30% of social media use is due to lack of self-control

One of the eternal questions to me is how much of our life is spent with useless and unproductive things. This is not to say that we should always be productive. There is a time for fun and my Friday posts are one such exercise in writing about economics and finance without it necessarily being useful. But what bugs me is if companies exploit their customers through unfair means. For example, I have written in the past that there are some experiments that show that Facebook and other social media sites are addictive like tobacco.

This obviously begs the question of how addictive they are and how much time is lost to us users succumbing to our social media addiction. In my previous post, the researchers tried to get to the bottom of it by asking people how much they would be willing to pay to get access to social media for a week or a month. Now, a group of researchers from Stanford University and Microsoft have done another set of experiments. They asked people if they think they are using social media and other apps too often and too much. And indeed, most people are aware that they use these apps too much. Asked about how much time they would spend doing other things if these apps weren’t readily available on their phones and computers, people expected that they would spend about 20% less time on Facebook, about 10% less time gaming, and about 5% less time with YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, etc.

Then these people were restricted in their social media use for several weeks either by having a limiter installed on their phones that limits the amount of time they can spend or by being offered a bonus if they reduced their social media use below a certain number of hours per week. Note that even in the limiter case, users could decide themselves, what limit they wanted to set themselves and they could change that time limit daily, so it is not an enforced limit.

What happened afterward shed some light on how addictive social media apps are. First, people reduced their social media use substantially more than they expected when they were offered a limiter or a bonus. But once that restriction was removed again, they again underestimated how much they would reduce their social media use if they could. In other words, people are aware that they are using social media too much and they substantially reduce their usage if they are incentivised to do so. But they systematically underestimate the amount of excess use they have on social media. If that sounds like an alcoholic who is aware that he drinks too much but only by a little, or a smoker who is aware that smoking is bad he only smokes a few cigarettes a day, then this is no coincidence. It is classic addictive behaviour that is observed with social media.

And the experiments provide a hint at how much social media is due to addictive overuse. In the case of Facebook, about 20 minutes per day, or roughly 30% of daily use. Imagine what you could achieve in your life if you could reduce your time on social media by 30% each day. You wouldn’t miss out on any of the fun, and become more productive at the same time.

Reduction in social media use under self-imposed restrictions

Source: Allcott et al. (2021).