Why You're Still Using Social Media (Even If You Want to Stop) with Dr. Cass Sunstein

0:06Pushkin.

0:12The late American author and media critic Neil Postman once famously wrote, Technological change is not additive. It is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something. It changes everything. Postman made this observation all the way back in 1992, over a decade before smartphones, and over a decade before the launch of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Postman's quote feels particularly relevant today, especially given what researchers around the world are learning about the negative effects of these technologies. Researchers like today's guest. I'm Cass Sunstein.

0:48I teach at Harvard. I work on law and behavioral science. I've been working for about seven years on social media and happiness. and the divergence between what people choose and what actually makes their lives better. You might know Cass from his influential book Nudge, which he co-authored with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler. Nudge explores how small changes in our environments can influence the choices we make. Or you may know Cass from his work in the Obama administration, where he helped bring behavioral science into public policy. I headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, analyzing the effects of regulations to make sure that the benefits are higher than the costs.

1:32Cass is one of the scholars in behavioral science that I really look up to. He's also one of the most prolific academics I've ever met. I've lost count of the number of books he's written. I think it's well over 50 at this point. And that doesn't even include the hundreds of academic articles he's authored, most of which are about some strange or unexpected aspect of human behavior. And this year, Cass adds to that long list as one of the authors of the World Happiness Report, an annual academic publication about the state of global well-being. Each year, the World Happiness Report centers on a different theme.

2:05The 2026 report is all about how technology affects human happiness. And in true Cass Sunstein fashion, his chapter in this year's report introduces an important new concept, one that I find super helpful for making sense of all the irrational ways we get stuck online in behaviors that tend to decrease our health and our happiness. People are thinking, given the fact that there is this platform and my people are on it, I'm going to stay on and I'm going to get off it kicking and screaming. But do I like this status quo? I do not like the status quo at all. So if you're feeling trapped by your relationship with technology and social media, stay tuned because Cass will share this exciting new concept from his chapter, why this new concept is so important and what understanding it means for escaping the trap of social media platforms.

2:54All that when The Happiness Lab returns right after some quick ads from our sponsors.

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5:46Behavioral scientist and legal scholar Cass Sunstein spends a lot of time thinking about ways that we can shape our behavior to feel happier and healthier. And he's particularly interested in cases in which people behave in ways that decrease what economists call their utility. Since I'm guessing that many of my listeners aren't trained economists, I asked Cass for a quick definition of utility. Well, it basically means well-being. So if you have a day where you're really enjoying it and maybe life is very meaningful and you think at the end that was such a great day, that had a lot of utility.

6:20If you had a day where you were in pain or struggling or sad or scared or worried or depressed, that would be a low utility day. So to think of utility as pretty close to synonymous with well-being is fundamentally right. Economists tend to assume that people are rational. That is, they should consistently behave in ways that maximize their utility. But of course, we do irrational stuff all the time. Like, for example, spending hour after hour scrolling on Instagram or TikTok, when that behavior makes us feel unproductive and pretty gross. So why on earth do so-called rational creatures like us waste so much time on platforms that don't even feel good?

7:00That was what Cass set out to explain in his chapter in this year's World Happiness Report. And his explanation involves recognizing something new, that social media isn't just a typical kind of product. Instead, it falls into the category of what Cass calls a product trap. A product trap is something where people buy it because there's some negative thing that happens if they're not the one who's buying it. So people sometimes buy goods whose existence they deplore. That phenomenon is, I think, keenly interesting and pervasive. goods that people consume, but they wish they weren't around. And social media has that form.

7:39So people are trapped. They are kind of forced, so to speak, into a situation where they're on social media, even though they would be happier if social media didn't exist. To better understand this idea of a product trap, let's turn to the way that the usual sorts of products, the non-trappy kind, tend to affect utility. Let's say I decide to buy a new blender. There are lots of things about my new blender that might affect how much I like it. Things like how well it blends through big chunks of ice, or how easy it is to clean. All stuff related to how well that blender works in my own kitchen.

8:15But one thing that won't affect my utility is whether or not lots of other people have bought the same blender. But for a small subset of products, it matters whether other people buy the same thing. Either because keeping up with the Joneses is the main point of buying that product in the first place, think luxury watches or designer handbags, or because the products themselves get better simply because more people are using them. Think social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Products like these are what Cass calls product traps. And the trap is that the company is able to maneuver you into a situation in which you get the thing because you would incur some sort of social cost if you weren't engaged.

8:56So that's a product trap. And now that you have a word for this concept, I bet you're going to start noticing product traps everywhere. This is a vocabulary term that I introduce in my Yale happiness class, and it is the one that the Yale students resonate with the most. They are just like, I'm so happy that there is a word for this thing that I have been into for a long time. Because I think that so many of the goods that they're supposed to get in life wind up being product traps or just the things that they use all the time. The students brought up filters on the photos that they use. They know it makes them look kind of weird and that it's not great for our body image that we're all using them, but they don't want to be the one person who's not filtering their photos.

9:34People in middle age like me, it'd be things like Botox or supplements or these things where it's like, I just wish the world didn't have these things. But in fact, given that the world does have them, I feel like I have to use them too. And when I was talking with my production team, they brought up Elf on a Shelf, which is a holiday example of this, where it's like, if the kid down the hall is, their parents are doing Elf on the Shelf, you feel like You have to do it too, but it just kind of makes you miserable. I'll give you two examples, if I may. My sister decided one Christmas that the adults would not give each other presents anymore.

10:06The presents would only go to children. And everyone thought that was an extremely great thing. Because for years, we'd been giving each other presents where there was no benefit, mostly, because people would struggle to find something people would like, and people didn't really need another tie or whatever. Another example is, you know, I go to Ireland because my wife is Irish and I drink a little bit of alcohol, even though I don't drink alcohol anywhere but Ireland. And the reason is among my beloved Irish relatives, I say, sorry, I'm not drinking. the reaction is maybe he's an alcoholic or maybe he's very negative about drinkers.

10:53And I'm not an alcoholic. I'm not negative about drinkers. But I give that kind of signal to some Irish relatives. And the idea is that this is a pervasive thing. Right. It's not just about the other people using these products. It's about what happens to you if you're the one person who chooses not to use this product. And this is what you've called a consumption spillover or a negative non-user externality. Walk me through how that works. The non-user externality, that's a little fussier term that we're using, where if you're not using the thing, you suffer. So let's suppose there's a party on a Monday night.

11:30Everyone's going. And people might think, I'm certainly going to go to the party because if I don't go, I'll be giving a signal to people that I don't like parties, that I don't like hosts, that I'm an antisocial person, that I'm a workaholic, or that I really like the show on Netflix. So not going imposes a cost on you. And the cost might be, you know, self-perception, or you might think that the other people are going to think, what's wrong with that guy? But it might be there are some social events that you go to because you kind of have to, but if they were canceled, you'd think life is a little bit better.

12:05And a lot of these product traps where the consumption spillover occurs is because of a specific emotion, which is this emotion of FOMO, right? This is what my Yale students talk about and why I think these product traps are so powerful in college students. It's like, it's literally affecting your sense of belonging. So there's a connection between the product trap phenomenon, the behavioral phenomenon of loss aversion. People dislike losses. They tend to anticipate at least disliking losses about twice as much as they like equivalent gains. If you think that I'm going to miss out, let's say, on a Instagram something or on a TikTok something, that's a loss and loss makes people feel very nervous.

12:47It's a distinctive kind of fear of missing out, which is accompanied by a thought that the thing that you're missing out from, you wish weren't occurring. And the fact that people get trapped in this because of social norms or because of agile, let's say, company behavior, that's really concerning. It might be that anyone can entrap almost anyone by triggering fear of missing out. One of the domains where my students instantly saw that they're dealing with a product trap, interestingly, was with AI and specifically the use of AI to do their schoolwork, the cheat bot use of AI, as they call it.

13:26Because I think all of them want to learn the material and do the essay on their own and get the sense of purpose that comes from that. But if they know that everyone in the class is using LLM, they feel like, well, I'm a chump if I'm putting my time into this. I should just use these same cheat bot tools that everyone else is. It seems like many of them aren't using it because of their own individual benefit of cheating. Many of them just kind of hated the idea that everybody else is using it, but they feel like, well, now I got to use it too. That's a great example. So AI for many students is a product trap where you wish didn't exist, but contingent on its existence, you have to use it.

14:02That's a different mechanism, kind of, from fear of missing out. It's that you would be performing less well. So product traps are bad for the people who get trapped using these products. But what about for the companies that make these products? It kind of seems like a good deal for them. Oh, yeah. It's fantastic. So in business schools, this relatively new stuff should be taught as a technique for attracting customers. So if you're trying to sell a product to say that you don't want to be one of the few who doesn't have it, that can be very effective, especially if it is visible. So if you're visibly not someone who's using, let's say, a social media platform that everyone in your group is using, that triggers something in the human brain.

14:51And if there's some product that's visible, it might be that the exclusion and the cost that is imposed by people who aren't included is the principal determinant of consumption behavior. So we know that a company would do very well in a very cheerful way to emphasize the wonderfulness of being part of a large community of people who are increasingly visibly buying or engaged in this. It also seems like companies are doing everything in their power to do this more and more. You can't just have a like internet game. It has to be an internet game where you share your stats with other people. You're always constantly showing off whether or not you're using the product, which of course contributes to the product trappiness of some of these goods.

15:34Yeah. And if you don't post your number, you are giving a signal of some maybe embarrassing sort that you're not participating, that you're not good at the thing, that you're not playful. and all of these things can be profoundly motivating and they can be exploited in a way that makes people worse off. So now you know what a product trap is. And I gotta admit, it kinda looks like social media platforms qualify. But not so fast. Because Cass and other behavioral scientists have a strict empirical test for determining whether a product truly counts as a product trap. One that involves a curiously irrational thing that we tend to do with our money.

16:15We'll hear all about that curious monetary behavior right after this quick break.

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19:54Like many behavioral economists, Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein spends a lot of time thinking about how people spend their money. and more specifically, how much people are willing to pay for different products. Suppose the question is, would you benefit from having a book or a dinner? How do we know? Well, we can ask how much you're willing to pay for it. It's kind of the best measure we have. So if people are willing to pay, let's say,$15 for a book and not$50, then we have some clue of what the book is worth to them in terms of well-being. So willingness to pay is the best real-world measure we have offhand of what makes people better off.

20:36Economists also have lots of theories about how a rational actor's willingness to pay should work. For example, the idea that people will have some dollar amount in their heads that represents a product's utility. How much it's worth to you. So if someone is willing to pay 50 bucks for, say, a blender, that dollar amount should be about the same if you're thinking about buying the product or selling it. But blenders and books are regular, non-trappy kinds of products, ones that aren't affected all that much by whether other people are buying the same product. Cass was interested in whether social media platforms work differently than books and blenders and whether they qualified as product traps.

21:13So I asked people how much you're willing to pay for a month of social media platforms. And then I asked a different population, how much money would you demand to be off a platform for a month? So the setup is people are asked, how much would you pay to use YouTube or pay to use Facebook or pay to use Twitter? Or how much would you demand to be off? And there's a Nobel Prize winning theorem that says the number has to be the same, that if people are willing to pay, let's say,$6 for a movie ticket, they would demand$6 to give up the movie ticket. Value is value. And I was testing whether this idea would be reflected in people's valuation of social media platforms.

21:59But I got a staggering result. A substantial number of people said, I'll pay nothing to social media platforms. And the average answer was pretty low, like$5 or$10. So people are saying nothing or they're saying kind of a pittance to use social media platforms. And then to give up use, I got a really big number. Like people wanted like$100 on average. So the disparity between how much people would demand to give up use and how much people are willing to pay to use Facebook is 20 to 1. There's a Nobel Prize winning theorem that says it has to be 1 to 1. It was really surprising to me when you showed that people are just not willing to pay anything to be on social media.

22:42Because if you look at just time use, you might have predicted something very different, right? Our young people today, my Yale College students, are on average in STEM studies using these platforms for like four hours a day, up to eight hours a day. But you ask them, how much is it worth to you if you have to pay money for it? And people are like, nothing. I would never pay to go on this stuff. What does that tell you? So there are a couple different possibilities. One is people are anchoring on the current price, which is zero. So if the current price is zero and they're asked, how much will you pay?

23:11They'll say zero. or they'll maybe adjust a little bit up from zero to five or ten. Another explanation is that people think that they're wasting their time. So I bet for a certain percentage of my population, people thought, yeah, I spent a lot of time on it, but it's dumb. And I'm not going to buy that terrible waste of time. I'll pay you nothing. And then there's a third explanation, which is a number of people might have just been mad. So having enjoyed, so to speak, a good for free, then they're asked, how much would you pay for it? They say, what are you talking about? This is free. Like if people are asked, how much would you pay for clean air or the opportunity to breathe oxygen?

23:52They might say zero in a survey because they're rebelling against the very idea that they'd have to pay. So those are three explanations. I think the most fun explanation is that people think they're wasting time. So we need a category. Let's call them wasting time goods, where people devote a lot of minutes and maybe even hours to a thing. But they know on reflection that it's not doing them any good, so they're not going to pay for them. And so researchers did a study which actually paid people to get off Facebook for a month. Tell me about that study. So there's this study by Alcott and others has one thing very much in common with mine.

24:33What was elicited was how much would you demand to be off? The difference is people were actually paid to be off. And then it turns out they have a good month. So they're more satisfied with their life. They're less depressed. They're less anxious. On every measure that's thrown at them, it's a good month. And then they're asked, after that good month, how much would you, the relevant person who had a good month, demand to be off Facebook? And on average, people give approximately the same number they gave before they experienced the good month. Having said$100 the first round, the average answer the second round is$86.