this explanation has mostly been the conjecture of experts and the media all along, with little solid evidence to back it up.
Now, at long last, we have some ‘half-solid evidence.’
In a study published not long ago, researchers took a close look at a dataset called ‘Monitoring the Future.’ Since 1990, the Monitoring the Future project has conducted an annual longitudinal survey of American 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students, collecting responses from 1.1 million teenagers to all kinds of questions related to their happiness.
The new study first confirmed the happiness trend found in earlier research: from 1990 through the first decade of the 21st century, happiness kept rising; but around 2012, various measures related to happiness (life satisfaction, self-esteem, happiness itself, and so on) began declining year by year.
The researchers found that the less teenagers exercised, the less time they spent meeting with peers (meeting in the real world), and the less time they spent reading print media, the lower their happiness. Another interesting finding was that the less time they spent on homework, the lower their happiness as well. But elementary and middle school teachers in China, please don’t get too excited when you see this—American students’ homework is simply not comparable to Chinese students’ homework, either in content or in volume.
Next, the researchers focused on the relationship between screen time and happiness. They found that teenagers who spent less than 1 hour per week on digital devices, as well as those who spent 1-2 hours per week (that is, less than 20 minutes a day on average), were the happiest—even happier than teenagers who had no contact with digital devices at all. As time spent on screens increased, happiness trended downward. Teenagers who spent 10-19 hours a week on screens were, on average, 41% less happy than those who spent only 1-2 hours per week.
In short, the more time teenagers spend on screens, the lower their happiness.
The reason I call this ‘half-solid evidence’ is that this is a correlational study, so it can’t establish a causal relationship. The researchers themselves say they were only trying to dig into some potential reasons for the reversal of the happiness trend.
What do you think about this issue? On average, how much time do you spend on screens every day (your phone, tablet, and video games)? Do your phone and various digital devices make you happier—or less happy?
References:
- Twenge, J. M., Martin, G. N., & Campbell, W. K. (2018). Decreases in psychological well-being among American adolescents after 2012 and links to screen time during the rise of smartphone technology.
- Alex Fradera. Researchers find the most plausible cause of wellbeing decline in youth is increased screen time. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/10/02/researchers-find-the-most-plausible-cause-of-wellbeing-decline-in-youth-is-increased-screen-time/
Note
- This article in the Psychology Insights Course series was written at the time to accompany content from Zhichao Wei: Psychology Insights Course. It’s a short popular-psychology piece—part science communication, part ramble—originally published on the now-closed platform Fàntuán. The original link no longer exists.
Leave a Reply