Davos 2024: How to Prevent an Anxious Generation

Adam Grant, Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Management and Psychology, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania: Good morning everyone. I'm Adam Grant. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm thrilled to have a chance to moderate the discussion this morning around the question 'Are the kids okay?'

And the answer, as you're going to see, is a definitive maybe. We have two wonderful experts here to enlighten us and bring some evidence to the table, we have Tali Sharot, who's a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UCL and MIT, and Nita Farahany, who's a professor of law and philosophy at Duke. Nita is going to kick us off and walk us through the data and Nita, it's all yours.

Nita Farahany, Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law and Philosophy; Director, Duke Science and Society, Duke University: Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here with you. And we're going to get the presentation up and going now.

Let me ask you this. How many of you are parents of children? Okay, and how many of you are worried about their screen time use? Right? I am the parent of an eight-year-old daughter. And I worry that between the ages of eight and 18, and she's like the average child, that she'll spend about 4.8 waking years of her life in front of a screen. That's about 4.5 out of 10 waking hours per day that she would spend in front of a screen and immersed with technology.

This isn't a speculative future. It's the present-day reality based on the data. The children, on average, are spending that much time during that critical developmental period in front of social media, TikTok, YouTube and other digitally immersive technologies, and it's unclear how their cognitive landscape is being fundamentally reshaped as this occurs.

My work at the intersection of technology, law, policy and ethics has brought me to look deeply at how digital technologies are impacting our brains and mental experiences. This isn't just an academic inquiry, it's a question of how do we harness technology and the benefits of technology, because there are many, while trying to mitigate against the downside risks, such that the next generation can flourish, such that they can have a childhood and be able to live online and offline and when they are online that they live in a world that is designed to be much better for their cognitive well-being.

But right now we are at a pivotal moment in society, where their cognitive landscapes are being fundamentally reshaped. They are in an ongoing experiment about how technology and how coevolution with technology impacts their brain and mental experiences. And we have absolutely no idea what the outcome of that experiment will be.

But we do have some data, which helps to inform us and helps us think about why it's so crucial that we start to imagine a different world, a different way of developing and deploying technology, different tribes, different frameworks for prioritizing the whole child, their cognitive liberty, their right to self-determination over their brains and mental experiences. To get there, it's important to understand where we are and where we are, is that from 2014 and 15 to 23, there is a roughly doubling of children who are almost constantly online, going from 3.8 hours a day to over seven hours a day. And what's startling about this, is that many people thought it was a blip during the pandemic. It is a sustained increase in time online, even as children return to in-person learning and in-person experiences.

And the data, while not perfectly clear about what the impacts of that constant screen time use are, shows an increasing trend in the availability and access to smartphones. So too has there been an increased trend of anxiety and depression, as well as sleep disturbances. And, while the causal story isn't a clear one, nor is all of the data convincing that there is this increase commensurate to screen time use, some of it points to the benefits of increased connectivity and creativity and opportunities for learning and immersion.

It's intriguing that in a study that was done on college students, when they limited their screen time use to 30 minutes per day, after three weeks they reported, self-reported, far lower degrees of depression and loneliness, even the control group simply being mindful about their social media use reported a decreased level of depression and loneliness, although not to the same degree as the college students who have limited their access and use. Part of this seems to be attributable to increasing disturbances and sleep, that as children spend more and more time late into the night on their devices, they're trading it off for the number of hours they're sleeping, putting them at increased risk of depression and anxiety, but also having increased wake-ups throughout the night.

Think about it. Last night. Last thing before you went to bed, what did you do? First thing, when you got up this morning, what did you do? Right? This constant digital immersion is stimulating and it is changing our brain and mental experiences. And what they're doing when they're online may be different than what you were doing last thing at night or first thing and more. And this morning, they're spending most of their time on user-created platforms, where the majority of their experiences are shaped by social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram and TikTok.

And, interestingly, this is creating an increased generational divide. Because what we see is that these platforms are not the dominant platforms for older generations to both get their news and information. If you look at the data with respect to where Generation Z gets the primary sources of their news, it's these platforms, which means that not only are they spending all of their time in these different filter bubbles and constructs that have been created, they're in some ways living in a very different world than prior generations. And, the fact and dominance of social media use is stark, the number of children who say that they spend almost constant time on YouTube, Tiktok, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook is increasing. Where for some it has moved into the several times a day for many, it's moved into almost constant interaction with these platforms.

Part of the problem is that these platforms are being intentionally designed with cognitive constructs to drive increased engagement, use and repetitive and even compulsive use. That includes features like auto-play that are designed to drive overconsumption or features like intermittent rewards that are given on platforms that are designed to gamify the experience, streaks which bring children back over and over again and create peer pressure to maintain their streak in order to show the relationship that they have with other children. These are being designed intentionally and systematically, even when the evidence shows that doing things like pairing short-form videos, together with recommender systems, activates the reward motivation system in the brain more strongly, and it's being designed intentionally to do so to play on different psychological mechanisms in the brain that children are particularly vulnerable to.

The result is an undeniable increase in internet addiction over time. What you see year over year, based on prevalence statistics, is that whether it's the children or university students, or everyone in this room, the rate of internet addiction has increased year over year among university students, the trend has become even more profound.

So, how do we think about this and how do we start to recognize a different world? A part of the news is good, despite everything I've just said, which is that when you ask Gen Z, what they would tell future generations or users who are first coming to these platforms, how they ought to think about engaging with social media, their advice shows a growing awareness of the impact of social media on their lives. They say things like, limit yourselves, social media is no joke, or don't look at inappropriate content if you can't handle it, because it will mess you up later. And, while they may not be able to escape, the digital constructs are advising those who come after them, that there are strategies that they can and should employ in order to do so.

What's coming next though, right could be different in kind and not just degree, as the world of spatial computing starts to increase the way children learn, their educational opportunities, their education may go increasingly from having a screen in front of them to a screen literally in front of their eyes; where the worlds that they're immersed in are digitally constructed in ways that even can be responsive and a closed loop based on sensors and cameras that gauge their reactions and shape their cognitive landscape and experience.

This doesn't have to be bad story, even though this picture creeps me out, just to see a child in this way interacting in this kind of environment. There are opportunities for learning and engagement. There are ways in which embedding intentionally and systematically, ways to benefit the child that could even create an environment like this where, when balanced with offline use, could offer opportunities for growth.

Generative AI presents a newfound challenge, where there are questions about whether the critical skills of children, their ability to write, to think critically, to be able to discern information, to be able to develop the empathetic connections that they need, could be softened or weakened, or it could democratize learning.

It could give every child a personal tutor that is tailored to their experience and their level of understanding. It could give them opportunities to democratize knowledge, to have access to it and to be designed intentionally in ways that try to push them toward empowerment, rather than entrapments.

Notice the dichotomy, I'm talking about a world in which intentional choices, intentional redesign of technology, deliberate and systematic choices, could use technology to harness it for the good of the children, to lead them to a world where, if they are co-evolving with technology, if they are spending time on screens, they're doing so in ways that favour their well being.

Which raises the question of how do we design technology and a world that really respects the whole child, that recognizes that near constant use of technology can't be the entire picture, that kids need the experiences of immersion in nature, they need to be able to go play in the mud and get dirty, play in water and experience natural environments and not just virtual ones, that their interactions with the growth of their resilience, the growth of their relational intelligence requires a connection not only with each other, but with nature and with the natural world.

So, trying to design a world for a whole child approach has to involve the redesign of technology. If technology is being designed in ways that lead to compulsive use, designed to lead children not to engage in critical thinking skills, but instead to spend much more time and surface level thinking in filter bubbles, where girls, in particular, have shown the effect of these different approaches, where they are having an epidemic in many ways of mental health and a reduction in self-esteem and self-identity as they compare themselves to the images that are created online. Technology redesigned systematically and intentionally focusing on the whole child could look different.

But to get there, I think we have to recognize, at least in part, that not all screentime use is bad. The message can't be to simply shame parents and say you have to get your kids offline. It's about finding a balance. It's about trying to encourage things, like active use of technology, rather than passive use. It's trying to recognize where the benefits are and where their educational programmes or other opportunities for self-reflection, how technology can be aligned with children.

Moving beyond that mantra of simply ban all screentime use also recognizes the inequities that that presents for families who can't simply say, Okay, fine, my child won't spend any time on a screen, even though I'm a single parent and that's the only way that I can actually offer educational content to my child who's watching PBS. Moving beyond that narrative will help us start to find solutions that truly savour and enable society.

There are important efforts underway to make this happen worldwide. There are different regulatory and policy approaches that are seeking to align technology in ways that benefit children. But we need to bring those under a common framework. We need a common set of principles that guide how we think about the different approaches to educational redesign, technology redesign and policy frameworks that would favour the whole child.

I believe, recognizing that children have a right to cognitive liberty, a right to self-determination of their brains and mental experiences, which includes a right to mental privacy, a right to freedom, a space for them to be able to think freely without suffering the effects of manipulation and entrapment. The right to self-determination, which is intentionally being fostered, gives us that guiding principle, which then means we have to translate it into different spaces, like an educational one.

What would education redesign look like that would prioritize the cognitive liberty of children? It's already begun in some places. If you look, for example, at Finland, who has intentionally designed its curriculum to try to prepare children from as early as preschool to be able to counter the effects of misinformation and disinformation by integrating technology in ways that help them to be able to develop that discernment skill and mental agility. That's a promising approach. Common Sense Media similarly has a digital citizenship curriculum that they've made widely and freely available that can be integrated into schools to teach children the basics of digital literacy, how it impacts them and how they can make choices that are different that could empower them for a better and brighter future.

At Duke University, we've launched a digital intelligence curriculum offering, for the first time this year, a class called 'Let's talk about digital,' helping children and university students to think critically about, not only the technologies but what it means for themselves, what it means for their place in the world. Doing more of this can help to be able to prepare children for a world of increasing digital immersion.

I don't believe that's enough and it puts it on them in many ways and already overburdened educational systems, even though that's a critical next step. We have to look at technology design and redesign and enable that redesign to truly focus on ways that are favourable to children. This includes things like privacy-first social media platforms that do things like not extract data from children and not use them for purposes of targeted advertisements, designing technology that is not meant to entrap them, but is meant to empower them.

There are already some entrepreneurial youth who started to create things like screen time widgets that you can embed to give yourself a digital wellness dashboard to track your social media use and to set intentional limits. Dry January, maybe some of you are participating. there are Dry November months that have been proposed for children to take a break from social media to break free of that kind of addiction. These are promising next steps, but technology companies have to start to design a fundamentally different set of industry standards that are around kids' codes, that are around their unique vulnerabilities that foster and favour their empowerment.

And finally, and importantly, we have to continue to develop robust policy frameworks that are designed to protect children. This includes limitations, for example, on unintentionally advertising to children, making sure that there are child standard policies, such as those that have been adopted in the UK, in the EU, or in China, where there is a voluntary minor policy that focuses on how to benefit children, increased mental health resources and funding, like those prioritised by the Biden administration, especially in places like schools.

We can make a difference in how we use and deploy technology if we thoughtfully have a comprehensive guiding framework to move ahead. But we have to make that intentional choice now, rather than letting our children simply be part of an ongoing experiment where we have no idea if it will enable them to flourish. Thank you

Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania: Alright, so let me kick it off with Tali. So Nita mentioned that the way you engage really matters totally, you have a bunch of fascinating experiments on this. Can you tell us how the kind of engagement we have online influences our mental health?

Tali Sharot, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London (UCL): Yes, so Nita mentioned, we really need to go beyond just screen time to look at the specific uses, but also to look at specific populations, because specific populations may be impacted differently. So just as one example, one finding that we have is that people with worse mental health are more likely to conduct searches that lead them to negative information and that negative information, in turn, makes their symptoms worse. So it's a bit of a feedback loop.

So for example, if you suffer from depression or anxiety, you're likely to have more negative thoughts, those negative thoughts drive your searches online, which then leads to the negative content. And so what can we do about that? One thing that would be helpful is to inform people ahead of time, about the content, the features of the content on the web pages before they consume them.

So, the way that I think about it is a bit like nutrition labels. So if you're about to eat a chocolate bar, you look at the nutrition labels, it tells you sugar, protein and calories, and so you can make the decision on whether to eat or not based on your goals. So, what we have developed, our nutrition labels for webpages, we've developed it in the form of a plugin that when you use a plugin, and you have a Google search, the Google search comes in as usual, all the links, but next to it are little labels that tell you how positive or negative is the content on the webpage. So you can decide if you're in a really bad mood today and you don't want more negative content so maybe you don't choose the website with the most negative contact.

But we don't want people to just avoid negative information right? There are other important things. So we also give them two other labels. One is how likely is information to enhance knowledge and, the second is how likely is information to direct your actions to make better decisions. These labels are based on machine learning that was trained on human ratings. And, of course, there are individual differences, right? The kind of information that will enhance Adam's knowledge is not necessarily the kind of information that will enhance mine, but on average, there's good interrater reliability.

So the idea is kind of to inform and empower the user to make better choices.

Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania: So, I'm completely on board for more of us to use these kinds of plugins. We've obviously all aligned on the kinds of changes that social media companies need to start making. As a parent. I'm not willing to wait for those changes to unfold and I think many of us are struggling with what to do with our kids.

I read a study earlier this year of 27,000 people, showing that the earlier kids got smartphones, the worse their mental health as young adults. You can track lower self-worth, lower resilience, higher rates of depression and anxiety, especially for girls.

Now, Nita you mentioned earlier, we don't know if this is always causal. There may be other terrible things those parents are doing with letting four-year-olds on social media. Yeah, but I think this is a real conundrum for parents. When our daughter was in eighth grade, we were the last holdouts to not give her a smartphone. And, at that point, the research shows, if you're the only kid who doesn't have it, your well-being also suffers because you end up isolated socially. So what is the responsibility of parents here? And what do we do in these situations?

Nita Farahany, Duke University: Yes, I mean, I think we've put a lot on parents as part of the problem, right? Within this framework that I put up, education includes education for parents, which I think is critical because there is some decent advice on this.

At the same time, like you said, four-year-olds, I have a four-year-old, there was a report that just came out from the UK that showed that 20% of three-year-olds now own a smartphone. I was like, own a smartphone or given a smartphone, like what does that actually mean? They are digital natives and it's shocking, but we have to start to grapple with that reality first and foremost. And if the messaging that parents are being given is it's bad to have your kid on a screen at all, I don't think that's helpful.

I get it from like, medical association perspective, the American Paediatric Association says to limit screen time use to two hours per day. And then there's some nuance within that, but I think we need a lot more nuance within that, right?

So if you're going to have your child on a screen, here's why active use is better than passive use. Or, if you're gonna have passive use, here's why PBS is better than, you know, some other show, where they're actually getting educational content. Here are educational platforms that different rating agencies have gone through and that are privacy-first for children, do have a limitation on the use of cognitive constructs that are designed to try to overstimulate their brain.

And there are a bunch of those, we just need to start offering that systematically to parents to make it a lot easier for parents to make those choices, rather than a black and white don't give your kid a phone or a device until the peer pressure is such that if they don't get one, they suffer the negative consequences of that.

Tali Sharot, University College London: I just want to pick up on a word that you said 'correlational'. And I know that most of the data is correlational, but I just kind of want to highlight that there are causational studies, because people, they're like, well, it's just correlational so we don't know if it's causing it, but there are causation studies.

So one study that was conducted by the economist Hunt Allcott, showed, what he did is he paid 1,000 individuals $100 each to get off Facebook. This is a little bit of an older study, to get off Facebook for a month, and then 1,000 individuals, he paid them $100 to just go on as usual, whatever they wanted to do. He came back at the end of the month and he measured wellbeing on every single dimension. Those people who were off Facebook for a month were doing better, less depressed, happier, they spent more time doing other things. So all of that is good and it's causational data.

But here's the surprise, there's two surprising things. One is that the users were surprised, they had no idea that it was going to have such a huge effect, right? So we have this kind of, we're suspicious that maybe it's affecting us, that it's mostly affecting us more than we actually realize and it's surprising. And here's what's most surprising to me, is that, despite the fact that most of the users said, 'I'm happier now, I'm doing better,' they went straight back to Facebook.

Nita Farahany, Duke University: I think the causal story though still is a little bit more complicated, right, which is part of the correlation is: Yes, it's clear that people were happier. But what were they doing during that other time? A lot of it's a trade-off story, right? So, it's not just the screens themselves. It's not just whatever the content is or the negative filter bubbles, whatever the experience of it is, it's that they're on and they're on constantly. They're not going outside. They're not engaging in nature. They're not having face-to-face interactions. They're sleeping less.

The sleep studies are really dramatic, showing the number of hours of declining sleep over time for children, and then the sleep disturbances which have been measured as well. And that isn't just the stimulation of the screen time, it is literally that they are on the devices until late into the night, even when parents set limits, they find ways to get on their devices and get on phones.

So I think when some people say it's not a causal story, it's not as simple as saying social media is bad, right? It's trade-offs of digital immersion at the expense of a whole child experience of childhood. And so I think that's part of it. Right? But I mean the study of the kids who limited it to 30 minutes a day they were happier, right? Lower levels of depression and loneliness. And they all went back to their devices as well.

So you know, what's happening and why do they go back to it? Is it the cognitive constructs? Is it that their friends are on it? Is it that the dopamine hits that they're getting from the rewards of being on the devices that they're not getting when you know, they go out and play in the mud?

Tali Sharot, University College London: It's a little bit similar to addiction, but I think you use that word in your talk, and addiction basically has two characteristics. One is that the more I use, the more I use. So that's one and the second is, that despite the fact, and you can think about drug abuse in this way, the fact that people are aware that it has negative effects on them and they don't actually want to use, they still use it. In fact, that was a very recent finding. That was really interesting, where most people said that they would give money for social media not to exist. So they are on social media, because everyone is, but they would pay to not have it. I think that's really interesting.

Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania: So when looking at the addiction statistics, there does seem to be a rise. It's not the majority of kids or adults though. It seems like, and Tali you talked about nutrition earlier, it seems like a nutrition analogy is more relevant for most of us, which is, we know we should eat the salad, but we prefer the junk food instead.

What are your thoughts about how to make these kinds of platforms less enticing?

Nita Farahany, Duke University: Yes, it's a funny way of putting it. So first, I'll say addiction alone doesn't tell the story. I was in an argument with a friend recently about his use of nicotine he uses nicotine patches and he said no, no, do the research, it's not what you think it is. It's a stimulant. There's a lot of like, I'm okay with being addicted to it because it has positive beneficial uses.

I read all the data and I was like, I'm still not using a nicotine patch, but at the same time, I get what the perspective is, right? There's addiction, which is that you are on it constantly and that you have a hard time of actually extracting yourself from it, and then there's addiction, plus negative effects.

What I would change is the negative effects. I would change the driving of the addiction and then some of the risks of harm that come from it, like disappearing content where kids are sold fentanyl is a deep problem, right?

We shouldn't have targeted advertisements commodifying kids' data. If they're going to be on devices, which they're going to be, we can limit it, we should limit it in certain setting, in schools and certain populations. But if they're going to be on devices, it's about designing it in a way that actually leads to their empowerment, their critical thinking skills, their relational intelligence or empathy, the right ways of developing it. And there are platforms that do that, even video game platforms like Mightier is a great platform that is designed for cognitive and social regulation, emotional regulation. Those are the kinds of things that I would do.

Tali Sharot, University College London: Yes, and I think, to do it, policy is where we need to start. There's almost close to zero policy on this, which just always seems absolutely crazy to me. So it has to be policy because the platforms are not going to start doing it themselves. That's kind of obvious. So you have to put the policy in place. And that's true for the negative effects of social media, mental health, doing all the things that you just said, for design, but also there is low hanging fruits on misinformation, where there's things, and we don't have time, but there are things that we know we could do on the platforms, but the platform doesn't have the incentives and the policymakers need to intervene to make those incentives

Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania: 15 seconds. if you could wave a magic wand and get one policy implemented to protect kids what would it be?

Nita Farahany, Duke University: Privacy, privacy around data.

Tali Sharot, University College London: Maybe just not allow use, allow it only from a certain age. I would say that. It may sound extreme, but that would be what I would do.

Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania: You heard it here first. Thank you. Thank you all. Thanks, everyone.