Viewing archives for Cause And Effect

Social media use and wellbeing in the Middle East and North Africa

Martijn Burger, Talita Greyling, Stephanie Rossouw, Francesco Sarracino and Fengyu Wu

Abstract

Social media use in the Middle East and North Africa is among the highest in the world, although considerable differences appear among countries. Heavy use is more common than in other regions: between 20% and 40% of users reported more than five hours of use in 2023–2024.

Social media use is heavier among certain social groups. Gen Z, men, single individuals, less religious and more affluent respondents, as well as those with higher education, are much more likely to be heavy users.

On average, heavy social media use (more than five hours per day) is associated with lower wellbeing. Heavy users are significantly more likely to report higher stress and depressive symptoms, and believe they are worse off than their parents, compared with non- or moderate users.

The impact of heavy social media use on wellbeing depends on how it is used. Engaging with multiple platforms, relying on social media as a primary news source, and following influencers are associated with higher stress, increased depressive symptoms, and more negative comparisons with parents’ quality of life.

The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Internet use, social media, and wellbeing: the role of trust, social connections, and emotional bonds

Zeynep Ozkok, Jonathan Rosborough and Brandon Malloy

Abstract

Previous studies from the World Happiness Report highlight the importance of trust and social connections for wellbeing. This chapter explores how the rise of internet and social media use has affected wellbeing directly, and also indirectly by altering trust, social connections, and emotional bonds.

We use four rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS), covering 30 countries over the years 2016 to 2024, to investigate the impact of internet use upon wellbeing. In order to measure the total impact of internet use, we instrument it by M-Lab data on local internet speed. The instrumental variable results reveal a significant negative coefficient on internet use that is not visible in standard OLS estimations.

The estimated relationship between internet use and wellbeing varies sharply across generations, genders, and regions. It is strongly negative for Gen Z, moderately negative for Millennials, near zero for Gen X, and slightly positive for Baby Boomers. The generational gradient reflects both greater increases in internet use among younger cohorts (exposure) and more negative estimated coefficients for those same cohorts (susceptibility).

The social and emotional foundations of wellbeing have deteriorated most for younger Europeans, especially in Western Europe. Declines in interpersonal trust, institutional trust, perceived social activity, and social meeting frequency are largest for Gen Z and Millennial women. In contrast, older cohorts show more resilience, supported by rising attachment to country and, in many Central and Eastern European countries, improved feelings of safety.

Perceived social activity (“compared to others your age”) has fallen everywhere and is among the strongest predictors of wellbeing losses.

Internet use is associated with several drivers of wellbeing, including trust, perceived social activity, and social connection. Interaction terms reveal that internet use can be positive for individuals with high interpersonal trust or strong attachments to their countries. However, those who report being highly socially active experience more negative effects, consistent with substitution or displacement of offline connections.

The digital environment matters: the effect of internet use on wellbeing depends on how common social media use is within an individual’s demographic peer group. Internet use is beneficial when peer-group exposure is low, but becomes increasingly harmful as social media use becomes more widespread among one’s peers.

Generational differences in wellbeing are widening over time. Older adults benefit from stable trust, rising attachment, improved safety, and moderate digital use, while younger adults face the erosion of these foundations in highly saturated digital ecosystems.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Problematic social media use and adolescent wellbeing: the role of family socioeconomic status across 43 countries

Pablo Gracia, Roger Fernandez-Urbano, Maria Rubio-Cabañez, Seyma Celik and Beyda Cineli

Abstract

For adolescents, Problematic Social Media Use (PSMU) is associated with more psychological complaints and lower life evaluation in all 43 countries we examined. These associations are most pronounced in Anglo-Celtic countries and least problematic in the Caucasus-Black Sea region.

Globally, the relationship between PSMU and lower wellbeing is stronger among adolescents from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than among their higher-status peers.

Socioeconomic differences in the relationship between PSMU and adolescent wellbeing are stronger than for psychological complaints.

Socioeconomic gradients for life evaluation are consistent across Anglo-Celtic, Caucasus-Black Sea, Central-Eastern, Nordic, and Western European countries, but are weak in Mediterranean countries. For psychological complaints, only the Anglo-Celtic region shows socioeconomic gradients in the link between PSMU and wellbeing.

Between 2018 and 2022, the negative association between PSMU and adolescent wellbeing intensified. This increase occurred across all socioeconomic groups and in most of the regions examined.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Social media, wasting time, and product traps

Cass R. Sunstein

Abstract

Three empirical studies raise serious doubts about whether social media use makes people happy, with implications for valuation, choice, and wellbeing. The central conclusion is that many people use social media because other people use social media. If social media use were somehow reduced or even stopped, many people would be better off, and they are aware of that fact.

The first study finds that people are willing to pay far less to use social media platforms than they would demand to stop using them. The fact that people would pay little or nothing to use such platforms raises the possibility that many think they are wasting time when doing so.

The second study finds that people lose welfare from using Facebook. Even after experiencing a ‌happier month without Facebook, however, they would demand a significant amount of money to stop using the platform for an additional month. The fact that people are more anxious and depressed when using Facebook provides strong cautionary notes about the idea that such use increases wellbeing.

The third (and, in important ways, the most revealing) study finds that while many young people would demand a significant amount of money to stop using Instagram and TikTok, they would also be willing to pay to eliminate those platforms from their community. Social media platforms impose a “negative non-user externality”, i.e., they impose a cost on people who do not use them.

A reasonable conclusion is that if social media platforms did not exist, many users would be better off.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Adolescent life satisfaction and social media use: gender differences in an international dataset

Jean M. Twenge, Alexis Diomino and Alana Rio

Abstract

Although many studies have documented links between heavy social media use and poor mental health, fewer studies have explored associations with positive wellbeing, especially in international datasets.

In 2022, the OECD’s PISA survey, conducted in 47 countries, asked over 270,000 15- to 16-year-olds how many hours a day they spent using social media and how satisfied they were with their lives.

Among girls, mean life satisfaction was highest among light users of social media (less than an hour a day) and declined with further hours of use. Among boys, this pattern held only in Western Europe and English-speaking countries.

The mean differences obscure a notable pattern, especially among boys. Compared to light users, a larger percentage of the heaviest users (7+ hours a day) had both the highest level of life satisfaction (10) and the lowest levels (0–4). The same was true for non-users of social media, with higher levels of both very high and low life satisfaction.

Thus, there is more variation in life satisfaction among non-users and heavy users of social media compared to light or moderate users. Among girls in most regions, non-users of social media were the most likely to report complete satisfaction with their lives, although in some regions, heavy users were also more likely to report complete satisfaction than moderate users.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Translating scientific evidence into effective policies for health and technology requires care

Sophie Lloyd-Hurwitz and Andrew Przybylski

Abstract

Professional science organisations that have examined social media and adolescent mental health have reached different conclusions and policy recommendations despite examining similar research. Given their substantial influence on policy and public understanding, it is important to investigate their evidence synthesis practices.

Our analysis of three high-profile reports on social media and adolescent mental health finds that they cited broadly similar types of research, yet showed little overlap (<1%) in their sources.

We also found considerable variation in how the reports synthesise, communicate, and simplify evidence, including differences in citation accuracy, contextual detail, limitation acknowledgement, and conclusion strength.

The stakes of getting these syntheses right are substantial. Poor synthesis quality risks developing policies which may be ineffective or cause unintended harm, and may contribute to the erosion of public trust in scientific institutions more broadly.

When communicating the state of a complex scientific field, it is crucial to be honest about shortcomings and uncertainties, and to maximise fidelity to the underlying research. As scientists committed to rigorous, transparent, and replicable approaches to understanding complex phenomena, we have a responsibility to consistently uphold standards that justify claims to scientific authority and to identify opportunities for improving practices within our community.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level

Jonathan Haidt and Zachary Rausch

Abstract

Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents? We call this the “product safety question”, and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the answer is no.

The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments; and 7) findings from natural experiments.

We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as sextortion and cyberbullying), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression and anxiety). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level.

We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent wellbeing and mental health, they can help answer a second question: was the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid 2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question”. We draw on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes”.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

International evidence on happiness and social media

John F. Helliwell, Lara B. Aknin, Haifang Huang, Mariano Rojas, Shun Wang, Vicente Guerra and Adam Danyluk

Abstract

Each year, Chapter 2 has two roles: first, to present and explain the latest global happiness rankings, and second, to present research on the current year’s topic. Often these two roles are closely linked, since the report’s focal topic may invite a range of alternative rankings. For example, we ranked the happiness of the native-born and the foreign-born when our topic was immigration in WHR 2018, and we ranked the happiness gaps between the more and less happy parts of the population when our focus was happiness inequality in WHR 2023.

In WHR 2024, we focused on happiness across age groups and generations. We return to that topic this year, with a special focus on the links between social media use and youth wellbeing around the world. We find striking differences in how the young have fared. In 85 of 136 countries, the under-25s are happier now (2023–2025) than they were twenty years ago (2006–2010). By contrast, in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, life evaluations for under-25s have fallen by an average of 0.86 points on the 0 to 10 scale. Why has youth happiness dropped so fast and so far in those countries?

An invited chapter in WHR 2019 used US evidence to attribute the drops in youth happiness to increased use of digital media. We wondered if the timing and nature of social media use might help to explain the striking variations in youth happiness in different parts of the world, so we gathered an international team of expert authors whose contributions are in the seven chapters following this one.

To keep our own analysis consistent with that in other chapters, we consider three age categories: 15–19, 20–24, and 25 or older. We also consider the following generational splits: those born in or after 1997 (Gen Z), those born 1981–1996 (Millennials), and all those born earlier (Gen X and preceding generations). The Gallup World Poll data start at age 15, as is common with most population-based surveys, so we also analysed student data from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, which covers a sample of 15-year-olds in 47 countries.

We present the global rankings first, then proceed to our new research on social media.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Executive summary: happiness and social media

John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Lara B. Aknin and Shun Wang

Abstract

In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. Many people blame social media for this fall in happiness, but does this hypothesis stand the test of rigorous scientific analysis? What about the rest of the world, where young people’s happiness has not declined relative to adults, even though social media is equally prevalent?

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Loud and clear: Voice notes could improve workplace communication, research finds

A switch to voice notes can help reduce ambiguity in workplace communications, and in turn reduce negative experiences, according to a newly-published study of workplace wellbeing.

Researchers from the World Wellbeing Movement and the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford presented participants with three common work scenarios between an employee and their line manager. Messages either took the form of a written email or required listening to an identically-worded voice note.

After reading the email or listening to the voice note, participants were then asked for their subjective interpretation of the message: positive, negative, or neutral.

Both communication methods are examples of ‘asynchronous communication’ – communication that does not take place in real time – and are relied upon more than ever in an era of remote and hybrid work as well as increasing cross-border (and cross-time zone) collaboration.

In two of the three scenarios, respondents rated the messages sent via voice notes as significantly less ambiguous than those sent via email, and negative interpretations of the messages were considerably reduced.

The researchers found gender differences when voice notes did not reduce ambiguity. In that case – such as in the final scenario – they actually increased negative interpretation among men.

And regardless of gender, participants who were already reporting higher levels of stress were more likely to interpret any ambiguous email message negatively.

Such findings highlight the complex nature of workplace communication, and the role which clear and effective communication can play in our wellbeing at work.

Sarah Cunningham, Managing Director of the World Wellbeing Movement and lead author of the new paper, said: “Many of us can relate to that moment of opening an email from a manager or colleague, and feeling our stomach drop. Email is efficient, but it also strips away non-verbal cues that help us interpret the sender’s intent. Our study shows that when a message is ambiguous, people are far more likely to jump to negative conclusions.

“A short voice note won’t solve every communication problem, nor should it replace email entirely, but when it reduces ambiguity in short, conversational-style messages like those we tested in this study, it can prevent needless misunderstandings, especially in hybrid and geographically-dispersed teams.

“Further research is needed to understand which other communication modes or interventions might reduce ambiguity even more effectively in asynchronous work, but our findings suggest that reducing ambiguity itself should be a central focus for any people leader seeking to strengthen communication.”

Dr William Fleming, a Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford and second author of the new paper, said: “Voice notes are increasingly common in our digital lives, so these findings demonstrate their value for workplaces too. Reducing ambiguity in workplace communications is something we should all strive for.

“The variation we find in the different voice notes highlights that we have to think about who is receiving messages, as well as the task at hand.

“For example, we find that men aren’t as receptive to voice notes when the messages do not bring clarity, which could tell us something about men’s comfort with different technologies, or about men-to-men relationships. There’s still more to learn.”

‘Could This Have Been a Voice Note? An Experiment Comparing Voice Notes and Emails’ is published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports.