Notes from my Knapsack 1-25-24

Notes from my Knapsack 1-25-24
Jeff Gill

Chickens and eggs and smartphones
___


Correlation does not equal causality.

It's a common statement around scientific endeavors in general and social science in particular. Just because something happens right before something else occurs doesn't mean the one caused the other. It could, for instance, mean they're both caused by the same as yet unmeasured trigger, but one phenomenon happens a little faster than the other.

Another funny way to make the point about correlation versus causality: there's a website by a guy named Tyler Vigen called "Spurious Correlations." His flexible brain working with modern data tools has been able to plot out graphs "showing" odd correlations such as how deaths by drowning in swimming pools closely follows by year the number of films Nicolas Cage appears in. Somehow, there is a statistical correlation, but surely not causation (I can hear some of you thinking furiously about how there might be, and you go right ahead).

An infamous version of this was a magazine story entitled "Bullying Can Make a Bully Healthier," that somehow picked up on data showing that bullies have a lower risk of chronic disease. Is there a connection? May well be, but causation? At the very least I hope not.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been getting a great deal of media attention, justified I would argue, for taking a wide range of survey data, and a global perspective, to demonstrate that starting in 2012 we've seen in the industrialized West a significant teen mental health crisis. His global view is important, because he is able to compare outcomes and changes within cultures and circumstances, and it's not a global shift caused by cosmic rays.

Or as Haidt said more recently, "(this crisis) was not caused by reality getting worse around 2012. Their material and physical health improved steadily." You can look up his work to see how he carefully demonstrates that aspect of what's going on. And then he says "(t)o paraphrase Epictetus: 'It is not events which disturb teens. It is the device through which they interpret all events.'" It's access on a personal, ongoing basis to smartphones.

Here's where I want to offer a note of caution, even as I've been standing with school administrators who are concerned that the incendiary effect of social media on personal devices are creating more intense, faster spreading tensions between students. They'd like to see smartphones limited in their buildings, more than they're allowed to in many cases.

Yet correlation is not causation. There's a growing assumption that the connection between smartphone enabled social media and increased mental health issues for teens is related to content, to challenges around self-image, invidious comparisons, teasing and taunting and bullying. That could be. We don't know.

But what won't get better, if we empower schools to decisively limit devices on school property, is if the decline in teen mental health and increases in anxiety and depression are all more connected to lack of sleep. The obsessive scrolling and clicking and gaming to 3 am most nights. Is sleep the true culprit here? We don't know.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; nope, he's not yet done with this subject. Tell him what you think, but not at 3 am, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.