Decoding Academia: Moral Entrepreneurs, Measurement Issues, & Screentime with Andrew Przybylski (Patreon Preview)

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Social Sciences, Science, Leisure, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2026

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Another episode where the guest is not a sense-making prophet or a galaxy-brained guru, as we engage in academic dialogos with Oxford psychologist Andrew Przybylski. This is a preview of our Decoding Academia series on Patreon (now 30+ episodes deep), where we swap internet gurus and rhetoric for actual researchers and empirical debates.

Andrew’s work spans motivation, gaming, and digital technology. His most recent crime is that he studies the impact of technology and has not found evidence that it is destroying wellbeing and ushering in civilisational collapse. We discuss the ongoing moral panic around smartphones, social media, and teenagers’ allegedly pulverised minds and why much of the debate rests on statistical techniques roughly equivalent to staring deeply at Excel spreadsheets and hammering SPSS until the desired narrative appears.

We get into measurement problems around “screen time,” why trivially small correlations become front-page catastrophes, and how the discourse rewards confident storytelling far more than (boring) careful causal inference. Also covered: cross-cultural evidence, the policy implications of airport pop science bestsellers, and the potential civilisational threat posed by Warhammer 40k.

If you enjoy episodes where we analyse methods rather than metaphysics, the full Decoding Academia series lives on Patreon.

Relevant Research (Przybylski & collaborators)

Andrew's Academic Profile and Personal Website
Fassi, L., Ferguson, A. M., Przybylski, A. K., Ford, T. J., & Orben, A. (2025). Social media use in adolescents with and without mental health conditions. Nature human behaviour, 9(6), 1283-1299.
Vuorre, M., & Przybylski, A. K. (2023). Estimating the association between Facebook adoption and well-being in 72 countries. Royal Society open science, 10(8).
Vuorre, M., Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2021). There is no evidence that associations between adolescents’ digital technology engagement and mental health problems have increased. Clinical Psychological Science, 9(5), 823-835.
Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature human behaviour, 3(2), 173-182.
Orben, A., Dienlin, T., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). Social media’s enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(21), 10226-10228.
Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2017). A large-scale test of the goldilocks hypothesis: quantifying the relations between digital-screen use and the mental well-being of adolescents. Psychological science, 28(2), 204-215.
Johannes, N., Vuorre, M., & Przybylski, A. K. (2021). Video game play is positively correlated with well-being. Royal Society open science, 8(2), 202049.
Przybylski, A. K., Rigby, C. S., & Ryan, R. M. (2010). A motivational model of video game engagement. Review of general psychology, 14(2), 154-166.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm
0:02.0	I'm going to be.
0:04.0	The Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus.
0:27.4	Decoding Academia Interview Edition with me.
0:31.1	Matthew Brown, Professor, psychologist, Guy from Australia.
0:35.8	Christopher Kavanaugh, as always, associate adjunct, something professor from
0:40.8	Japan. No, no. Associate professor. Okay, sorry, yep. An anthropologist, extraordinary,
0:46.5	but not really, as he likes to emphasize. And today we got, it's a, is it an interview edition?
0:52.4	It's an academic edition. What is what is it chris well some would say
0:56.4	academic but you know academic that that counts too we have somebody from my old honk mat you might
1:03.7	not have known it but i graduated from the university of oxford i might have yeah you've
1:08.0	probably haven't mentioned that you know and those, Matt, the way they treated me as a
1:13.4	working class member of the proletariat. Just shameful. But that's for another time. We have Andy
1:19.7	Shibilski, who I think I did a reasonable job of pronouncing his name, but I think he could tell
1:25.3	me if it's true. And he is from University of
1:28.6	Oxford's human behavior and technology. That's what you're a professor of, isn't it, Andy?
1:33.5	Yeah, I'm a psychologist. And my main department is something called the Oxford Internet Institute.
1:39.1	Hmm. I'm familiar with it. Yeah. I'm the only psychologist professor there, so that's pretty sweet. But I'm
1:44.8	surrounded on all sides by philosophers, anthropologists, lawyers, you name it. So it's a really
1:51.2	great place to work. I don't mean to be smart you before we start Andy as well, but is it true
1:56.0	that you were psychotherapist in a past life? So no, I did. I was trained with many of the classes that
2:03.6	Matt derides. It's true. I was, I was locked in a, in a university psychology department basement
	...

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