Longitudinal survey finds little evidence that social tech predicts life satisfaction in adults
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Social technologies, digital tools that allow people to communicate and share content with each other online, have become a central way of communicating for many people worldwide. Yet the possible effects of these technologies on the well-being and life satisfaction of regular users are still widely debated.
Researchers at Georgetown University, the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) carried out a study aimed at better understanding how the use of social media and other interactive platforms may influence the life satisfaction of adults living in the United States.
Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, provide little evidence that changes in social technology use predicted adults’ subsequent life satisfaction.
“The debate around how the use of social technology affects life satisfaction elicits strong opinions, but there is a lot of disagreement underneath,” Kostadin Kushlev, co-first author of the paper, told Phys.org. “Different researchers have looked at the same data and come to opposite conclusions.
“Part of the problem is the question itself. Asking whether social media is good for well-being is a bit like asking whether eating is good for your heart. Different foods do very different things, and the effects also depend on the person and other factors.”
After reviewing earlier literature and opinions on this topic, Kushlev and his colleagues identified possible design elements that could be improved. For instance, some speak about social media as if it were a single technology, yet different platforms might affect users differently.
“To improve on existing literature, we set out to do several things at once, first looking at each platform on its own,” said Kushlev. “Moreover, instead of taking a single ‘snapshot,’ we followed the same people over time. We also looked at whether answers differed by age, gender, race, education and income. Finally, we used a statistical approach that can distinguish a real effect from the trivial noise that turns up as significant in any large sample.”
Tracking digital habits and satisfaction over time
As part of their study, the researchers surveyed 1,966 adults living in the United States across five survey rounds conducted three months apart. These people were recruited as part of the Understanding America Study, a project run by USC aimed at surveying a nationally representative, probability-based sample of American adults online.
“During each survey, we asked how often people used 10 technologies: FaceTime, texting, WhatsApp, email, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X, TikTok and YouTube,” said Kushlev. “We also measured their life satisfaction with an established three-item scale.”
When statistically analyzing the collected data, Kushlev and his colleagues wanted to answer two distinct questions. The first was whether people who use a specific platform more often than others are more or less satisfied with their lives. The second was whether a specific individual grows more or less satisfied when they use a platform more frequently than they did before.
“The first of these questions is addressed in most cross-sectional studies,” explained Kushlev. “The second question is the one that gets us closer to cause and effect. To analyze responses, we took a Bayesian approach, which let us do something more useful than declaring a result significant or not. It lets us say whether the effect credibly exists, rather than only that we found or failed to find one.”
Across the social technologies they considered, the team found no credible evidence that self-reported changes in frequency of use predicted life satisfaction about three months later. This held true for all the platforms even when they were examined individually, including Instagram and TikTok, whose potential effects on life satisfaction have been widely debated. This also held true for each demographic subgroup: men and women, people with higher and lower incomes, younger and older adults, and others.
“We did find that people who use TikTok or YouTube more report lower life satisfaction, but again, those types of associations could be due to third factors like age rather than indicate a causal relationship,” said Kushlev.
“These are the types of relationships documented by most existing cross-sectional research. We sometimes forget that these platforms promise convenience, entertainment, and connection. So, it’s important to state that while we found no credible evidence that these technologies are making adults less satisfied with their lives, we also found no credible evidence that they are making them more satisfied.”
Guiding further research on social technology use
The results of this study suggest that changes in U.S. adults’ use of 10 common social technologies generally did not predict subsequent changes in their life satisfaction. Interestingly, however, the team did find that higher life satisfaction modestly predicted increases in video calling among some demographic groups.
It is important to note that the team only surveyed adult participants, so these findings do not imply that social media is harmless for children or adolescents. Future studies could use the same Bayesian statistical approach to study other populations, including both teenagers and preteens. In their future research, Kushlev and his colleagues would also like to use more objective techniques to measure social technology use.
“Most of what we know about screens and well-being rests on people estimating their own usage with very rough measures,” said Kushlev.
“We need objective, device-level data. The companies already have it. Researchers do not. In our study, our measure of use tops out at ‘multiple times a day.’ It cannot tell the difference between someone who checks an app a few times a day and someone who checks it 200 times. My current work is trying to address this, at least in part.”
Kushlev is currently also involved in a new study. As part of this project, adolescents who are receiving their first smartphone will be randomly assigned to two groups. Approximately half will have access to social media, while the other half will not.
The researchers plan to track the participating adolescents’ phone usage using specialized software. At present, they are recruiting families for this study that will receive a free smartphone for their participation.
“Randomly assigning one teenager to quit social media may not show much, because whatever they gain can be undermined by being left out of what everyone else is doing,” added Kushlev.
“Policies that apply to a whole school or a whole age group avoid that problem, and states and countries are now enacting exactly those policies. Studying those policies rigorously, and building measurement into the laws themselves, is one of the most valuable things we could do in the next few years. This will provide evidence on what is effective and what is not, as well as document any unintended downstream consequences.”
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Publication details
Kostadin Kushlev et al, Social technology use and life satisfaction in a five-wave panel study of US adults, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02564-8.
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Longitudinal survey finds little evidence that social tech predicts life satisfaction in adults (2026, September 20)
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