Facebook Bums Us Out But We’ll Pay for It Anyway
People who deactivated their accounts for a month were less anxious and depressed
By Cass R. Sunstein
Would you be better off without Facebook? Would society benefit, too?
A team of economists, led by Hunt Allcott of New York University, has just produced the most impressive research to date on these questions.
In general, the researchers’ findings are not good news for Facebook and its users. Getting off the platform appears to increase people’s well-being — and significantly decrease political polarization.
Allcott and his co-authors began by asking 2,884 Facebook users, in November 2018, how much money they would demand to deactivate their accounts for a period of four weeks, ending just after the midterm election.
To make their experiment manageable, the researchers focused on about 60 percent of users, who said that they would be willing to deactivate their accounts for under $102.
The researchers divided those users into two groups. The Treatment group was paid to deactivate. The Control group was not. Members of both groups were asked a battery of questions, exploring how getting off Facebook affected their lives.
