OPINION

Perspectives on Science & Policy

DON'T FREAK OUT ABOUT QUARANTINE SCREEN TIME 

AK Przybylski & P Etchells

April 2020

The evidence directly linking children’s screen time to cognitive and social harm seems, in reality, to be paper thin.

THREE PROBLEMS WITH THE DEBATE AROUND SCREEN TIME

A Orben P Etchells & AK Przybylski

August 2018

The cycle of moral panic around screen time and technology use feels endless. Here are three issues we need to address before we can move the debate on

BEYOND CHERRY-PICKING

A Orben & AK Przybylski

January 2019

Behavioural scientists have long assumed data analysis to be automatically objective: that they could open a dataset, ‘have a look at the data’ and report the results they find. Our paper shows that doing this, especially when using powerful large-scale datasets, will produce many significant results that demarcate non-existent effects (‘false positives’), misleading the scientific literature and social policy in the process.

WE WON'T KNOW IF SCREEN TIME IS A HAZARD UNTIL FACEBOOK COMES CLEAN

AK Przybylski & P Etchells

January 2019

Facebook's research app shows big tech can't be trusted to conduct research on its users. To get real answers about how tech impacts us, social media firms need to give their data to external scientists

WE’RE TOLD THAT TOO MUCH SCREEN TIME HURTS OUR KIDS. WHERE’S THE EVIDENCE?

AK Przybylski & A Orben

July 2019

The authors of a landmark study argue that social media use has only minor effects on wellbeing. But an entire industry says otherwise