A teenager picks up a phone to check one notification. Forty minutes later, they’re still scrolling and couldn’t tell you what they watched. That isn’t a character flaw. A large new study in JAMA Network Open suggests it’s a measurable pattern, one that shows up almost a year later as higher attention and impulsivity scores in a parent’s report.
Researchers led by Jason Nagata at the University of California, San Francisco tracked 11,286 American teenagers for five years, from around age 12 to 17, using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the largest long-term study of teenage brain development in the US. They set out to settle a question that has floated around without solid evidence for a decade: does compulsive social media use actually damage a teenager’s attention over time, or do teenagers with attention problems just drift towards compulsive use in the first place?
The data says both happen. But one direction is stronger, and the picture changes depending on whether you ask a parent or the teenager.
The backdrop makes the question urgent. Around 7 million American children aged 3 to 17, about 11.4% of that age group, have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point, up by roughly 1 million diagnoses between 2016 and 2022 alone. Close to 8 in 10 of those kids carry a second condition alongside it, usually anxiety, depression, or a behavioural disorder. That climb has run in parallel with the rise of smartphones and social media in teenage life, which is exactly why researchers wanted a study that could separate coincidence from cause.
Scrolling versus screen time
Counting hours on a phone tells you almost nothing. A teenager researching a school project and a teenager doomscrolling both rack up identical “screen time.” So Nagata’s team measured something sharper instead: a six-item scale, adapted from a well-known Facebook addiction questionnaire, that asks teens whether they think about social media constantly, keep failing to cut back, feel distressed when they can’t get online, and notice it crowding out the rest of their life. Researchers call this problematic social media use, and it behaves more like gambling addiction than like an ordinary hobby.
That distinction matters because it echoes an argument the culture critic Ted Gioia has been making for years in his essay The State of the Culture, 2024. Gioia argues that entertainment has quietly given way to something else entirely: not art, not even mindless fun, but compulsive, repeatable stimulus. Sport drifts from playing to watching to gambling. Journalism drifts from newspapers to multimedia to clickbait. Music drifts from albums to tracks to fifteen-second clips built purely to be repeated. He puts the tech industry’s logic bluntly: platforms aren’t chasing the next great artist, they’re building dependency, and as he writes, “addiction is the goal.”
That’s a cultural critic’s claim, not a peer-reviewed one. The JAMA study is the first large, multi-year dataset that actually tests whether something like it plays out inside real teenagers’ brains.
What the five years of data show
Every year for five years, researchers measured problematic social media use, self-reported by the teens, and ADHD symptoms, reported by their parents. Following the same kids repeatedly let the team separate two very different things: teenagers who are simply prone to both problems throughout adolescence, and a specific year in one teenager’s life when their social media use spiked and something shifted afterward.
Here’s the finding. In the two most recent years of the study, roughly ages 14 to 16, a spike in a teenager’s own reported compulsive use came before a small but statistically real rise in ADHD symptoms their parent reported the following year. The effect size was small by statistical standards, but it held up after the researchers controlled for household income, parental education, race, ethnicity, and each teenager’s usual baseline.
The reverse pathway, ADHD symptoms driving more compulsive use later, showed up in only one of the four year-to-year comparisons and was noticeably weaker. Compulsive scrolling nudging attention problems upward looks like the stronger, more consistent story here, not the other way round.
Worth noting: this isn’t a study of kids who are all heavily hooked. On the 1-to-6 problematic-use scale, the yearly average sat at around 1.77 for the entire five years, barely above the floor. The effect shows up at the margins, in the years when an individual teenager’s own use crept up relative to their usual level, not because the whole sample skewed towards addiction. ADHD symptoms and compulsive use also moved together within the same year for most of the study, from early adolescence through age 15, before that same-year overlap faded out by the final check-in at 16 to 17.
Money and parental background mattered too. Higher household income and higher parental education both tracked with lower ADHD symptoms and lower problematic use across the board, an association the researchers controlled for statistically so it wouldn’t distort the year-over-year findings above.
Why boys, not girls
The effect wasn’t spread evenly. When the researchers split the sample by sex, the link between a rise in compulsive use and a rise in ADHD symptoms the following year only reached statistical significance for boys, and it showed up at both of the final two annual check-ins. Girls never crossed that threshold at any point in the study.
Girls showed a different pattern: a modest, real correlation between generally higher ADHD traits and generally higher problematic social media use as a lifelong tendency, without the same year-to-year knock-on effect boys showed. The researchers flag this split as exploratory rather than settled, since no strong existing theory predicted it. It loosely tracks earlier findings that boys react more strongly to high-stimulation, high-reward media, while girls’ vulnerabilities tend to show up around different patterns, like heavy multitasking across platforms.
The 14-to-16 window isn’t a random cutoff either. Adolescent brain research points to a mismatch during these years: the brain’s reward-seeking circuitry matures faster than the self-control systems meant to rein it in. That gap, sometimes called the dual-systems imbalance, peaks in mid-adolescence, which is precisely the stretch where this study found compulsive social media use and rising ADHD symptoms moving together.
Parents see one thing, teens report another
Here’s the strangest wrinkle. When the researchers reran the analysis using teenagers’ own self-reported attention symptoms instead of their parents’ ratings, the pattern flipped. Teens’ self-ratings didn’t show the “more scrolling now, worse attention next year” pattern their parents’ reports showed. Instead, existing attention problems predicted more compulsive use a year later, the reverse of the parent-reported finding.
That mismatch deserves attention rather than a quick explanation. Parents may be picking up on visible signs, distraction, restlessness, trouble putting a device down, and reading them as classic ADHD behaviour. Teenagers may not experience or describe their own inner attention state the same way an outside observer does. Neither version of the data is wrong. They’re likely measuring different things: a behaviour pattern adults notice from the outside, and an internal experience teens report about themselves.
What the study doesn’t prove
It would be easy to compress this into “phones cause ADHD.” The data doesn’t support that, and the researchers say so directly.
This is an observational study, not a controlled experiment. No teenager was randomly assigned to heavy or light social media use, so a third factor, a rough year at school, a family disruption, poor sleep, could push both compulsive scrolling and attention symptoms up at the same time without one causing the other. The effect sizes were small, even though they held across more than eleven thousand teenagers. And the sample skews towards white teenagers from higher-income, more educated families relative to the wider US population, which limits how far the findings travel to other groups.
What the study does establish is narrower and more useful: a repeated, year-over-year signal that compulsive, hard-to-control social media use, not screen time in general, tends to precede small upticks in attention and impulsivity problems during a specific window, roughly ages 14 to 16. That’s a smaller claim than “social media causes ADHD,” but harder for platforms to dismiss as coincidence.
The researchers also checked whether the finding was just an artefact of kids who already had ADHD. They reran the entire analysis after excluding every teenager who had a formal ADHD diagnosis or was on ADHD medication at the start of the study. The results held up, at similar strength and in the same direction, which weakens the argument that the effect is only visible because already-symptomatic kids were driving the numbers.
Where Gioia’s argument and the data meet
Gioia’s essay isn’t science, and treating it as science would be a mistake. But his central image, platforms engineering a shift from entertainment towards pure repeatable stimulus, carries more weight sitting next to five years of longitudinal data showing a measurable behavioural pathway in real teenagers. He describes tech companies building interfaces around what he calls a “dopamine doom loop,” punishing anything that might pull a user off the platform, a news link, an outside app, even the plain urge to put the phone down. He also points to internal Meta research, surfaced by a company whistleblower, reportedly showing that Instagram use tracked with depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts in teenage girls, and that leadership had seen the findings. The JAMA data can’t confirm what happened inside Meta’s own research, but it adds an independent, peer-reviewed data point sitting right next to that earlier internal warning.
The honest reading probably sits in the middle. Something about how these platforms are built, the infinite scroll, the unpredictable reward of the next notification, the friction built into leaving, appears to interact with an already-sensitive stretch of early-to-mid adolescence, particularly for boys. Not a moral panic. Not nothing either. A small, real signal, repeated year after year, across more than eleven thousand kids.
What actually helps
The researchers stop short of prescribing solutions, but the shape of their findings points somewhere practical. Because the effect concentrated specifically around ages 14 to 16 rather than spreading evenly across adolescence, that window looks like the sharpest point for parents, schools, and clinicians to watch, not screen time as a raw number, but whether a teenager shows signs of losing control over their own use: repeated failed attempts to cut back, distress when access is removed, social media crowding out sleep, schoolwork, or time with friends in person.
None of this calls for panic or confiscating every device in the house. It calls for the same thing good parenting and good public health always call for: watching the pattern, not just the clock.
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