Study Finds Growing Up WIth Gadgets Has a Downside: Social Skill Impairment

PolygamousRanchKid writes with this excerpt from a CNN story:"Tween girls who spend much of their waking hours switching frantically between YouTube, Facebook, television and text messaging are more likely to develop social problems, says a Stanford University study published in a scientific journal on Wednesday. Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses. The study only included girls who responded to a survey in Discovery Girls magazine, but results should apply to boys, too, Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor of communications who worked on the study, said in a phone interview. Boys' emotional development is more difficult to analyze because male social development varies widely and over a longer time period, he said."

Comments

Not News

[sunderland56]

Where do you think the whole middle-aged-guy-living-in-parents-basement meme comes from?

The only new thing here is that it happens to girls, as well as guys.

Not a controlled study

[timeOday]

You would expect introverts to spend more time on gadgets, so the direction of causation here, if any, is not determined. I hate to use a cliche, but "correlation != causation" never seemed more apt.

Re:Not a controlled study

[LordLucless]

Not to mention it's apparently a self-selected, self-reported "study" aimed at girls who read a technology magazine.

that's the truth

[Shakrai]

The only new thing here is that it happens to girls

I've recently had the "privilege" of venturing back into the dating market after more than a year of being single. Imagine my surprise when I learned that it's virtually impossible to date these days without an unlimited texting package. Nobody knows (or at least nobody I've dated) how to talk anymore. It's as if asking for conversation in more than 160 character bites is too much. The distressing thing is that this trait seems to be independent of education and background. I've dated women with backgrounds ranging from GED to Ph.D candidate and have encountered this with all of them.

Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I'm a techno geek who still appreciates the value of a good handshake and eye contact. The lack of these skills doesn't just screw you with dating; it screws you in the business world as well.

Re:that's the truth

[Cruciform]

I created a profile on PoF and set the limit to 300 characters minimum to contact me.
I got a few nice messages, but then there were ones with a bunch of gibberish complaining about how they had to write so much just to make contact. It's 4 lines of text... jeez.
The period now seems to have been replaced with "lol" in most communication too. At least it weeds out the ones worth talking to.

Re:that's the truth

[Samantha Wright]

Look at all the social network users without resistance to ostracism! Who's going to run civilization now? Zoidberg! That's who!

Re:that's the truth

[Shakrai]

I'm skeptical of online dating as well but I'm at a loss for what's better these days. I'm not into the bar/clubbing scene, so cross that off the list. I've always maintained boundaries at work and refuse to date co-workers. What does that leave? I've tried activity groups (hiking clubs and the like) but most of the people who attend those are already paired off. Church may be an option for some people but the median age at my church is around 60 so that's not going to work either.

I've actually met a few friends through OKCupid. Nothing that panned out as relationship material but if you troll through that site long enough you'll actually find decent human beings mixed in with the fake profiles/spammers and the extremely desperate. I think I've met seven or eight people through OKC and only one of them turned out to be psycho. That's probably comparable odds to meeting people in person -- anybody can pretend to be sane for the initial conversation! Sucks that you got banned from there. I wouldn't regard E-Harmony as any real loss; it's overpriced and hasn't quite escaped it's Christian roots. Unless you are a fairly religious person looking for your future spouse E-Harmony isn't likely to prove fruitful.

Re:that's the truth

[sydneyfong]

What does that leave?

Try Slashdot?

Speaking of that, there's no reason I shouldn't try my luck here too. Hey girls! I'm single, male, 26, and have excellent karma. PM if interested.

Please define "social problems"

[tlambert]

Please define "social problems"

Please do it in terms of something other than "the old farts say it was always done this way, so it should always be done this way".

Welcome to your children's world.

-- Terry

Re:Please define "social problems"

[Anonymous Coward]

This was my first thought upon reading the post.

Social norms are often an artificial construction, the expectations of them are a burden in themselves, and often quite illusory.

It's like Machismo, Honor, or a dozen other terms. Are they good, or are they just what's expected?

Re:Please define "social problems"

[Froobly]

The corporate world is not all about compromising as you've been led to believe. At least in the tech industry, successful companies value people who know what's right, and take action on that knowledge. What they don't value is people who are mean about it, or who have a victim complex. They don't want yes men, although they sometimes have difficulty ferreting them out. They want someone who can identify problems, speak up, and solve the problems.

But there are other issues that come up, that can fool you into believing that they don't want informed, stubborn people. It sounds like you don't have much respect for managers, and that could be your downfall. If you don't like somebody, and you let them know, how can you expect them to like you? People who are perceived as mean or unfriendly are often singled out and discriminated against, even when they're in the right.

Here's the truth that you probably won't like hearing: management is fucking hard, and it's not much fun. I try to avoid it if at all possible, preferring to come up with clever software designs and banging out code -- you know, the fun stuff.

Those people who you complain about making tons of money for knowing how to shake hands and smile? Their job is a lot harder than you think. They have to keep track of every aspect of a project, figure out ways of communicating what needs to be done, deliver information to their superiors in a way that won't freak them out, and try to extract good performance out of engineers who see them as just another smile and a handshake.

Good managers are hard to come by. With no management, stress and uncertainty accumulate, and projects go to bad places. With bad management, they tend to go to even worse places. With good management, things get done, and people feel satisfied in their jobs.

You may feel like people want you to be someone who you're not. I honestly don't know who you are, but I'm guessing you're angry and bitter. That does not define who you are -- that's just what you're thinking right now. You can choose to do what you want, and it's what you do that defines who you are, not what's happened to you, or what you've done in the past. I think you might find that if you try to be nice to people, treat them with respect, and genuinely convince yourself that they're not all fucktards, things might turn out a little better for you.

"least likely to develop normal social tendencies"

[egburr]

least likely to develop normal social tendencies

Well, from what I remember of "normal social tendencies" in high school, maybe it's better that fewer people develop them.

Paradigm shift

[tm2b]

Or, they could consider the idea that as on-line communication becomes rooted in our social ecosphere, social skills are changing to more closely integrate on-line interactions.

15 years ago, online dating was satire. 5-10 years ago it was socially frowned upon. These days, it's damned near normative.

Study finds surveys bad science..

[tbird81]

Seriously?

n: 3461 - pretty good
Inclusion criteria: Girls 8-12 who replied to a magazine survey - pretty bad
Measurement: Self-reporting of multitasking, self-reporting on social ability - reliable?
Interpretation: Can also be applied to boys - where the fuck did this come from??
Author: Clifford Nass a "self-described technologist of 25 years".

The author seems to be one of those self-promoting weirdos who picks a topic he knows will be controversial, does some easy "science" with it, and comes up with a controversial conclusion. He says he finds the results "disturbing".

Well Clifford, I find the fact that Stanford employs someone like you quite disturbing. I find you job title "technologist" disturbing. And I find your name dropping of Google and Microsoft disturbing. Most of all, I find the complete lack of scientific method in this study incredibly sad - it's just made for pop-science articles. Shame on you.

Re:Study finds surveys bad science..

[Rinnon]

Don't forget the fact that the magazine in question is "Discovery Girls." Now, I don't want to submit myself completely to stereotypes, but what kind of person reads Discovery Girls? I'm guessing NERDY GIRLS. Just a shot in the dark. And nerds aren't exactly known for their stellar social skills. Not that any of this is a bad thing, I'd take a nerdy socially awkward girl any day of the week (not from the age range the survey took from mind you).

You're doing it wrong.

[raehl]

That's because phone calls are fucking annoying.

If you want to have a conversation with someone, take them out to dinner or some other activity where you are together.

Otherwise, unless you're stuck across the country and can't see each other, stop expecting people to accept your interruptions to their day.

Re:You're doing it wrong.

[Shakrai]

I'm curious why you went to phone calls when I never mentioned them in my initial post?

That said, some of us do appreciate the value of hearing an actual voice and knowing we have someone's (relatively) undivided attention. Phone calls don't need to "interrupt" your day nor do they need to endure for hours on end. I can communicate more to someone with a five minute phone call than I can with five hours of texting.

Speaking of fucking annoying that's how I view text messages. They are fine for "Hey, I'm running a few minutes late" but utterly useless for real conversation. They are slower than IM, less meaningful than e-mail and entirely too prone to the misunderstandings that a danger in all forms of non-verbal/in-person communication. Vocal inflections and body language make up a significant portion of human interaction; you are missing a great deal when you remove them both from the equation.

Yeah..

[raehl]

My social skills are fine, asshole!

Welcome to the 21st century

[russotto]

Multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online, and watching video ARE normal social skills nowadays.

Re:Seriously

[rrohbeck]

For the same reason we have TV aimed at children.

Don't write this off

[Prune]

I'm saying the following as a software developer (among other things), which may or may not be ironic: I've always had the concern for the potential (often actualized) of information technology to be socially detrimental. From evolutionary psychology we know that despite the appearances of a very flexible psyche, significant components of most of our behaviors and thinking are hardwired by biology. Nurture only has so much leeway within the boundaries set by nature. Millions of years of evolution have created a social animal that is well fit to a specific environment of foraging tribalism. Civilization has already in a mere 10k years taken us quite far from that, and we've built a sort of human zoo for ourselves. For all the benefits this has brought, many detriments have come about as well, a lot of them having to do with people's actions today often influencing people with whom they have no personal relationships (contrast a tribe where everyone knows everyone else in the tribe and members rarely had influence outside the tribe), much more indirect links between appropriate behavior and reward (creating stress), and so on. Information technology is taking us further yet from our biologically optimal environment, and I have no confidence it will turn out well. Our social interactions have become a perverted version of what we've evolved for, and patterns of interaction through technology abuse the neurological mechanisms responsible for controlling communication and other social aspects of the mind, in the same way that spaghetti programming abuses the goto statement.

[This part of the post is a bit tangential and may be skipped.] Some people would say that everything will be fine because eventually technology and biotechnology will be used to directly enhance our minds and bodies, so that we can exceed our biological constraints. These people ignore the problem of our moral/ethical frameworks, which are grounded in the brain's evolutionary heritage, being incapable of guiding us in such a future as there is no precedent in the evolution of moral/ethical behavior. Simple example: 60 years in the future a person begins being slowly "enhanced" by replacing one by one his neurons, and then other cells, with artificial or bioengineered ones that initially duplicate function and then bring online enhanced functionality; eventually the whole person's consistence has been replaced; now contrast this to, instead, making a recording of all relevant information about the person, building an artificial copy, and killing the original; same result, yet the second version feels wrong to most people. Our morals/ethics are not equipped for situations that have no analogy whatsoever to anything in our evolutionary past. If we extend ourselves, we would have to extend our morals and ethics too, and the latter extension is basically arbitrary.

Coincidence

[goldaryn]

Siri and I were just talking about this