The belief that internet-enabled platforms, services, and technologies have caused broad psychological harms in the past 2 decades is widespread among policymakers, practitioners, and the general public. Yet because research on this topic has been conducted with limited—typically Western—samples, the extent to which this is true has been difficult to determine.
In a recent studyopens in new window, Matti Vuorre and Andrew K. Przybylski sought to answer a basic question: Do those who have access to or use the internet report lower psychological well-being than do those who do not have access to or use the internet? Their analysis, through thousands of different statistical specifications, of data from the Gallup World Poll data set—data that were collected between 2006 and 2021 from over 2 million individuals in 168 countries—showed that across a range of eight different outcomes, such as life satisfaction and reports of negative experiences, internet users reported consistently higher levels of well-being. Surprisingly, the answer was the same across outcomes, internet use predictors, different subsets of the data, and plausible covariates in 85% of the over 30,000 statistical analyses.
Do these findings then mean that internet access or use leads to greater psychological well-being and that individuals’ worries about online harms are misplaced? Not exactly. First, a small portion of the analyses indicated that young women who use the internet report lower satisfaction with their community when compared with the reported community satisfaction of young women who do not use the internet. And second, although the results argue against population-level harms, more detailed analyses regarding specific platforms, technologies, and demographic groups will yield more nuanced answers.
This second observation points at a fundamental challenge in this field of inquiry: Many of the behaviors of concern to individuals or of interest to researchers leave only traces in the proprietary databases of large technology companies, whose interests do not directly align with those of communities or researchers. Researchers are then unable to access the data urgently needed to conduct the kinds of analyses that would be most informative regarding the issues they care about.