The author of this wonderful little book is a professor of developmental psychology at Université Paris Descartes, and a CNRS researcher in experimental psychology.
Through this very pleasant and accessible essay, Nicolas Poirel teaches us how to read scientific studies: what do they bring us? How far can we make them speak… or not? What are the proven effects of screens on children? And which ones, sometimes widely relayed in the media, are a matter of supposition, fantasy or extrapolation?
Let us cite three telling examples developed in this book:
- Cognitive biases in causal attribution
Many articles, in the general or specialist press, report “clinical observations” and draw hasty conclusions from them. While such observations are useful for guiding research, they must not replace the results of that research.
If we say: “I notice that aeroplanes make noise”, does that entitle us to say: “Everything that makes noise is an aeroplane”? Obviously not! Yet it is this shortcut that is often the cause of “fake news” on the question of the effects of screens. A clinician says: “I notice that children with violent behaviour play a lot of war video games”. It is then tempting to conclude: “Children who play a lot of war video games have violent behaviour”. Yet this is no truer than saying that everything that makes noise is an aeroplane! It is a reasoning bias. Only scientific research could establish a causal link between looking at screens and violent behaviour.
- Which scientific studies can prove a causal link?
This is where the problem becomes complex. The only research that could prove that playing a lot of war video games makes you violent would rely on a protocol contrary to any form of ethics. It would be necessary to form a homogeneous population of children (in terms of age and sociological and psychopathological data), to assign them by lot to a group heavily exposed to war video games and to a second, unexposed group, and then to compare the behavioural development of these two groups. Since this type of study is obviously unacceptable to an ethics committee, a different approach is taken: it is based on children’s existing habits. A group of children already playing war video games is formed, along with a group that does not play them, and the behaviours of the children in the two groups are compared. But this tells us nothing about the causal link between war video games and violent behaviour. What was these players’ behaviour before they started playing? Did they already behave violently, for example in the playground? And if so, did this violent behaviour increase under the effect of video games? Or, why not, decrease? We can therefore see that the protocols used do not make it possible to settle the question.
- Babies in front of the television and attention disorders
Here again, a widely relayed idea is that exposing toddlers to television leads to an attention deficit. A study has indeed shown that a statistically significant number of children aged 1 to 3 heavily exposed to television showed a decrease in attention scores at the age of 7 (Foster and Watkins, 2010). However, there is a difference between a “decrease in attention scores” and an “attention deficit”. In this study, crossing the line between a decrease and a genuine deficit concerns only 10% of the 1,159 children observed, with exposure times of over 7 hours a day! Unfortunately, the messages broadcast in the media are rarely this precise, and retain from this type of study only an approximate and therefore misleading claim, liable to make parents anxious.
Beyond the very illuminating examples he gives, Nicolas Poirel invites us, through this book, to understand how misinformation and fake news are made. For you can make scientific studies say anything when you lack rigour in reading them, whether through negligence or to serve an ideology.
Medical director of the Hôpital de Jour pour Enfants André Boulloche in Paris, she works more particularly on the relationships young people have with screens, communication with young children, and autism.
