Episode
Decoding Academia: Moral Entrepreneurs, Measurement Issues, & Screentime with Andrew Przybylski (Patreon Preview)
- Podcast
- Decoding the Gurus
- Published
- Feb 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4389
- Processing state
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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…