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

Summary

Young people are spending increasing amounts of time online. Yet nearly 50% of English teens feel they spend more time on smartphones than they'd like.

Over the past decade, youth mental health has declined significantly, raising concerns about whether increasingly engaging digital designs are limiting self-control and in turn impacting mental health. However, understanding of this issue remains limited.

This project partners with One Sec, a leading self-control app used by 750,000+ active users across 175 countries. The app introduces a 10-second delay before accessing certain apps and has been shown to reduce their use (Grüning et al., 2023; Haliburton et al., 2024).

Project aims

Research on such ""friction"" interventions is in its early stages, making this a valuable and unique opportunity to study how these interventions influence digital behaviour.

The project will first use digital data donation, where users voluntarily share their social media data, to track changes in usage patterns after applying One Sec's intervention.

This allows for the identification of whether the intervention not only reduces app use but also alters social media behaviour.

It will then use an experimental Micro-Randomised Trial design to compare the effectiveness of the friction-based intervention against other psychological approaches like self-commitment and social signalling at both individual and population levels.

This will inform basic mental health research as well as direct policy and industry interventions.

An internship with One Sec will provide experience in data science and behavioural research, while building advanced skills in a dynamic start-up environment.

Contact details

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

Opportunities

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

• PhD