Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on mental health
jamanetwork.com
jamanetwork.com
Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on road death toll.
iirc a similar study on the Aussie age ban is finding similar results; basically no difference. Some kids benefit, others suffer.
Agree that a study on grades would be useful too
That's like saying not eating for a few hours makes up for eating 4000 calories at dinner.
I personally would've guessed many immediate positive effects just from a phone ban in school, TFA claims they have a measurement against that.
And ofc AI is busy messing all of this up.
school phone bans in brazil appear to increase test scores by 0.06 SD (although the identification strategy is a bit sketchy): https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35233/w352...
AFAIK declining mental health was the main driver of the bans - put forward by its proponents like Jonathan Haidt, author of "The Anxious Generation."
Why anyone would expect phone bans to improve mental health is beyond me when the majority of phone use is not happening at school.
Improve grades, improve classroom behavior, maybe. What about those?
Isn't that partly the goal with the ban? Fewer distractions.
I'm saying When we remove their phone, they do not have any sense of loss (unhappiness). If that's true then the simpler system of no phone is preferable to the complexity of having one.
If the phone was adding something (something unique/irreplaceable) then we'd expect to see some negative outcome once it's removed.
After a while, watching the same rerun or failing at the same Contra level got boring and playing outside seemed like a good change of pace. For most people, watching TV was at least somewhat communal.
Our inability to collectively get along ramped up exponentially as smartphones took off. Phones, and the platforms within that people have become dependent upon, are the root.
Edit: Instead of getting to know people at a deep level, understanding what shapes their core views and how they view the world, and constructively communicating with them to shape their worldview over time for the better, we prefer to yell and scream at each other in 140 characters for the sake of upvotes.
Real change and progress takes time and effort, but for some reason we're collectively deluded into thinking that it'll happen via upvotes in 45 seconds and without ever having looked one another in the eye.
We're absolutely fascinated by them. Gobsmacked.
And many people blindly believe what they see on their screens because they don't know any better. They trust the article they read without thinking too deeply about it or looking for alternative perspectives. They gobble up the reel they just watched and are irate about whatever it told them to be irate about. But this isn't anything new, just look at how easily grandma and grandpa gobbled up whatever Fox News fed them in 1998, or what heavily edited images designed to manipulate their thoughts and opinions they were exposed to in the 70s, the 80s when they turned the television on.
Screens have always, and will always, be used to manipulate people, and that's been incredibly amplified over the past 15-20 years.
Yet if you take the screen away and spend time connecting with people on a deeper level, really spend time getting to know them, life feels a hell of a lot different than what the screens show you. Understanding one another is a hell of a lot easier. Everyone can see exactly the same thing as the other person - the analog, meatspace world around them that isn't being manipulated and twisted in an effort to get them to think a certain way.
It's the screens.
I also raised two children. My eldest is 18 and only now has a phone. When your children are adults you may no longer feel that phones, or screens, are the root cause. But, the whole world will have changed by then, so time will tell.
> Yet if you take the screen away and spend time connecting with people on a deeper level, really spend time getting to know them, life feels a hell of a lot different than what the screens show you.
I am not disagreeing with you here. My point is that the reason society is divided is not fundamentally because of phones or screens and removing them does not magically remove our ideological differences.
Differences of opinion are okay, but it's harder to get along when our lives are lived in spaces that silo us off and encourage distrust and anger. Screens do that to us, meatspace doesn't.
But there are plenty of places in the world that don't seem quite as negatively affected to me, and even where screens are not the main culprit behind government/corporate manipulation and control.
You're never going to get people to stop using social media, but maybe it ought to be possible to regulate better.
We're literally allowing people with bad intentions have a direct contact with children. It's insane.
Not to mention that I learned that nowadays lying for some benefit on social media is completely normalized.
Lying used to be off-putting in western society, and would be a clear red line.
I keep seeing this crop up in the id verification discussions. The same psychological processes that social media companies exploit in children exist in adults and have the same result. The problem isn't manipulating children, it's that they're manipulating everyone.
Pleasure is cheap, even addictive. Fulfillment and meaningful work are extremely difficult to come by. Everything is monetized, every interaction, every experience... money makes experiences transactional, they lose their meaing.
To have a fulfilling live people needs to participate in society, have opportunities, education, basic needs covered... and that is our failure. A kid can get 24/7 entertainment while lacking food or good education.
In this case the prevailing theory is that the phones were already banned in classes, so the schoolwide ban didn't do anything to screentime. Which, duh.
I’m a strong supporter of following the science. But this is a hard thing to measure. And the effects may be fairly diffuse or accumulate over time.
In order to quantify whether something is too much, you need to quantify what an optimal or better baseline would be.
However this study in particular is pretty bad, see the comment elsewhere about the screentime not spent not going down (possibly cause of extant classroom bans)
What do you mean? Here's one published last year:
> This study does not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, given that no differences were observed in mental, physical, and academic outcomes for adolescents attending schools that permit, versus restrict phone use. However, the negative associations found between increasing time spent on phones/social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing do provide evidence on the need to address phone and social media use in adolescents, and school policies should be developed as part a more holistic approach. [...]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
If so, it's no wonder they see no difference. They didn't see a change in the presumed underlying cause.
Though this is still relevant to policy-makers who are thinking of instituting district-wide bans. It's sorta like all the heat around critical race theory: banning something that doesn't actually happen much in schools.
Two things.
1. There is no evidence. Mostly because Well being cannot be really quantified. 2. Convenience and comforts trumps well being. Basic human nature. Are we willing to teach kids abstract concepts such as wisdom and "nishkamakarma" so that they will have well being instead of conveniences and comforts? They will be less of a "knowledge worker" and more of a philosopher. They will consume vastly less, thus would hurt the current system of capitalistic indulgence.
We are not willing to do any of these. At the root, it is you that is causing your unwellbeingness...But you can't change. Deal with it. Stop the whining! Let the kids have what ever fun they want..Don't snatch the phones from their hands. Teach them stuff so that they can see it for what it is (an instrument of manipulators and exploiters), that they are repelled by it.
Yeah...I am ok.
Isn't there a baseline saying well being is declined?
> In the full sample, the estimated postpolicy association was 0.65 (95% CI, 0.01-1.30; P = .05) for depressive symptoms, 0.21 (95% CI, −0.08 to 0.50; P = .16) for anxiety, 0.23 (95% CI, −0.12 to 0.59) for hostility, and −0.52 (95% CI, −1.08 to 0.03; P = .06) for mental well-being.
> Although a small number of estimates were suggestive of worse outcomes before multiple testing correction, none remained statistically significant after prespecified correction. Results were similarly null in gender-stratified analyses.
That’s the most concise way I can put that.
Correct.
and the only discontent with that a minority of their people feel is when they look at us.
Where traditional Arrernte, Wongi, et al likely won't notice at all.
There's nothing preventing Wongi folk from buying a pair of DGX Sparks and having them shipped out to Kalgoolie and they're literally on the same ground as the Australian component of the SKA - some of the more advanced signal processing instrumentation and racked supercomputers on the planet.
I hear talk of making AI centres isolated in space, etc.
I expect if you took away adults phones for a few hours every day their would experience increased anxiety
It's certainly counter-intuitive.
All you need to know
Reminds me of a scene from the movie "Thank you for smoking" where Big Tobacco's lead scientist has managed to find no link between smoking and cancer for 30 years. It's a miracle!
This study doesn't say anything about the effects of social media on students.
It finds that phone bans in schools are not associated with measurable improvements in mental health. This is not the same as saying that social media and phone use aren't harmful, it only means that phone bans in school don't independently improve mental health outcomes.
A similar study from a couple of years ago [1] reached the same conclusion, however they had more data which exposed the hidden correlation (emphasis mine):
> Implications of all the available evidence
> This study does not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, given that no differences were observed in mental, physical, and academic outcomes for adolescents attending schools that permit, versus restrict phone use. However, the negative associations found between increasing time spent on phones/social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing do provide evidence on the need to address phone and social media use in adolescents, and school policies should be developed as part a more holistic approach. Preventative efforts should also consider how other behaviours that influence mental health and wellbeing are influenced by increased phone/media use, such as sleep, physical activity, attainment, classroom behaviour and problematic use.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
Apparently they did not control for medication or supplements, such as vitamin D treatments, artificial UV light exposure, or antidepressants.
Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access. School's probably a social, cognitive and energy highlight in the otherwise permadark day.
The only way this would matter would be if phones were banned and then also those other interventions were withheld in order to perfectly counterbalance the expected effect of the phone ban. Do you have some evidence that Iceland suddenly decided to reduce these interventions between 2018 and 2023?
This point isn’t even mentioned in the limitations section of the study, so why are you making it? There are more significant potential limitations to this study that they did describe, including the fact that “we also lacked objective measures of in-school smartphone use and therefore could not determine whether bans reduced actual phone use”. (Though that doesn’t exactly matter either, since if the bans aren’t actually stopping phone use, then they are still ineffective, just in a different way.)
> Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access.
This is a nonsensical interpretation that seems to me to betray a lack of understanding of statistics. The planet doesn’t experience any more or less sunlight in the winter between 2016 and 2023, so has no bearing on whether or not there would be a detectable effect from an intervention.
And what-about the effect on teachers and staff? Don't they matter?
I'm being a bit dismissive. This is however a very very small study.