In 2018, when I entered this debate as a co- author of The Coddling of the American Mind, it was true that the great majority of published studies on "digital media" and mental health were correlational, and every social scientist knows that correlational studies often suggest to our intuitive minds a causal pathway that vanishes when experiments using random assignment are published. (Think of the changing guidance on the health effects of fat, carbs, and red wine). But even in 2018 there were a few experimental studies on social media and mental health. For example, college students who were asked to reduce their social media use for three weeks generally experienced mental health benefits compared to the control group. Zach Rausch, Jean Twenge, and I began to collect all the studies we could find in 2019, and we organized them by type: correlational, longitudinal, and experimental. We put all of our work online in Google Docs that are open to other researchers for comment and critique. You can find all of our
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