The internet may be distracting but it’s not necessarily depressing, a new study suggests.
Published Monday in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, the study crunches data from two massive surveys of well-being and mental health and finds little evidence for the thesis that being online leads to feeling miserable.
“We show that the past 2 decades have seen only small and inconsistent changes in global well-being and mental health that are not suggestive of the idea that the adoption of internet and mobile broadband is consistently linked to negative psychological outcomes,” write Matti Vuorre, a psychological researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Andrew K. Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford in the UK.
The two reached this nuanced conclusion after extensively comparing country-by-country internet-adoption stats from the International Telecommunications Union (showing the online share of the world’s population rose from 17% in 2005 to 59% in 2020) with mental well-being results from the Gallup World Poll (a survey of people aged 15 and up in 168 countries, covering from 2005 to 2022) and mental-health data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2019 (covering 204 countries from 2000 through 2019).
The Gallup poll asked respondents to assess their happiness or sadness by answering such questions as “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?” and ranking their overall life satisfaction on a 0-to-10 scale. It found that "internet-technology adoption did not predict life satisfaction or negative or positive experiences to a meaningfully large degree.”
That conclusion survived scrutiny of the Gallup data for age and gender demographics, contrary to warnings from the likes of US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that online use can be harmful to teenagers.
Vuorre and Przybylski then conducted similar analysis of the “GBD” estimates, which draw on World Health Organization member-state-level data, and once again didn’t find “evidence supporting the view that the internet and technologies enabled by it, such as smartphones with internet access, are actively promoting or harming either well-being or mental health globally.”
They do, however, report “very small” associations with increased depression or self-harm among younger users, including the 10- to 14-year-old range uncovered by the Gallup surveys. But they warn against reading too much from what they described as a faint signal based on data they find less certain than Gallup’s results.
Their paper follows years of concern over what excess online time can do to adults and especially children—anxiety that Apple and Google have tried to address with such measures as iOS’s Screen Time and Android’s Digital Wellbeing.
But surveys that have quizzed kids directly about their online usage and mental state have found them generally content, or at least feeling in control of their experience. The Surgeon General’s own social-media advisory noted that social platforms can help kids “by providing positive community and connection with others who share identities, abilities, and interests.”
Vuorre and Przybylski conclude by calling on online platforms to grant researchers more access to internal data about usage and engagement instead of providing only limited glimpses, banning some researchers, or locking useful APIs behind a pricey paywall.
“These data exist and are continuously analyzed by global technology firms for marketing and product improvement but unfortunately are not accessible for independent research,” they write. “It remains a fundamental challenge to this field of inquiry to ensure that this information is accessible to independent scholars.”