The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

> People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls.

Can anyone translate? Random web search find suggests multiplying by 37 to get a percentage, which sounds very questionable, but even then these improvements seem negligible.

This doesn't really line up with my lived experience. Getting myself out of shitty platforms and community spaces improved my mental state significantly (although the damage that's been done remains).

From the paper PDF (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336...):

> We estimate that users in the Facebook deactivation group reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, anxiety, and depression, relative to control users. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p < 0.01 level, both when considered individually and after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the full set of political outcomes considered in Allcott et al. (2024). Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Facebook on people over 35, undecided voters, and people without a college degree.

> We estimate that users in the Instagram deactivation group reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement in the emotional state index relative to control. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p = 0.016 level when considered individually, and at the p = 0.14 level after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the outcomes in Allcott et al. (2024). The latter estimate does not meet our pre-registered p = 0.05 significance threshold. Substitution analyses imply this improvement is achieved without shifts to offline activities. Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Instagram on women aged 1824.

Perhaps it wasn't clear what I meant. When I said significantly, I meant it in the colloquial sense, not in the statistical significance sense.

I was looking for a more digestable figure describing the extent of improvements, not whether the study found them confidently distinguishable (which I just assumed they did based on the wording, good to know they didn't for Instagram).

The best thing you can do is compare it to another study, since turning 0.06 standard deviations into a percentage of happiness isn’t going to be that telling.

In general, 0.2 is considered a small effect. So 0.06 is quite small — likely not a practically noticeable change in well-being. But impressive to me when I compare it to effect sizes of therapy interventions which can lie around 0.3 for 12 weeks.

Quote:

> “50 randomized controlled trials that were published in 51 articles between 1998 and August 2018. We found standardized mean differences of Hedges’ g = 0.34 for subjective well-being, Hedges’ g = 0.39 for psychological well-being, indicating small to moderate effects, and Hedges’ g = 0.29 for depression, and Hedges’ g = 0.35 for anxiety and stress, indicating small effects.”

(Source: The efficacy of multi-component positive psychology interventions, 2019 — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331028589_The_Effic...)