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In the chilling Netflix expose of the evils of social media, renowned NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses how rates of mental health problems among adolescents and pre-teens have skyrocketed along a trajectory that fully have paralleled increases in social-media use across the past decade.
In fact, rates of teen suicides, according to this report published by Comparitech, also bear an eerie resemblance to the rates of social-media usage.
According to this report, between 2011 and 2018, rates of cyberbullying among teens have increased markedly in nearly every nation across the globe. For instance, in the US, rates of teens reporting having been victims of cyberbullying connected with social media increased from 15% in 2011 to 26% in 2018. These comparable rates for some other nations, just to put a global face to the problem, are as follows:
- Turkey: 2011, 5%; 2018, 20%
- Mexico: 2011, 8%; 2018, 18%
- UK: 2011, 11%; 2018, 18%
- China: 2011, 11%; 2018, 17%
Documentary: The Social Dilemma
In the highly discussed and provocative documentary, The Social Dilemma, director Jeff Orlowski worked to create an honest and chilling portrait of the adverse effects that the social media industry is having on the minds, hearts, and behaviors of billions of people across the world. Right this second.
Based on genuine and informed reports of several Silicon Valley insiders (e.g., Tristan Harris, former design ethicist for Google; Jeff Seibert, former executive at Twitter; Bailey Richardson, member of the early team that developed Instagram; Sandy Parakilas, former operations manager for Facebook—and several other experts and insiders with unique and important information on these issues), the film shows that a broad array of psychological and social problems have recently emerged as a result of the increase in the social media presence in our world.
These experts talk about such adverse phenomena as:
- Addiction to devices;
- Anxiety associated with social media;
- Unprecedented political polarization;
- Adverse effects on self-esteem;
- Reduced attention to school and work;
- and more.
Near the start of the film, several of the experts are asked by the documentary makers to describe the basic, fundamental problem at hand. Various answers were given. People talked about the fact that social media is highly addicting. Or that it hijacks the reward pathways of the brain. Or that it ultimately hijacks human actions to the fiscal benefit of the corporations that provide these products.
Based on my work as a behavioral scientist with an interest in advancing the positive features of the human experience in a world that is sometimes rather bleak (see Geher & Wedberg, 2020), I don't disagree with any of these concerns; I think they are all valid.
This said, to my mind, the film didn't quite get to the core of the issue that underlies the entirety of the social media problem. As an evolutionist who studies carefully the human condition, to me, the ultimate problem at hand is this: evolutionary mismatch.
Evolutionary Mismatch and the Social Media Problem
To truly understand why large-scale social media use is so problematic, we need to understand the human experience from a broader perspective. We need to step back.
The human mind evolved under conditions that are, in many ways, quite different from the conditions that so many of us find ourselves in today. During the lion's share of evolutionary history, human communication was exclusively of the face-to-face variety. Remote forms of human communication did not come on the scene until well after agriculture emerged about 10,000 years ago. In terms of organic evolutionary processes, 10,000 years is a blink of an eye. We, you and I, right now, have minds that evolved for ancestral, face-to-face communication.
Our minds did not evolve for large-scale remote communication. In fact, when people communicate with others who have their identities partly or fully concealed, as is so often the case with remote communication, a very general pattern emerges: People behave badly. In short, a landslide of social psychological research over the years has found that when people have their identities downplayed, they are, across a broad range of contexts, more likely to engage in anti-social (i.e., bad, mean, nasty) behavior toward others (see Zimbardo, 2007).
Evolutionary mismatch exists when something about the current environment of an organism is mismatched from the ancestral conditions that surrounded the organism's evolutionary history in important ways (see Geher & Wedberg, 2020; Geher, 2020).
When we think about The Social Media Problem, we see evolutionary mismatch in spades. Here is a short list of ways in which communication via modern social media mismatches ancestral nomadic human contexts:
- People often communicate with others without being face-to-face.
- People can often hide their identities when communicating with others.
- Social media is constantly available; the ability to seek validation or interaction from other people is available 24/7.
- People can now communicate with others across any and all geographical boundaries.
- People interact with strangers in higher proportions than would have ever been possible under ancestral conditions.
- People have the capacity for cruel and hurtful behavior in communicating with others that is simply unprecedented.
From an evolutionary perspective, it is evolutionary mismatch that sits at the core of The Social Media Problem. From this perspective, understanding evolutionary principles as they apply to the human condition is essential to understanding what sits at the base of the Social Media Problem which, as is explicated in The Social Dilemma, is truly eating away at humanity at breakneck speed. It is eating away at humanity as I type each word here, in fact. The effects that social media is having on our worlds are nothing short of fantastical.
Bottom Line
Tristan Harris and the other former Silicon Valley insiders who were bold enough to push back against the large-scale social media movement in The Social Dilemma should be applauded for their efforts. Not only have these brave souls publicly spoken out against the work of major corporations, but several of them have banded together to form The Center for Humane Technology, a large-scale initiative to advance the understanding of the human/technology interface with the goal of attenuating many of the adverse effects of social media on the modern human experience.
From where I stand, while I see efforts such as the launching of The Center for Humane Technology are admirable, it strikes me that they will only be able to reach their full potential when a full-scale evolutionary lens, rooted in the concept of evolutionary mismatch, is applied to the problem at hand.
At a proximate, micro-scale, there are many specific human issues, such as cell-phone addiction, that connect with The Social Media Problem. At an ultimate, macro-scale, there is a single issue that underlies the entirety of The Social Media Problem. And that single issue is this: evolutionary mismatch. Understanding evolutionary mismatch, and concepts applied to evolution and the human experience in general, will, without a doubt, emerge as foundational to addressing The Social Media Problem.
Note: Thanks to my good friend John Tobin for encouraging me to watch The Social Dilemma which inspired this post.
References
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil". The Journal of The American Medical Association. 298 (11): 1338–1340.
