Exploring Digital Behavioural Data and Large-Scale Interventions to Enhance Digital Self-Control

Summary

Young people in the UK report spending around five hours online daily, with nearly half feeling they spend more time on their smartphones than they'd like. Over the past decade, youth mental health has declined significantly, and many are concerned that increasingly engaging digital designs may hinder self-control and thereby negatively impact mental health. However, there is still limited understanding of whether these concerns are justified and how to improve digital self-control.

This project partners with One Sec, a leading self-control app used by 750 thousand people per hour across 175 countries, which adds a 10-second delay before accessing target apps, that effectively reduces social media consumption (Grüning et al., 2023; Haliburton et al., 2024). This addition of such ‘friction’ into people’s technology use represents an exciting opportunity to study how interventions like these change digital behaviours and health using large scale naturalistic data.

Project aims

The project first will leverage digital data donation, where users voluntarily share their social media data (e.g., from TikTok) with research, to examine changes in usage patterns after using One Sec across a large-scale naturalistic global sample. 

It will then apply a Micro-Randomised Trial to compare the effectiveness of One Sec’s friction-based intervention against other intervention approaches, such as time limits and goal-setting, at both individual and population levels examining mental health outcomes.
 

An internship in the One Sec team will also allow you to experience data science and behavioural research in a fast paced and innovative start-up environment, building further cutting-edge analytical and technological skills.

Contact details

Amy Orben - amy.orben@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

Opportunities

This project is open to applicants who want to do a:

• PhD