Paper published in Psychological Review – 'Digital Technologies and Evolutionary Mismatch: Harming, but Also Healing Mental Health'

Tanay Katiyar is first author and I am co-first author on this recently published paper (credit to Tanay for doing the bulk of the writing though; this is a project that I have been working with him on since he visited our lab in Zurich).

Here is a tweet thread on it. I'll replicate the text and images here.

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Australia just banned social media for under-16s. Will that help?

Out in Psychological Review, our evolutionary analysis suggests why the ban will backfire.

Despite some harms, these technologies can help address problems caused by industrialisation!

The concept of evolutionary mismatch is central.

We didn’t evolve for modern environments, which can thus cause novel disease or disorder.

However, our world was weird and mismatched before smartphones came along! Apps can fix mismatches of e.g. loneliness, but cause new ones.

Despite the hype, evidence linking mental health outcomes to social media and tech use is murky and mixed. We think an evolutionary mismatch approach helps explain why: some people and problems are helped; some additional problems are created.

Our world is novel in many, many ways; smartphones and the internet are just one new form of that, but nuclear family, industrialised environments were already radically different from hunter-gatherer lifestyles.

The paper dives into two key case studies of different digital technologies: both mitigate existing evolutionary mismatches but bring their own problems.

Instant messaging and gaming.

Example 1 on instant messaging considers how close community has evaporated in industrialised society. Those lost close connections and constant possibility for casual communication have been refilled with WhatsApp etc. New problems arise – monitoring complex social information is harder behind a screen, and so detecting inclusion is difficult, potentially causing status anxiety or falsely implying exclusion.

The image of the teenager sitting on their phone at a dinner table, or alone in a bedroom, has a dystopian feel, but in many respects they are reliving a much more natural, continuous communication with their peers!

Example 2 is around free play and video games. Increasing free play is something

@JonHaidt historically called for along with reducing phone use. But banning social media seems like the only message now. Allowing kids more play time is pretty much forgotten!

We point out in the paper that industrialised life has robbed kids and adolescents of adult-free spaces to hang out and play. Video games and other digital technologies bring them back!

There are novel costs, of course: different forms of bullying emerge, and some elements of video games are addictive and carry an opportunity cost for healthier time-use. But blanket bans would rob the benefits as well as the costs.

Overall, we suggest that an evolutionary mismatch framework that recognises new technologies can both heal and harm is a useful way to conceive of their effects. Panicking about new problems is common, but we must recognise the old problems such technologies are fixing!

Advantages to this lens: an evolution-informed perspective can help correct knee-jerk assumptions about what is ‘natural’. 12-year olds continuously texting each other are actually communicating in a more natural way than 12 years olds stuck in a bedroom alone!

It also helps predict who will be helped and who will be harmed by novel technologies – some people are having mismatches fixed, others are suffering novel mismatches.

We also think an evolutionary perspective on human psychology could help design healthier apps – if they refill our lives with elements which are missing from modernity, we could all benefit!

We give an example of dating apps as a use-case where the current structure is clearly suboptimal, for all sorts of reasons.

Dating apps are a dynamic space – I saw that the founder of Hinge is starting a new dating app, recognising the stagnation and desire for new solutions (but I don’t think ‘add AI’ will be sufficient…)

To conclude, moral panics about new technologies are as old as time. An evolutionary lens could help correct them. We shouldn’t miss out on the possible benefits!

Huge congratulations to @adigitaltanay who led the paper. And to our supervisors, Adrian Jaeggi, Nikhil Chaudhary and Amy Orben.