Chapter 30: Exercises — Mental Health and Social Media: Navigating the Evidence

Reflection Exercises

Exercise 1 [Reflection] Think about your own social media use over the past week. For each platform you used, estimate approximately how much time you spent on it and characterize whether that use felt primarily active (posting, commenting, direct messaging) or passive (scrolling, browsing without engaging). Did your use feel more emotionally positive, negative, or neutral overall? What specific features or content types drove those feelings?

Exercise 2 [Reflection] Consider a time when you felt worse after using social media. What specifically happened? Was it exposure to certain content, a lack of engagement with something you posted, witnessing others' social experiences, or something else? Can you identify which theoretical mechanism (social comparison, sleep disruption, cyberbullying, displacement) best describes what you experienced?

Exercise 3 [Reflection] Amy Orben's Goldilocks hypothesis suggests that both too little and too much social media use is associated with worse outcomes compared to moderate use. Reflect on your own experience: does this curve fit your relationship with social media? What would you identify as your "optimal" level of use, and how does your actual use compare?

Exercise 4 [Reflection] Think about a relationship or community that social media has enabled for you that would have been impossible or much harder without it. How meaningful is that connection? Does it have features of genuine friendship or community, or does it feel qualitatively different from offline relationships? How does this complicate simple narratives about social media being harmful?

Exercise 5 [Reflection] The chapter describes how Maya follows fitness influencers whose content she knows is unrealistic but watches anyway. Have you had a similar experience—engaging with content you intellectually knew was harmful or unrealistic but continued to consume? What does this suggest about the limits of "media literacy" as a solution to social media harms?

Exercise 6 [Reflection] Sleep is described as one of the clearest pathways between social media use and mental health harm. Track your own sleep for one week, noting when you last used a screen before sleep and how long and well you slept. What patterns do you observe? What would have to change about your habits for you to protect sleep more effectively?

Exercise 7 [Reflection] Imagine you are a teenager in a rural area with no LGBTQ+ peers or community, and social media provides your only access to others with shared identity. Now imagine a blanket restriction on social media for under-16s is implemented. Write a reflection on the ethics of that policy from this hypothetical teenager's perspective.

Research Exercises

Exercise 8 [Research] Find and read the original Orben and Przybylski 2019 paper in Nature Human Behaviour ("The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use"). What was the actual size of the correlations they found? How did they operationalize "digital technology use"? Compare their actual claims to how the paper was covered in two news articles you can find about it. Where do the news reports diverge from the paper?

Exercise 9 [Research] Look up the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey data for the most recent available year. Find the data on persistent sadness or hopelessness among high school students, broken down by gender and race/ethnicity. What trends do you observe? How do the numbers compare to the 2009 baseline discussed in the chapter?

Exercise 10 [Research] Research the Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on social media and youth mental health (Vivek Murthy). What specific recommendations did it make? What evidence did it cite? How did social media companies respond? Write a 500-word summary that distinguishes the advisory's evidentiary claims from its policy recommendations.

Exercise 11 [Research] Find three peer-reviewed studies (published since 2020) on social media use and body image in adolescents. For each study, note: the sample size and composition, the method of measuring social media use, the method of measuring body image, the main finding, and the effect size if reported. What patterns do you find across the three studies?

Exercise 12 [Research] Research the AAP's current guidelines on screen time for adolescents. How have they changed since 2016? What specific recommendations do they make for teens aged 13-17? What evidence do they cite for their recommendations? Do the guidelines distinguish between types of screen use?

Exercise 13 [Research] Look up Patti Valkenburg's research group's most recent publications on social media and adolescent well-being. Summarize their key findings about individual differences. What characteristics, according to their research, predict whether a given adolescent is likely to be harmed versus helped by social media use?

Exercise 14 [Research] Find the Wall Street Journal's 2021 reporting on Facebook's internal research on Instagram and teenage girls. What specific findings did Facebook's own researchers document? What did the company do in response? How do these internal findings compare to the external academic research at the time?

Analysis Exercises

Exercise 15 [Analysis] The chapter presents several potential mechanisms by which social media might affect mental health: social comparison, sleep disruption, cyberbullying, and displacement of activities. For each mechanism, identify: (a) the type of evidence supporting it (correlational, experimental, longitudinal), (b) the strength of that evidence, and (c) whether it supports a causal or merely correlational interpretation. Which mechanism do you think has the strongest evidentiary support, and why?

Exercise 16 [Analysis] Take the following hypothetical finding: "A study of 500 college students found that those who used Instagram more than 3 hours per day had significantly higher depression scores (p < 0.001, r = 0.18) than those who used it less than 1 hour per day." Analyze this finding using the concepts from the chapter. What does "significantly higher" mean statistically? What does the effect size (r = 0.18) tell you? What alternative explanations exist? What would you need to know to interpret this finding more confidently?

Exercise 17 [Analysis] The chapter describes the Haidt/Orben debate as reflecting a genuine tension between two legitimate approaches to evidence and policy. Construct the strongest possible version of each argument. Then identify: Is there an empirical question that, if answered, would resolve the dispute? Or are there genuine value disagreements underlying it?

Exercise 18 [Analysis] Compare the following three groups of adolescents and analyze how the chapter's evidence applies differently to each: (a) A socially popular, high-self-esteem 16-year-old who uses Instagram primarily to stay connected with a large friend group; (b) A shy, isolated 15-year-old with low self-esteem who uses Instagram primarily to view beauty and fitness content; (c) A gay 16-year-old in a rural conservative community who uses Instagram to connect with LGBTQ+ communities. For each, what does the research predict about whether social media is likely to help or harm them?

Exercise 19 [Analysis] Publication bias is described as a likely distortion in the social media and mental health literature. Design a hypothetical study that you think would probably show no effect (or even a positive effect) of social media on mental health. Why might such a study be less likely to be published? What does this mean for how we should interpret the existing published literature?

Exercise 20 [Analysis] The chapter notes that the gender gap in mental health deterioration—girls faring worse than boys—is consistent with the social media hypothesis but does not prove it. Generate at least three alternative explanations for the gender gap that do not require social media as a causal factor. What evidence would distinguish your alternative explanations from the social media hypothesis?

Exercise 21 [Analysis] Evaluate the following policy proposal: "All smartphones sold in the United States should include a government-mandated feature that automatically limits social media app use to 60 minutes per day for users under 18." Based on the evidence presented in the chapter, what are the likely benefits of this policy? What are the likely costs or harms? What information would you need to assess whether the benefits outweigh the costs?

Creative Exercises

Exercise 22 [Creative] Write a first-person diary entry from Maya's perspective on a day when social media makes her feel worse. Then write a diary entry from a day when social media genuinely helps her. Both entries should reflect the specific mechanisms described in the chapter (comparison, connection, sleep, cyberbullying, community) rather than being generic.

Exercise 23 [Creative] Design an Instagram interface specifically optimized for adolescent mental health rather than engagement. What features would you change, add, or remove? What algorithmic changes would you make? How would you balance user autonomy with protective design? Present your design as a list of specific product decisions with brief rationales.

Exercise 24 [Creative] Write a 600-word op-ed responding to the Surgeon General's 2023 advisory, taking the position that the advisory overclaims what the evidence shows. Then write a 600-word op-ed defending the advisory's approach as appropriate given evidence of plausible harm. Which position do you find more compelling, and why?

Exercise 25 [Creative] You are Dr. Aisha Johnson at Velocity Media, preparing a briefing for the CEO on what the mental health and social media research means for product decisions. Write the briefing (1,000-1,200 words) that is honest about uncertainty while still providing actionable guidance. What product changes would you recommend, and with what level of confidence?

Exercise 26 [Creative] Create a "media literacy guide" for high school students explaining how to read research reports about social media and mental health. Include sections on: what correlation means and doesn't mean, how to interpret effect sizes, what questions to ask about study design, and red flags in media reporting. Make it accessible to a 10th-grade reading level.

Group Exercises

Exercise 27 [Group] Debate exercise: Divide the group into two teams. Team A argues that the existing evidence is sufficient to justify significant restrictions on social media access for under-16s. Team B argues that the evidence is too uncertain and heterogeneous to justify such restrictions. Each team has 10 minutes to prepare and 5 minutes to present. Then hold a moderated discussion identifying the strongest points on each side.

Exercise 28 [Group] "Town hall" exercise: Role-play a community meeting about whether to implement phone-free schools in a local district. Assign roles: parents who are worried about their teenagers' mental health, parents who are worried about restricting students' communication, LGBTQ+ students, school administrators, mental health researchers, and a representative from a social media company. How do the different stakeholder perspectives shape the policy debate?

Exercise 29 [Group] In small groups, design a longitudinal study that would substantially improve our understanding of the causal relationship between social media use and adolescent mental health. What would you measure, how often, in what population, with what comparison group? What ethical issues arise? Present your design to the class, and have the class identify the most significant limitations.

Exercise 30 [Group] Audit exercise: As a group, identify five pieces of media reporting (news articles, podcasts, social media posts) about social media and mental health research from the past year. For each, evaluate: Does it accurately describe the study design? Does it distinguish correlation from causation? Does it report effect sizes? Does it present counter-evidence or limitations? Score each report on accuracy and compile a group assessment.

Exercise 31 [Group] Using the framework of individual differences (Valkenburg et al.), create a "risk and benefit profile" for different types of social media users. What characteristics predict harm? What characteristics predict benefit? What does your framework suggest about which users should be most and least concerned about their social media use?

Exercise 32 [Group] Map exercise: Create a visual map of all the proposed mechanisms connecting social media use to mental health outcomes discussed in the chapter. For each mechanism, indicate: direction (positive or negative effect), strength of evidence (weak/moderate/strong), whether it is direct or mediated, and the population for whom it is most relevant. Present and compare your maps across groups.

Exercise 33 [Group] Simulate a product review meeting at a social media company. One team plays the ethics team presenting evidence of mental health harms and proposed protective interventions. Another team plays the product/growth team arguing that the evidence is uncertain and that interventions would reduce engagement. A third team plays neutral executives who must decide what to do. What decision does the executive team reach, and why?

Applied and Extended Exercises

Exercise 34 [Applied] Find a teenager (with appropriate permission and ethical care) and conduct an informal interview about their social media use and how it affects their mood, sleep, and sense of self. What themes emerge? How do their reported experiences compare to what the research literature predicts? Write a 1,000-word reflection on what you learned.

Exercise 35 [Applied] Track your own social media use for two weeks using a screen time monitoring app. In week one, use as you normally would. In week two, implement one specific change (no social media after 9 p.m., no social media for the first hour of the day, or a maximum of one hour per day). Compare your mood, sleep, and subjective sense of well-being across the two weeks. Write a reflection on what you observe, applying the research concepts from the chapter. Identify the limitations of your self-experiment.