{"id":359333,"date":"2026-03-26T15:21:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T15:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/359333\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T15:21:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T15:21:09","slug":"against-the-smartphone-theory-of-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/359333\/","title":{"rendered":"Against the Smartphone Theory of Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>(Illustration by Isabella Pereira\/TheArgument, photos by Sefa Karacan\/Anadolu Agency via Getty Image and Neville Elder\/Corbis via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

In 2018, Stanford economist Matthew Gentzkow and his colleagues paid about 1,700 Americans to deactivate Facebook for four weeks before the midterm elections. Those who logged off were happier, less anxious, and less politically polarized.<\/p>\n

Findings like these have trickled through academia into mainstream media and the public discourse, where parents, teachers, depressed youths, and politicians are well-primed to see smartphones and social media as The ProblemTM.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s what nobody talks about: The people who deactivated also knew less in general. They came back measurably more ignorant about what was happening in their own country. And in a second, larger study of more than 35,000 Facebook and Instagram users, the same thing happened.<\/p>\n

The strongest, most reliable finding from years of randomized social media research is not that Facebook makes you crazy; it\u2019s that, for better or worse, Facebook is how you find out what\u2019s going on in the world.<\/p>\n

This finding is a Rosetta Stone for the smartphone debate, because it reveals something both sides keep getting wrong: The smartphone is not a cigarette. It isn\u2019t a toxin that we can isolate and test and ban. It is an information-delivery system \u2014 a relentless, inescapable IV drip of news, connection, outrage, friendship, conspiracy, solidarity, and garbage \u2014 whose effect on any individual depends entirely on what\u2019s in the drip.<\/p>\n

Today, billions of people look at their phones and see the whole world. But some theorists look at the whole world and see only phones.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

The debate has calcified into two camps: The Jonathan Haidts of the world, who blame phones for basically every modern malady, and the skeptics who say the evidence is thin and the panic overblown.<\/p>\n

NYU Professor Arpit Gupta coined the term \u201cSmartphone Theory of Everything\u201d (STOE), which, in his telling, seems to explain every modern problem there is. The rise of youth anxiety? It\u2019s the phones. The rise of global populism? The phones, again. The surge in attention disorders in the U.S.? The global decline in literacy? The scourge of political polarization? Phones, phones, and more phones.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I have been reporting on this space for several years and my conclusion is that the \u201cSmartphone Theory of Everything\u201d is wrong about \u201cEverything\u201d \u2026 but it isn\u2019t wrong about everything.<\/p>\n

Throughout my reporting, I\u2019ve relied on several experts across psychology, economics, and political science. Rather than base my analysis on individual correlational studies, I leaned on randomized trials, meta-analyses that evaluated hundreds of studies, and a \u201cconsensus\u201d survey<\/a> that asked over 100 academics what they thought about claims about smartphone and social media use on personal and mental health.<\/p>\n

My argument, in short, is this: The smartphone is not a poison, it\u2019s a displacement machine.<\/p>\n

When you stare into your phone, you are displacing some other activity \u2014 sleeping, socializing, playing outside, paying attention in class, watching TV\u2026<\/p>\n

In the countries where the effects are worst \u2014 the English-speaking West, especially among vulnerable teenagers \u2014 something about the combination of what phones deliver and what they displace is producing uniquely bad outcomes.<\/p>\n

I have hypotheses about why, but I want to be honest: This is the part of the argument where the evidence thins out. (My guess is that the information flowing through the IV drip is the most anxious and polarizing and the displaced activities are the most beneficial for these populations.)<\/p>\n

The phone is a device that interacts with a society\u2019s preexisting pathologies. In the English-speaking West, they are revealing, not creating, a deeper rot.<\/p>\n

The strongest proponents of the STOE often ignore the stubborn fact that phones are practically global, but their worst effects are strangely concentrated in the richest English-speaking countries. But the fiercest critics of the STOE often ignore the findings of randomized trials and real-world experiments, such as phone bans in schools, which have mostly shown that taking phones away from people makes them a little happier and better at focusing.<\/p>\n

One of the most interesting wrinkles in the Smartphone Theory of Everything is that while phones are everywhere, the problems that they cause are often rising fastest and first in the richest countries \u2014 especially in the U.S.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, the theory that smartphones make people sad. According to the latest World Happiness Report<\/a>, happiness among young people has plummeted most severely in Western developed countries that speak English, such as the United States, U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, \u201chappiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and Eastern Europe,\u201d the 2024 report<\/a> said. In East Asia, happiness is increasing \u201cat every age.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same is true for suicide. Emergency room visits for suicide attempts among young women soared across the Anglosphere<\/a> in the last few years. But, as I\u2019ve reported<\/a>, the suicide rate among people ages 15 to 19 fell in most European countries in the last decade.<\/p>\n

Or take attention deficit disorders. The surge in ADHD cases seems to be another U.S.-heavy phenomenon, with U.S. diagnoses<\/a> vastly surpassing that of European and OECD countries<\/a>. To understand rising anxiety and attention disorders in the U.S., we have to recognize the phenomenon of diagnostic inflation<\/a> \u2014 i.e., medical providers expanding the definition of anxiety and ADHD to treat more cases.<\/p>\n

In politics, the U.S. also seems to be an outlier in some maladies that are associated with smartphones. A 2020 paper on polarization in the West found that \u201caffective polarization\u201d \u2014 the ire that people feel for the party they oppose \u2014 rose fastest and first in the U.S.<\/a>, with most of the increase predating the smartphone age. The researchers wrote that polarization took off in the 1990s, right around the introduction of Fox News, which was nearly 20 years before the smartphone revolution took off.<\/p>\n

As for smartphones creating populism and distrust, this also appears to be a disproportionately Western phenomenon. A 2022 <\/a>Nature Human Behaviour<\/a> review of 496 articles<\/a> found that digital media is most strongly associated with declining political trust and growing populism in developed democracies, such as the United States. In autocracies and developing democracies, by contrast, the largest effect of digital media on politics seems to be that it increases political participation.<\/p>\n

What do we make of all this? If you\u2019re anti-smartphone, this pattern is a real problem for your theory; you can\u2019t explain a localized epidemic with a global cause. But the smartphone defenders aren\u2019t off the hook because the epidemic is real, and phones are clearly implicated in the mechanism. I think the answer is that smartphones are interacting with other phenomena that are distinctly Western or American and creating berserk local effects.<\/p>\n

My favorite Jonathan Haidt argument is that phones replace play-based adolescence with phone-based adolescence. That is, the most important thing about phones isn\u2019t what\u2019s on the screen, but rather everything that\u2019s off the screen when you\u2019re lost gazing into your pocket device. I\u2019d broaden the point beyond adolescence: for people of every age, the smartphone\u2019s deepest effect may not be what it delivers but what it displaces.<\/p>\n

In 2025, researchers found<\/a> that randomly removing internet access from smartphones produced a range of benefits, including improved mental health, subjective well-being, and the ability to sustain attention. More than 90% of the nearly 500 participants experienced at least one benefit. As best as the researchers could tell, the most significant reason for improved mental health and subjective well-being came from participants spending more time \u201csocializing in person, exercising, and being in nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another randomized trial<\/a> that paid people to deactivate Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections also found that people spent more time with friends and family. From that paper:<\/p>\n

The 60 minutes freed up by not using Facebook \u2026 were allocated to both solitary and social activities offline. Solitary television watching increases by 0.17 points on our scale; other solitary offline activities increase by 0.23 points, and time devoted to spending time with friends and family increases by 0.14 points.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very hard for researchers to control what participants are doing with their phones. But it\u2019s not hard for researchers to see what people are doing when they\u2019re not on their phones. They sleep more! They socialize more! They go outside more! (And, yes, they watch TV more.)<\/p>\n

And yet, they also learn less about the world. There is a widespread fear that phones and social media are a source of misinformation<\/a> and conspiracy theories<\/a>. But the most careful randomized studies have found something close to the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we pay people to stay off of social media, the strongest finding is that they get less information,\u201d said Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

Across the two studies that randomized people to deactivate Facebook<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>, Gentzkow and his colleagues found that going off social media had minuscule effects on political polarization, but it also left people measurably less informed about current events. The first study paid nearly 1,700 Americans to deactivate Facebook for four weeks before the 2018 midterm elections. People who deactivated were happier, less anxious, and less politically polarized. But they also knew less about the news.<\/p>\n

In the second study, more than 35,000 Facebook and Instagram users were paid to go dark for six weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Deactivation had little to no effect on polarization, views about election legitimacy, candidate favorability, or voter turnout. And again, people who left came back knowing less about what was happening in the world.<\/p>\n

The story we tell ourselves is that smartphones and social media pump nonsense into the national bloodstream and that logging off would produce a better-informed citizenry. But these studies suggest that while smartphones and social media do spread some misinformation, they also function as a primary news delivery system.<\/p>\n

If smartphones are making us depressed, conspiratorial, and anxious, it might be because the news is structurally becoming more depressed, conspiratorial, and anxious. But the STOE focuses our attention, policymaking efforts, and ire only at the accelerant and not the source of the flames.<\/p>\n

In 2023, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, and London Business School used AI to trace<\/a> positive vs. negative words across around 1 billion newspaper articles from the 1850s to the 2020s. For more than a century, news positivity hovered around a stable average. But after the 1960s, negativity surged.<\/p>\n

\u201cNews coverage has just gotten more and more negative every decade in the last 50 years, especially when you adjust for economic recessions,\u201d Wharton economist J. H. van Binsbergen, a coauthor on the paper, told me<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As I wrote in an essay for <\/a>The Atlantic<\/a>, I suspect that as the media industry got more competitive in the past few decades, publishers desperate to command reader attention doubled down on the old clich\u00e9s that \u201cif it bleeds, it leads\u201d and \u201cbad is stronger than good<\/a>.\u201d In this light, smartphones didn\u2019t independently make the news more depressing; they made it easier to read depressing news.<\/p>\n

People like to compare smartphones and cigarettes<\/a>. That\u2019s wrong. Honestly \u2014 and I say this for research purposes, exclusively \u2014 I wish smartphones were cigarettes.<\/p>\n

If the phone experience were a mass-manufactured bundle of chemicals that we could test in isolation against a control group, this whole essay could be one sentence long: We did some tests on phones, and they\u2019re giving people cancer.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately \u2014 again, for research purposes, only \u2014 smartphones are not tobacco. Everybody\u2019s online experience is unique, which means that everybody is effectively smoking a slightly different cigarette. No surprise, then, that observational analyses struggle to prove causality, and randomized experiments to prove causality are typically brief and limited.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t assign child participants to heavy social media use for a full year, and you certainly can\u2019t randomly assign kids to use their smartphones in a specific way for a long time. (\u201cHi Madison, we need you to spend your entire junior year marinating in angry left-wing Reddit posts to measure the impact of online Marxism on the teenage mind\u201d is not a plausible design study.)<\/p>\n

If you force participants to deactivate Facebook in a study, they might just download Twitter; in fact, that\u2019s exactly what happened in a 2020 study<\/a>. If you force them to give up their phones entirely, they\u2019ll still need to maintain desktop web access; in fact, that\u2019s exactly what happened in a 2025 study<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A better metaphor is \u201calcohol\u201d<\/a>: fun for many, dangerous for some. Similarly, smartphones might have small effects on the majority population and large effects on a minority population. In 2020, Instagram\u2019s own analysis concluded that its product \u201cmade body image issues worse<\/a>\u201c for one-third of teenage girls who already experienced body image issues. That\u2019s a lot! But it also implies that for the majority of teenage girls, Instagram had a small or negligible effect. And, of course, most people are not teenage girls.<\/p>\n

Cellphone Cassandras<\/a> can exaggerate the conclusions of careful research, which often show small overall effects. But critics of the STOE often ignore practical conclusions by fixating exclusively on small overall effect sizes, despite the evidence of significant long-tail effects. (Then again, Cassandra was famously cursed to utter true prophecies that would never be believed.)<\/p>\n

To summarize everything I\u2019ve just said in one sentence: The smartphone is a displacement machine and an information-delivery system, whose harms are filtered through the structural weaknesses of any given culture.<\/p>\n

But what about the specific claims? Are phones really terrible for sleep? How strong is the evidence that they cause anxiety outside of specific populations? Are they turning us into conspiracy theorists?<\/p>\n

In Part 2 of this essay, I\u2019ll do my best to place 10 popular claims into three buckets: Strong evidence, mixed evidence, and weak evidence. I\u2019ll go through each of the most common claims and give my sense of what research actually shows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Illustration by Isabella Pereira\/TheArgument, photos by Sefa Karacan\/Anadolu Agency via Getty Image and Neville Elder\/Corbis via Getty Images)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359334,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[85,46,321,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-359333","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-mobile","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}