An addicting addiction

Following on from recent tirades about risk perception and innate versus social behaviour, here's an interesting article about how perceived norms enforce behaviour beyond evaluating risk. In fact I'd call this one anti-clickbait, since the article is more interesting than the title.

As far as the title subject itself goes, for me I see nothing intrinsically problematic with people discussing their opinions. Experiencing and discussing other points of view is generally a good thing if you're sincere about it; a philosophy overdose isn't a real thing. As for what people actually do there though, that's another story... I may or may not go on an explosive rant about the current state of Tory party politics to make my point, but I haven't yet decided if this is more likely to just make me even more angry rather than providing an outlet.

Whereas addiction is something people experience mostly as individuals, social norms are shared mental states shaped by the views and beliefs of other members of the society and by our subjective perceptions of those beliefs. And I believe that with appropriate interventions, social norms can be swiftly and completely overturned.

Norms are enforced through the approval or disapproval of a societal majority. The enforcement comes in many different guises — from verbal feedback, to barely noticeable glances and body language, to the guilt and shame that individuals feel when they fail to comply to the norm. Our behavior stems not just from our own choices and values but also from our beliefs about what others think is morally appropriate.

Strikingly, social norms often remain intact even when most people privately oppose them... more than 80 percent of Saudi men surveyed were privately in favor of female labor force participation and that the men dramatically underestimate their peers’ support for female employment. Because of those false beliefs and the fear of social penalties, the men are reluctant to reveal their true preferences. This strengthens the existing norm, which even further incentivizes the men to keep their preferences hidden.

When researchers intervened and corrected men’s beliefs about the expectations of their peers, the number of husbands encouraging their wives to sign up for a job-matching mobile application grew by nearly 60 percent among those who had underestimated the general level of support, and the number of women who actually applied for jobs outside the home grew by 10 percentage points.

I've said previously that our expectations can sometimes make societal change much harder to implement by thinking the battle can't be won and therefore isn't fought at all. It would be very interesting indeed to see if there are general conditions under which knowledge of everyone else's opinion makes change easier, and to what extent, and when this is plays a less important role.

Framing the issue solely as social media addiction, besides being unhelpful, might in fact hinder social change. Measures that give teens and parents more control over the time they spend on social media — including Apple’s Screen Time and Android’s Digital Wellbeing — work well to increase awareness of our behavior, but they do nothing to change expectations about the private beliefs and hidden preferences of other people. Because of this, strategies that target individual behavior will be largely ineffective when it comes to changing the social norm.

So in that sense spending a lot of time on social media is like being famous for being famous, an unavoidable necessity - or maybe even like saying we're addicted to living in houses. We are social creatures and if everyone's hanging out socially in some venue or other, then that's where we go. Social media is innately fun. It's fun to learn new things and hear other opinions. The question is how, given its unique attributes as a form of communication, we do this without blowing our heads off in the process.

No, You're Not Addicted to Social Media

One afternoon last April, at a coffee shop deep in suburban Philadelphia, I overheard a curious conversation between what looked to be a teenager and her grandfather. They were discussing the impacts of social media, and the girl bemoaned how depressed it made her feel.