Evidence synthesis
Research-backed syntheses across multiple studies — what we know, what remains uncertain, and what to do about it.
Latest research 2026: does social media affect mental health?
This evidence synthesis examines the relationship between social media use and mental health, covering correlational, experimental, and mechanistic studies. The evidence reveals small average effects, person-specific heterogeneity, and a growing gap between observational and experimental findings.
Latest research 2026: is dopamine really why we use social media?
This synthesis examines the evidence for dopamine release during social media and video game use, comparing it to other rewards. It evaluates whether variable-ratio reward schedules are the primary mechanism behind compulsive engagement, or if other factors like social threat and habit are more important.
Latest research 2026: is phone addiction real?
This evidence synthesis examines whether phone addiction meets criteria for a clinical disorder and why gaming disorder entered the ICD-11 while social media addiction did not. It covers conceptual definitions, neurobiological mechanisms, measurement challenges, and policy implications.
Latest research 2026: Does social media use affect your HRV and nervous system?
Research on social media and HRV spans acute laboratory tasks, observational correlations between habitual use and resting HRV, and mechanistic work on sleep displacement and light exposure. The evidence is fragmented, heavily confounded, and rarely controls for the dominant determinant of short-term HRV: breathing rate. No well-powered study has established a causal chronic effect of social media on resting parasympathetic tone.
Latest research 2026: are apps/phones really secretly listening to your conversations?
Research has found no direct evidence that major consumer apps continuously record and transmit ambient audio for ad targeting. However, the detection methods used have documented blind spots, governance frameworks have significant compliance gaps, and the companies best placed to resolve the question control the very data needed to answer it. The most evidence-backed explanation is that sophisticated behavioural inference, cognitive bias, and statistical probability account for most anecdotal experiences, but this cannot yet be proven experimentally.
Latest research 2026: why do our brains lose track of time while scrolling?
Research draws on attentional timing, memory segmentation, dopaminergic neuroscience, and platform-specific behavioral studies to explain why scrolling distorts time perception. The evidence base is indirect: no study has yet measured brain activity during naturalistic scrolling with time distortion as the primary outcome. Multiple candidate mechanisms are supported by adjacent research but none has been directly demonstrated in real scrolling contexts.
Latest research 2026: what actually reduces social media use?
A substantial body of research examines time limits, abstinence, environmental modifications like grayscale, and clinical approaches for reducing social media use across a spectrum from mild dissatisfaction to severe compulsive use. Most controlled trials recruit mildly dissatisfied volunteers and run for only a few weeks, so findings are difficult to extend to severe or clinical cases and long-term durability remains almost entirely untested. The evidence identifies several plausible mechanisms and replicable short-term effects, but causality claims are tentative and effect sizes are often small or heterogeneous.