andrew przybylski – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Oxford Study: Those Dastardly Video Games Are Good For Improving Your Mood

from the you-don't-say dept

As someone who has evangelized for the video game industry and how games, long villainized by parents, politicians, and police, are actually either a neutral or positive force for the public and culture, I never shy away from sharing studies that demonstrate this. While a great deal of time has been spent on discussions of the impact of violent video games, it would be untrue to claim that the gaming industry in general hasn’t been targeted for all kinds of negative claims. It turns people into lazy game-junkies. It keeps people from experiences in real life. Hell, it’s a threat to the global population, with men (only men!) too busy playing video games to procreate and keep the human race going.

Meanwhile, all kinds of studies have come out about the positive impact of playing some video games. The University of Oxford had a study correlating gameplay with gamers self-reporting an increase in “well being.” An NIH study found gaming to be a good treatment for depression. And now we have another Oxford study, conducted with thousands of gamers playing a commercially available game played in their home setting, that correlates improvement in mood with gameplay.

The study analysed data from players in 39 countries, including the US, UK, Canada and Germany and found that PWS players’ moods rapidly increased during gameplay. Players consistently reported a higher mood after the first fifteen minutes of the play session compared to the start of each session.

Lead author Assistant Professor Matti Vuorre, Tilburg University and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute said:

‘At present short-term changes in video game players’ moods are poorly understood. Gameplay research frequently relies on artificial stimuli, with games created or modified by academic researchers, typically played in a lab environment rather than a natural context. Instead, we wanted to know how real play in natural contexts might predict player mood on short timescales.’

It’s important to note that this is studying short term mood effects, rather than mid- or long-term effects on mood. Still, the point is that there is an emotional well-being lift as a result of playing games in this study. The game played here is PowerWash Simulator, or a slightly modified version of it. Not a violent game, nor one that is rife with quick-twitch action. The only real modification to the game was the inclusion of a “researcher” character that would pop up in game to ask the player to self-report their mood level.

Now, there will be some out there that will look at this study with narrow eyes. I can already hear them comparing this to dopamine hits gained when using illicit drugs. Surely a heroin addict would report an uplift in mood after getting a fix, or some such nonsense like that. But the more proper analogy, according to this study, is not with drugs, but rather with other forms of entertainment.

The researchers found that the average player’s mood increased by approximately 0.034 units (on a 0-1 scale), from the beginning of the session to during play and the bulk of the improvement occurs for the average player after 15 minutes of gameplay. This change is comparable with changes seen in other leisure activities such as reading, shopping, or listening to music.

They also looked at differences in mood uplift between the population of similar PWS players. The Oxford team statistically modelled between-person differences in mood shifts in the population of PWS players. They found that nearly three-quarters of players (72.1%) were likely to experience an uplift in their mood during PWS play.

The study rightly cautions against trying to extrapolate these results into some kind of encompassing “video games are great!” conclusion. Rather, it’s a data point, and the the study’s authors suggest that more research should be done using more games and more people to gather more data on the short term effects on mood of playing video games.

But what the study certainly demonstrates is that the notion that video games are generally bad for people is simplistic nonsense.

Filed Under: andrew przybylski, happiness, matti vuorre, moral panic, video games
Companies: oxford university

Yet Another Study Finds That Internet Usage Is Correlated With GREATER Wellbeing, Not Less

from the that-pesky-data dept

You’ve all heard the reports about how the internet, social media, and phones are apparently destroying everyone’s well being and mental health. Hell there’s a best selling book and its author making the rounds basically everywhere, insisting that the internet and phones are literally “rewiring” kids minds to be depressed. We’ve pointed out over and over again that the research does not appear to support this finding.

And, really, if the data supported such a finding, you’d think that a new study looking at nearly 2 and a half million people across 168 countries would… maybe… find such an impact?

Instead, the research seems to suggest much more complex relationships, in which for many people, this ability to connect with others and with information are largely beneficial. For many others, it’s basically neutral. And for a small percentage of people, there does appear to be a negative relationship, which we should take seriously. However, it often appears that that negative relationship is one where those who are already dealing with mental health or other struggles, turn to the internet when they have no where else to go, and may do so in less than helpful ways.

The Oxford Internet Institute has just released another new study by Andrew Przybylski and Matti Vuorre, showing that there appears to be a general positive association between internet usage and wellbeing. You can read the full study here, given that it has been published as open access (and under a CC BY 4.0 license). We’ve also embedded it below if you just want to read it there.

As with previous studies done by Vuorre and Przbylski, this one involves looking at pretty massive datasets, rather than very narrow studies of small sample sizes.

We examined whether having (mobile) internet access or actively using the internet predicted eight well-being outcomes from 2006 to 2021 among 2,414,294 individuals across 168 countries. We first queried the extent to which well-being varied as a function of internet connectivity. Then, we examined these associations’ robustness in a multiverse of 33,792 analysis specifications. Of these, 84.9% resulted in positive and statistically significant associations between internet connectivity and well-being. These results indicate that internet access and use predict well-being positively and independently from a set of plausible alternatives.

Now, it’s important to be clear here, as we have been with studies cited for the opposite conclusion: this is a correlational study, and is not suggesting a direct causal relationship between having internet access and wellbeing. But, if (as folks on the other side claim) internet access was truly rewiring brains and making everyone depressed, it’s difficult to see how then we would see these kinds of outcomes.

People like Jonathan Haidt have argued that these kinds of studies obscure the harm done to teens (and especially teenaged girls) as his way of dismissing these sorts of studies. However, it’s nice to see the researchers here try to tease out possible explanations, to make sure such things weren’t hidden in the data:

Because of the large number of predictors, outcomes, subgroups to analyze, and potentially important covariates that might theoretically explain observed associations, we sought out a method of analysis to transparently present all the analytical choices we made and the uncertainty in the resulting analyses. Multiverse analysis (Steegen et al., 2016) was initially proposed to examine and transparently present variability in findings across heterogeneous ways of treating data before modeling them (see also Simonsohn et al., 2020). We therefore conducted a series of multiverse analyses where we repeatedly fitted a similar model to potentially different subgroups of the data using potentially different predictors, outcomes, and covariates.

That allowed them to explore questions regarding different subgroups. And while they did find one “negative association” among young women, it was not in the way you might have heard or would have thought of. There was a “negative association” between “community well-being” and internet access:

We did, however, observe a notable group of negative associations between internet use and community well-being. These negative associations were specific to young (15–24-year-old) women’s reports of community well-being. They occurred across the full spectrum of covariate specifications and were thereby not likely driven by a particular model specification. Although not an identified causal relation, this finding is concordant with previous reports of increased cyberbullying (Przybylski & Bowes, 2017) and more negative associations between social media use and depressive symptoms (Kelly et al., 2018; but see Kreski et al., 2021). Further research should investigate whether low community well-being drives engagement with the internet or vice versa.

This took me a moment to understand, but after reading the details, it’s showing that (1) if you were a 15 to 24-year old woman and (2) if you said in the survey that you really liked where you live (3) you were less likely to have accessed the internet over the past seven days. That was the only significant finding of that nature. That same cohort did not show a negative correlation for other areas of well being around fulfilment and such.

To be even more explicit: the “negative association” was only with young women who answered that they strongly agree with the statement “the city or area where you live is a perfect place for you” and then answered the question “have you used the internet in the past seven days.” There were many other questions regarding well-being that didn’t have such a negative association. This included things like rating how their life was from “best” to “worst” on a 10 point scale, and whether or not respondents “like what you do every day.”

So, what this actually appears to do is support is the idea that if you are happy with where you live (happy in your community) than you may be less focused on the internet. But, for just about every other measure of well-being it’s strongly correlated in a positive way with internet access. There are a few possible explanations for this, but at the very least it might support the theory that the studies of those who are both facing mental health problems and excessive internet usage may stem from problems outside of the internet, leading them to turn to the internet for a lack of other places to turn.

The authors are careful to note the limitations of their findings, and recognize that human beings are complex:

Nevertheless, our conclusions are qualified by a number of factors. First, we compared individuals to each other. There are likely myriad other features of the human condition that are associated with both the uptake of internet technologies and well-being in such a manner that they might cause spurious associations or mask true associations. For example, because a certain level of income is required to access the internet and income itself is associated with well-being, any simple association between internet use and well-being should account for potential differences in income levels. While we attempted to adjust for such features by including various covariates in our models, the data and theory to guide model selection were both limited.

Second, while between-person data such as we studied can inform inferences about average causal effects, longitudinal studies that track individuals and their internet use over time would be more informative in understanding the contexts of how and why an individual might be affected by internet technologies and platforms (Rohrer & Murayama, 2021).

Third, while the constructs that we studied represent the general gamut of well-being outcomes that are typically studied in connection to digital media and technology, they do not capture everything, nor are they standard and methodically validated measures otherwise found in the psychological literature. That is, the GWP data that we used represent a uniquely valuable resource in terms of its scope both over time and space. But the measurement quality of its items and scales might not be sufficient to capture the targeted constructs in the detailed manner that we would hope for. It is therefore possible that there are other features of well-being that are differently affected by internet technologies and that our estimates might be noisier than would be found using psychometrically validated instruments. Future work in this area would do well in adopting a set of common validated measures of well-being (Elson et al., 2023).

On the whole it’s great to see more research and more data here, suggesting that, yes, there is a very complex relationship between internet access and wellbeing, but it should be increasingly difficult to claim that internet access is an overall negative and harmful, no matter what the popular media and politicians tell you.

Filed Under: andrew przybylski, data, internet, matti vuorre, social media, study, well-being
Companies: oxford university

Can We Stop The Moral Panic Yet? New Study: Children’s Brains Are Not Harmed By Screen Time

from the the-research-is-becoming-overwhelming dept

Over the last few years, we’ve highlighted study after study after study showing that, contrary to the public narrative, claims by politicians, the media, and plaintiffs in many, many lawsuits, the actual evidence just does not show at all that social media/internet is doing damage to kids. In a recent post we highlighted just a few of the recent reports on this.

Now, the folks at Oxford University, who did one of those studies above, have released another study, this time looking at almost 12,000 kids in the US to determine whether “screen time” had an impact on their brain function or well-being. This is a pretty massive study, and the results are pretty damn clear:

Screen time activities included ‘traditional’ screen pursuits such as watching TV shows or movies and using digital platforms such as YouTube to watch videos, as well as interactive pursuits like playing video games. In addition, they were asked about connecting with others through apps, calls, video calls and social media.

Even with participants who had high rates of digital engagement, there was no evidence of impaired functioning in the brain development of the children.

The study appears pretty thorough:

Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States, researchers from Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, University of Oregon, Tilburg University, and University of Cambridge analysed the cognitive function of 9-12 year old children alongside their self-reported screen time use.

[….]

In the ABCD study, the participants’ neurodevelopment was assessed through monitoring functional brain connectivity, which refers to how regions of the brain work together and includes emotional and physiological activities. This was done through MRI scans. Further to this, physical and mental health assessments and information from the child’s caregiver was provided.

When analysing the screen time use alongside the ABCD data, patterns of functional brain connectivity were related to patterns of screen engagement, but there was no meaningful association between screen time use and measures of cognitive and mental well-being, even when the evidential threshold was set very low.

The researchers behind this study were pretty clear on what they feel has been learned (and I’ll note that Andrew, in particular, is always extremely careful not to overclaim what his studies say, as you can hear when we had him on the podcast recently):

Jack Miller, the first author who analysed the data as part of his thesis at the Oxford Internet Institute said: “If screen time had an impact on brain development and well-being, we expected to see a variety of cognitive and well-being outcomes that this comprehensive, representative, research did not show.”

Professor Andrew Przybylski who supervised the work added: “We know that children’s brains are more susceptible to environmental influence than adults, as digital screen time is a relatively new phenomenon, it’s important to question its impact.”

Professor Matti Vuorre from Tilburg University, a co-author observed: “One thing that makes this work stand out is our analysis plan was reviewed by experts before we saw the data; this adds rigour to our approach.” He added, “One also suggested we take a look at social media on its own because it’s a source of worry for many and we did not find anything special about this form of online engagement.”

Professor Przybylski concludes: “Our findings should help guide the heated debates about technology away from hyperbole and towards high-quality science. If researchers don’t improve their approach to studying tech, we’ll never learn what leads some young people to flounder and others to flourish in the digital age.”

All of this research is important, because clearly there does remain a mental health crisis going on, including among children. But we risk making things worse, not better when we immediately insist that it must be because of the internet, or video games, or screen time or whatever.

You can also read the full study yourself if you’d like to get at the details, since they published it as open access. And, because they put it under a creative commons attributions license, we can also post a copy here.

Filed Under: andrew przybylski, cognitive development, jack miller, kids, moral panic, screentime, social media

Massive New Study, Covering 72 Countries, Nearly 1 Million People, Finds Zero Evidence That Facebook Leads To Psychological Harm

from the the-data-says...-we're-in-a-moral-panic dept

Professor Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute is one of the best, most important researchers out there providing thorough, comprehensive, empirical evidence that every tech moral panic is not supported by the data. We’ve covered his work before, including the complete lack of evidence that social media makes kids unhappy, how there’s actually some positive correlation between people playing video games and feeling better (the opposite of what most seemed to believe), and how mandatory internet filters to stop porn don’t work.

He’s now back with a new study (with Professor Matti Vuorre), and the scale of it is astounding:

The independent Oxford study used well-being data from nearly a million people across 72 countries over 12 years and harnessed actual individual usage data from millions of Facebook users worldwide to investigate the impact of Facebook on well-being.

I don’t think we’re going to have a small sample-size issue with this study. Indeed, the global nature of the study is useful as it gets beyond what many studies do, just looking at western college students who are readily accessible to academic researchers.

You can look at the full paper, which is interesting.

Overall, a country’s per capita daily active Facebook users predicted that nation’s demography-aggregated levels of positive experiences positively, and negative experiences negatively. In addition, the associations between countries were similar, but the uncertainty cutoff of 97.5% for posterior probabilities of direction was strictly only met for positive experiences (table 1). Associations between Facebook adoption and life satisfaction were less certain within countries, but stronger when comparing countries to each other. While these descriptive results do not speak to causal effects, they align with other findings suggesting that technology use has not become increasingly associated with negative psychological outcomes over time [8], and that the increased adoption of Internet technologies in general is not, overall, associated with widespread psychological harms [24]. We also found that Facebook adoption predicted young demographics’ positive well-being more strongly than it did older demographics’, and that sex differences in this dataset were very small and not credibly different from zero. These demography-based differences, and lack therein, were notable in light of previous literature that has reported young girls to be more at-risk of screen- and technology-based effects than young males (e.g. [27]; but see [28]). However, those studies focused on younger individuals (from 10 to 15 years old), which likely partly explains the different findings.

The authors are clear not to overstate what their paper is saying. They’re not arguing that “Facebook makes you happy” or anything like that. But they are saying that the evidence does not support the common refrain that it makes people unhappy.

And, in case you’re wondering, the authors are also clear that while they did get data from Facebook, it was not funded in any way by Facebook, nor did Facebook have any idea what their report would show until it was published.

Again, I know that the narrative that you hear about all the time insists otherwise, but it’s nice to see more data that again suggests we’re living through quite a ridiculous moral panic about the new new thing, which in all likelihood we’ll look back on as a silly thing, as ridiculous as moral panics about comic books, or pinball, or rock n’ roll, or radio, or chess, or the waltz (all of which faced moral panics).

Filed Under: andrew przybylski, matti vuorre, mental health, mental well being, social media, studies
Companies: facebook

Oxford University Study Shows Small Correlation Between Playing Video Games And 'Well Being'

from the well-i'll-be dept

For the first few decades after video games became a serious medium of entertainment among the public, they were also blamed for all manner of ills. Violence in children was chief among the concerns, of course, but so too were claims that video games made kids anti-social, apathetic, and fat slobs stuck in their parents’ basements. It was only part of the way into the 2010s when the studies on the topic of video games started making a notable turn away from these dire warnings. Oxford University’s Andrew Przybylski had his hands on many of these new studies, such as the one indicating games only made people violent if they were too shitty or difficult, or his study decoupling social media from any causation of unhappiness in children.

Well, Przybylski is at it again with an interesting study that seems to indicate some correlation, though not causation, between time spent playing video games and “well being.”

The research began in 2019 with the Oxford team discussing collaborative opportunities with several major gaming companies. One of the general goals was to conduct a correlational study using objective play-time data as opposed to the traditional self-reported data used in prior research.

Using anonymized telemetry data supplied by Electronic Arts and Nintendo of America the research ultimately looked at two games: Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Players were invited to opt-in to the research, and alongside objective telemetry data they completed surveys asking about emotional well-being and motivations for gaming.

While the researchers were surprised at the findings, which seemed to indicate that there was a small correlation between time spent gaming and self-reporting of positive well-being, Przybylski rightfully cautioned consumers of the report to not come to the wrong conclusion about any of this. The idea isn’t that you should play more games for longer if you want to be happier. Instead, the focus should be why players play certain games. If that’s the focus, the idea that paring back the time playing games to address unhappiness might be exactly the wrong approach for some.

All this goes to suggest regulating video game play solely on duration of play time may not be an effective way to moderate the medium’s possible negative effects. For some people, in some contexts, longer video game play time may lead to more positive well-being outcomes.

“Our findings show video games aren’t necessarily bad for your health; there are other psychological factors which have a significant effect on a persons’ well-being,” Przybylski adds. “In fact, play can be an activity that relates positively to people’s mental health – and regulating video games could withhold those benefits from players.”

The point here is that when it comes to mental health and how video games interact with mental health, the landscape is so wildly complicated and full of nuance that blanket approaches become downright silly. And, instead of focusing on the video game as though it were the problem, the focus should be put on the person, what they play and why the play it, and what the outcome of such game playing is for that individual.

When put that way, honestly, it seems rather obvious.

Filed Under: andrew przybylski, studies, video games, well being