Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Orben and Przybylski found that there were a few analyses showing fairly substantial negative effects of screen time, some that showed no effect at all, and some that showed that screen time was actually beneficial. They took the average. It was negative, but very weak indeed, with screen time accounting for approximately 0.4 per cent of the variation in wellbeing. To put that into perspective, it’s around the same-sized correlation one finds between wellbeing and regularly eating potatoes, and smaller than the link between wellbeing and wearing glasses. So much for all the scare stories – the multiverse analysis implied that we’ll have to look beyond the easy scapegoat of screen time if we want to explain adolescent mental health problems.40 The wider relevance is obvious: instead of running just one single analysis, which might suit your individual bias, we instead should take a much broader view of statistics, looking at all the counterfactuals, and asking ourselves what might have happened if we’d decided to run things slightly differently.