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Randomized controlled trials cannot identify social media’s causal effects

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 4, page 615 (2025)Cite this article

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The effects of social media on well-being have been a subject of intense debate among scientists, policymakers and the public1. However, scientific attempts to quantify causal effects tend to produce inconsistent, small and conflicting effect sizes. In their Perspective, Vanden Abeele and colleagues (Vanden Abeele, M. M. P., Murphy, S. L., Lemahieu, L., & Koster, E. H. W. Methodological considerations for social media intervention studies. Nat. Rev. Psychol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-025-00474-6; 2025)2 take aim at plausible methodological origins of this uncertainty, emphasizing the implementation and interpretation of social media intervention studies. Yet in doing so they miss perhaps the most consequential problem — the social nature of social media ensures that the bulk of research surveyed in their article could not possibly have yielded a coherent causal estimate.

The inability to draw causal estimates from studies in this literature arises from a seemingly unlikely culprit — the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). RCTs are a common approach to causal inference across the sciences but are often erroneously interpreted as the best or perhaps only means by which causality can be inferred3,4. Although they can be useful for inferring causality in certain scientific contexts, doing so requires that strict assumptions hold.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biology Department, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Joseph Bak-Coleman

  2. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

    Joseph Bak-Coleman

  3. Center for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

    Joseph Bak-Coleman

  4. Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Joseph Bak-Coleman

  5. Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany

    Joseph Bak-Coleman

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  1. Joseph Bak-Coleman
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Correspondence to Joseph Bak-Coleman.

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Competing interests

J.B. has consulted for the United Nations Development Programme on matters related to the impacts of technology on society, including impacts on well-being.

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Bak-Coleman, J. Randomized controlled trials cannot identify social media’s causal effects. Nat Rev Psychol 4, 615 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-025-00475-5

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