Flaws in a Recent Lancet Study on Phone Use in Schools

By: Jon Haidt, Zach Rausch, and Alec McClean

A recent study published in The Lancet (Goodyear et al., 2025) has generated newsheadlinessuggesting that restricting phone use in schools has no effect on the wellbeing or academic performance of students. This contradicts severalpreviousstudiesthat did find such benefits.

‍

In this post, we lay out several flaws in the design and interpretation of the Lancet study, and several oddities in the data that we believe render its “no benefit” conclusion unjustified.

The authors of the study claimed to have

[E]valuated the impact of school phone policies by comparing outcomes in adolescents who attended schools that restrict and permit phone use.

The word “impact” implies the ability to discern causality. The authors then assert that,

[T]here is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents

and conclude that

[T]here is no evidence to support that restrictive school phone policies, in their current forms, have a beneficial effect on adolescents’ mental health and wellbeing or related outcomes, indicating that the intentions of these policies to improve adolescent health, wellbeing, and educational engagement are not realised.

Read the full essay here.