Hello, this is Caitlin Luna, host of Speaking of Psychology.

This podcast was recorded live during the 2018 APA convention in San Francisco.

It's about the dark side of screen time.

Enjoy.

I'm joined by Dr. Adam Alter, a New York Times best-selling author and psychologist. His most recent book explores the dark sides of screen time and how our devices are affecting our well-being and happiness.

Dr. Alter is also an associate professor of marketing at New York University, and his research is about

judgment and decision-making and social psychology. Welcome, Dr. Alter.

Thanks, to having me. Happy to have you here today.

So I watched a TED talk of yours where you were talking about between 2007 and 2017, about

all the time in our daily lives. So taking out time for sleeping, work, commuting, eating, that sort of thing,

we have this precious few hours of our personal time.

And you noted that in those 10 years, the amount of personal time

we spent on a screen time rose exponentially.

Can you explain more about that?

Yeah, so we don't have that many hours in the day when we aren't doing things like working,

sleeping, eating, taking care of other people, certain things that are kind of fixed, and

that leaves this period of a few hours that's open to us. It's discretionary, it's personal time.

And we've always spent some of that

time as a population on screens because we've watched TV for many decades. And so in 2007,

before the introduction of the first generation of the iPhone, we spent about 30 or 40% of that

time on TV, on screens, and to some extent on computers as well. But with

the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, there was a huge rise in the

...