Why You're Still Using Social Media (Even If You Want to Stop) ft. Dr. Cass Sunstein | Happiness Lab

Key Takeaway

Social media platforms function as 'product traps'—goods we consume despite wishing they didn't exist. Research shows people won't pay anything to use social media, yet demand $100 to quit for a month. The solution? When asked how much they'd demand to quit if everyone in their community quit too, most said they'd pay to eliminate it entirely. This reveals we're collectively trapped: we use platforms not because we enjoy them, but because everyone else does.

Episode Overview

Harvard behavioral scientist Cass Sunstein introduces the concept of 'product traps' in his chapter of the 2026 World Happiness Report. A product trap is a good people consume not because it increases their utility (well-being), but because not using it imposes social costs when others are using it. Social media platforms are prime examples: research shows people won't pay to use them but demand significant compensation to quit—unless everyone quits together. The episode explores why we're stuck in these traps despite knowing they harm our well-being, and outlines three paths to escape: community action, company redesign, and regulatory intervention using libertarian paternalism.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why You're Still Using Social Media (Even If You Want to Stop) ft. Dr. Cass Sunstein | Happiness Lab from The Happiness Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

The late American author and media critic Neil Postman once famously wrote, "Technological change is not additive. It is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something. It changes everything." Postman made this observation all the way back in 1992. over a decade before smartphones and over a decade before the launch of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok. Postman's quote feels particularly relevant today, especially given what researchers around the world are learning about the negative effects of these technologies. Researchers like today's guest. I'm Cass Sunstein.

I teach at Harvard. I work on law and behavioral science. I've been working for about seven years on social media and happiness and the divergence between what people choose and what actually makes their lives better. better. better. You might know Cass from his influential book Nudge, which he co-authored with the Nobel Prizewinning economist Richard Thaylor. Nudge explores how small changes in our environments can influence the choices we make. Or you may know Cass from his work in the Obama administration where he helped bring behavioral science into public policy.

I headed the office of information and regulatory affairs analyzing the effects of regulations to make sure that the benefits are higher than the costs. Cass is one of the scholars in behavioral science that I really look up to. He's also one of the most prolific academics I've ever met. I've lost count of the number of books he's written. I think it's well over 50 at this point. And that doesn't even include the hundreds of academic articles he's authored. most of which are about some strange or unexpected aspect of human behavior.

And this year, Cass adds to that long list as one of the authors of the World Happiness Report, an annual academic publication about the state of global well-being. Each year, the World Happiness Report centers on a different theme. The 2026 report is all about how technology affects human happiness. And in true Cass Sunstein fashion, his chapter in this year's report introduces an important new concept. One that I find super helpful for making sense of all the irrational ways we get stuck online in behaviors that tend to decrease our health and our happiness.

People are thinking, given the fact that there is this platform and my people are on it, I'm going to stay on and I'm going to get off it kicking and screaming. But do I like this status quo? I do not like the status quo at all. all. all. So, if you're feeling trapped by your relationship with technology and social media, stay tuned because Cass will share this exciting new concept from his chapter, why this new concept is so important, and what understanding it means for escaping the trap of social media platforms.

media platforms. media platforms. All that when the Happiness Lab returns right after some quick ads from our sponsors. scientist and legal scholar Cass Sunstein spends a lot of time thinking about ways that we can shape our behavior to feel happier and healthier. And he's particularly interested in cases in which people behave in ways that decrease what economists call their utility. Since I'm guessing that many of my listeners aren't trained economists, I asked Cass for a quick definition of utility. Well, it basically means well-being. So, if you have a day where you're really enjoying it and maybe life is very meaningful and you think at the end that was such a great day, that had a lot of utility.

If you had a day where you were in pain or struggling or sad or scared or worried or depressed, that would be a low utility day. So, to think of utility as pretty close to synonymous with well-being is fundamentally right. Economists tend to assume that people are rational. That is, they should consistently behave in ways that maximize their utility. But of course, we do irrational stuff all the time. Like, for example, spending hour after hours scrolling on Instagram or Tik Tok when that behavior makes us feel unproductive and pretty gross.

So, why on earth do so-called rational creatures like us waste so much time on platforms that don't even feel good? That was what Cass set out to explain in his chapter in this year's World Happiness Report. And his explanation involves recognizing something new, that social media isn't just a typical kind of product. Instead, it falls into the category of what Cass calls a product trap. A product trap is something where people buy it because there's some negative thing that happens if they're not the one who's buying it.

So, people sometimes buy goods whose existence they deplore. That phenomenon is I think keenly interesting and pervasive goods that people consume but they wish they weren't around and social media has that form. So people are trapped. They are kind of forced so to speak into a situation where they're on social media even though they would be happier if social media didn't exist. To better understand this idea of a product trap, let's turn to the way that the usual sorts of products, the non-trappy kind, tend to affect utility, let's say I decide to buy a new blender.

There are lots of things about my new blender that might affect how much I like it. Things like how well it blends through big chunks of ice or how easy it is to clean. All stuff related to how well that blender works in my own kitchen. But one thing that won't affect my utility is whether or not lots of other people have bought the same blender. But for a small subset of products, it matters whether other people buy the same thing. Either because keeping up with the Joneses is the main point of buying that product in the first place, think luxury watches or designer handbags, or because the products themselves get better simply because more people are using them.

Think social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Products like these are what Cass calls product traps. And the trap is that the company is able to maneuver you into a situation in which you get the thing because you would incur some sort of social cost if you weren't engaged. So that's a product trap. And now that you have a word for this concept, I bet you're going to start noticing product traps everywhere. This is a vocabulary term that I introduce in my Yale happiness class, and it is the one that the Yale students resonate with the most.

They are just like, I'm so happy that there is a word for this thing that I have been into for a long time. Because I think that so many of the goods that they're supposed to get in life wind up being product traps or just the things that they use all the time. The students brought up filters on the photos that they use. They know it makes them look kind of weird and that it's not great for our body image that we're all using them, but they don't want to be the one person who's not filtering their photos.

people in middle age like me, it'd be things like Botox or, you know, supplements or these things where it's like, I just wish the world didn't have these things. But in fact, given that the world does have them, I feel like I have to use them, too. And when I was talking with my production team, they brought up Elf on a Shelf, which is a holiday example of this where it's like if the kid down the hall is their parents are doing Elf on the Shelf, you feel like you have to do it, too.

But it just kind of makes you miserable. I'll give you two examples if I may. My sister decided one Christmas that the adults would not give each other presents anymore. The presents would only go to children. And everyone thought that was an extremely great thing because for years we'd been giving each other presents where there was no benefit mostly because people would struggle to find something people would like and people didn't really need another tie or whatever. Another example is, you know, I go to Ireland because my wife is Irish and I drink a little bit of alcohol even though I don't drink alcohol anywhere but Ireland.

And the reason is among my beloved Irish relatives, I say, "Sorry, I'm not drinking." The reaction is, "Maybe he's an alcoholic or maybe he's very negative about drinkers." And I'm not an alcoholic. I'm not negative about drinkers, but I give that kind of signal to some Irish relatives. And the idea is that this is a pervasive thing, right? It's not just about the other people using these products. It's about what happens to you if you're the one person who chooses not to use this product. And this is what you've called a consumption spillover or a negative non-user externality.

Walk me through how that works. the non-user externality. That's a little fussier term that we're using where if you're not using the thing, you suffer. So, let's suppose there's a party on a Monday night. Everyone's going and people might think, I'm certainly going to go to the party because if I don't go, I'll be giving a signal to people that I don't like parties, that I don't like the hosts, that I'm an antisocial person, that I'm a workaholic, or that I really like the show on Netflix.

So not going imposes a cost on you and the cost might be you know self-perception or you might think that the other people are going to think what's wrong with that guy but it might be there are some social events that you go to because you kind of have to but if they were cancelled you'd think life is a little bit better bit better bit better and a lot of these product traps where the consumption spillover occurs is because of a specific emotion which is this emotion of FOMO right this is what my Yale students talk about and why I think these product traps are so powerful in college students is like it's literally affecting your sense of belonging.

belonging. belonging. So there's a connection between the product trap phenomenon, the behavioral phenomenon of loss aversion. People dislike losses. They tend to anticipate at least disliking losses about twice as much as they like equivalent gains. If you think that I'm going to miss out, let's say on a Instagram something or on a Tik Tok something, that's a loss. And loss makes people feel very nervous. It's a distinctive kind of fear of missing out which is accompanied by a thought that the thing that you're missing out from you wish weren't occurring.

And the fact that people get trapped in this because of social norms or because of agile let's say company behavior that's really concerning. It might be that anyone can entra almost anyone by triggering fear of missing out. One of the domains or my students instantly saw that they're dealing with a product trap interestingly was with AI and specifically the use of AI to do their schoolwork. Uh the cheapbot use of AI as they call it because I think all of them want to like learn the material and do the essay on their own and get the sense of purpose that comes from that.

But if they know that everyone in the class is using LLM, they feel like, well, I'm a chump if I'm putting my time into this. I should just use these same cheapbot tools that everyone else is. It seems like many of them aren't using it because their own individual benefit of cheating. Many of them just kind of hated the idea that everybody else is using it, but they feel like, well, now I got to use it, too. That's a great example. So AI for many students is a product trap where you wish it didn't exist but contingent on its existence you have to use it.

That's a different mechanism kind of from fear of missing out. It's that you would be performing less well. So product traps are bad for the people who get trapped using these products. But what about for the companies that make these products? It kind of seems like a good deal for them. Oh yeah, it's fantastic. So in business schools, this relatively new stuff should be taught as a technique for attracting customers. So if you're trying to sell a product to say that you don't want to be one of the few who doesn't have it, that can be very effective, especially if it is visible.

So if you're visibly not someone who's using let's say a social media platform that everyone in your group is using that triggers something in the human brain and if there's some product that's visible it might be that the exclusion and the cost that is imposed by people who aren't included is the principal determinant of consumption behavior. So we know that a company would do very well in a very cheerful way to emphasize the wonderfulness of being part of a large community of people who are increasingly visibly buying or engaged in this.

in this. in this. It also seems like companies are doing everything in their power to do this more and more. You can't just have a like internet game. It has to be an internet game where you share your stats with other people. You're always constantly showing off whether or not you're using the product, which of course contributes to the product trappiness of some of these goods. Yeah. Yeah. And if if you don't post your number, you are giving a signal of some maybe embarrassing sort, that you're not participating, that you're not good at the thing, that you're not playful.

And all of these things can be profoundly motivating and they can be exploited in a way that makes people worse off. So, now you know what a product trap is. And I got to admit, it kind of looks like social media platforms qualify. But not so fast, because Cass and other behavioral scientists have a strict empirical test for determining whether a product truly counts as a product trap. One that involves a curiously irrational thing that we tend to do with our money. We'll hear all about that curious monetary behavior right after this quick break.

Like many behavioral economists, Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein spends a lot of time thinking about how people spend their money and more specifically how much people are willing to pay for different products. different products. different products. Suppose the question is, would you benefit from having a book or a dinner? How do we know? Well, we can ask how much you're willing to pay for it. It's kind of the best measure we have. So, if people are willing to pay, let's say, $15 for a book and not 50, then we have some clue of what the book is worth to them in terms of well-being.

So, willingness to pay is the best real world measure we have offhand of what makes people better off. Economists also have lots of theories about how a rational actor's willingness to pay should work. For example, the idea that people will have some dollar amount in their heads that represents a product's utility, how much it's worth to you. So, if someone is willing to pay 50 bucks for, say, a blender, that dollar amount should be about the same if you're thinking about buying the product or selling it.

But blenders and books are regular non-trappy kinds of products, ones that aren't affected all that much by whether other people are buying the same product. Cass was interested in whether social media platforms work differently than books and blenders and whether they qualified as product traps. So I asked people how much you're willing to pay for a month of social media platforms and then I asked a different population how much money would you demand to be off a platform for a month. So the setup is people are asked how much would you pay to use YouTube or pay to use Facebook or pay to use Twitter or how much would you demand to be off and there's a Nobel Prize winning theorem that says the number has to be the same that if people are willing to pay let's say $6 for movie ticket they would demand $6 to give up the movie ticket.

Value is value. And I was testing whether this idea would be reflected in people's valuation of social media platforms, but I got a staggering result. The substantial number of people said, "I'll pay nothing to use social media platforms." And the average answer was pretty low, like5 or $10. So people are saying nothing or they're saying kind of a pittance to use social media platforms. And then to give up use, I got a really big number like people wanted like a $100 on average. So the disparity between how much people would demand to give up use and how much people are willing to pay to use Facebook is 20 to one.

There's a Nobel Prize winning theorem that says it has to be one to one. It was really surprising to me when you showed that people are just not willing to pay anything to be on social media because if you look at just time use, you might have predicted something very different, right? Our young people today, my Yale college students are on average in STEM studies using these platforms for like four hours a day up to eight hours a day. But you ask them how much is it worth to you if you have to pay money for and people are like nothing.

I would never pay to go on this stuff. What does that tell you? So there are a couple different possibilities. One is people are anchoring on the current price which is zero. So if the current price is zero and they're asked how much will you pay they'll say zero or they'll maybe adjust a little bit up from zero to 5 or 10. Another explanation is that people think that they're wasting their time. So I bet for a certain percentage of my population people thought yeah I spent a lot of time on it but it's dumb and I'm not going to buy that terrible waste of time.

I'll pay you nothing. And then there's a third explanation which is a number of people might have just been mad. So having enjoyed so to speak a good for free then they're asked how much would you pay for it they say what are you talking about this is free like if people are asked how much would you pay for clean air or the opportunity to breathe oxygen they might say zero in a survey because they're rebelling against the very idea that they'd have to pay. So those are three explanations.

I think the most fun explanation is that people think they're wasting time. So, we need a category. Let's call them wasting time goods where people devote a lot of minutes and maybe even hours to a thing, but they know on reflection that it's not doing them any good, so they're not going to pay for them. And so researchers did a study which actually paid people to get off Facebook for a month. Tell me about that study. So there's this study by Alcott and others has one thing very much in common with mine.

What was elicited was how much would you demand to be off. The difference is people were actually paid to be off and then it turns out they have a good month. So they're more satisfied with their life. They're less depressed. They're less anxious. And every measure that's thrown at them, it's a good month. And then they're asked after that good month, how much would you, the relevant person who had a good month, demand to be off Facebook? And on average, people give approximately the same number they gave before they experienced the good month.

Having said $100 the first round, the average answer the second round is $86. Now, the part that's kind of intuitive about that is 86 is lower than 100. So people learn that it's kind of good to be off. they don't demand as much. But the wild part is that having had a good month, they should say, "You don't have to pay me anything. I'm getting off. This is not a good thing for me. I just learned I had a great month." And we found none of that.

They asked for 86. That's that's weird. The authors of the study don't know how to explain it. But Cass did have an explanation. Cass reasoned that the participants may totally recognize that they don't enjoy being on Tik Tok or Instagram, but they feel like they have to be because everyone else is. They were suffering from that negative non-user externality that Cass mentioned before the break. Their own utility was worse off because so many other people were using social media platforms. They were product trapped. But was Cass's hypothesis right?

Well, researchers recruited a new group of participants and asked them a different willingness to pay question. How much would you demand to be off contingent on everyone in your community being off? That's the product trap question. And what they found was if you ask people how much would you demand to be off, you got the standard answers as in my study. So people say I will require you to pay a lot to be off these platforms in this case Tik Tok and Instagram. $50, $60, $70, $100.

People are going to demand real money to be off. But then if people and these are college students are asked how much would you demand to be off contingent on everyone in your community being off then they say if everyone in the community is off then I will pay you you don't have to pay me a nickel that's the dominant sentiment and the explanation there is a little more intuitive I think which is people are thinking given the fact that there is this platform and my people are on it I'm going to stay on and I'm going to get off it at kicking and screaming.

But do I like this status quo? I do not like the status quo at all. If you ask me, would I want to live in a world that didn't have Tik Tok or Instagram? Large numbers of people say absolutely. I'll pay you real money to produce it. This is a very profound finding and we're now studying it in multiple domains with respect to Starbucks and iPhones and multiple products. But there's a an assortment of goods which people enjoy in the sense that they devote time or money to them only because other people are enjoying them in that sense, but they're not really enjoying them at all.

I mean, this is pretty fascinating just as a happiness researcher in general because I think we're so locked into people's individual utility. We tend not to think about collective utility, but I think this is a really special case of collective utility where it's like the collective utility is itself making us choose things that are bad for us. Right. Completely. And it's a really tough collective action problem to get yourself out of a product trap. It is a really tough collective action problem, but it's also not impossible.

We'll explore what we can do to escape product traps when the happiness lab returns from the break. I'm speaking with Harvard law professor and behavioral scientist Cass Sunstein about his chapter in this year's World Happiness Report. The research Cass has shared so far paints a pretty bleak conclusion. Even when people recognize that social media hurts their well-being, many still feel compelled to keep using it so long as other people are using it too. Social media, in other words, is a classic product trap, which frankly kind of sucks.

So given that most people aren't leaving these platforms anytime soon, how do we break free? Cass says that behavioral science suggests at least three different paths forward. First, there are individuals, communities of individuals. their companies and their regulators. So, first line of defense, communities. So, people can band together like my sister and my family did to say adults aren't going to get Christmas presents. You can have a community of we're not going to give our kids cell phones until 8th grade. You're exiting from the product trap by virtue of some kind of collective agreement.

Now this is happening all over the country. Schools can help by saying no cell phones in schools and that can be supplemented by parental efforts or there can be agreements among people that just say we're going to limit our time on social media. And this is just a a self-help remedy on the part of groups who are alert to the existence of the product trapped who can publicize its existence and make things better and better is good even if it doesn't lead to perfection. Then there are the companies and they're right now in a bind where it appears that some of their economic interests are competing with their values and also their desire not to get a regulatory hammer.

Instagram has done a bunch of things to try to discourage young people from being on their platform and for getting more sleep. So there's a lot that the companies could do. On the regulatory side, I'd be very cautious just because I'm that kind of guy and because we're talking about speech. But you could imagine disclosure requirements for example or when I was in the government, we would sometimes do guidance documents and if the government has a best practice for let's say social media platforms with respect to product traps, that can do a lot of good.

I mean, I'm excited that you're using the term product trap and that this has taken off among students because the term is actually quite new. It wasn't a thing. The very existence of a phrase can provide the ingredients for a solution. We're seeing this starting early days, but I'm hopeful that we're going to see a lot more in the next 6 months. months. months. I love this idea of having the phrase that can be so so helpful. One of the things I find most compelling about product traps was how my students reacted when I first presented this idea in the happiness class.

These light bulbs went off where they just felt like so much of the stuff that they spend time on is one of these things. These things that they feel like has little value for themselves, maybe is time wasting, maybe is actively harmful, but they have to do it because everybody else is doing it. And I feel like with social media, there was an interesting transition talking to my students when it was just the like Facebook days of social media. I think people didn't realize it was as much of a product trap as it was in part because it wasn't so negatively affecting students utility just kind of being on social media.

But I think in the age of Tik Toks and reals when students feel like they're really sucked in and they can kind of feel it in the moment of the product use, I think they all get this really really clearly. clearly. clearly. Yes. So people know that they're trapped with respect to social media platforms. There are other domains where people are trapped and they don't know. And this is a little like a clue about the nonisolated nature of this problem. So these product traps are everywhere.

Are there past examples of people solving them? Well, what has worked in the past to solve them? I think liquor and cigarettes are two clear examples where young people would smoke and drink and some number of them wish people weren't doing that. And that's our three strategies which is individuals doing things to prevent the product trap from damaging them or companies trying to do things. You know, it might be a ban on smoking in public places or something which has an expressive effect and ripples over or it might be government doing something.

I'll tell you a very provocative idea which my co-authors and I are playing with which is we're dealing with a non-user externality here. And the way you handle externalities typically is impose a financial thing. So taxes as a response. And for cigarettes that's actually been done. There is stiff cigarette taxes which have contributed to the extraordinary reduction in smoking rates in the United States. And for many young smokers, it took exactly the same form as what we're talking about for social media platforms where young people would say, "I'm going to smoke." Sure.

Do I wish they were smoking? No. And if we'd run an experiment like the ones we've talked about, we would have found that people would demand a lot to give up smoking, but would probably pay for a world in which no one in their group was smoking. And this gets to an idea for which you are very well known. This idea that we can find freedom in what's known as libertarian paternalism. What is this idea? idea? idea? The idea is there are ways of intervening that completely respect people's freedom.

So they're libertarian, but that also steer people in a direction that they wouldn't otherwise go. That makes their lives go better. So libertarian, some people are paternalist, some people are, they typically don't agree with each other. But if you think of a GPS device or a warning, for example, that certain foods have allergens, both of those are liberty preserving. You can eat the food with the allergens. You can say, "I see it has shrimp and peanuts, and I'm allergic to neither of them, and so I'm going to go for it." Or you can say, "I see the GPS device says, here's the way to go to New Haven.

I have my own way, or I have a scenic way, and I'm going to use that." So, it's liberty preserving, hence libertarian, but a GPS device is paternalistic. It tells you here's how you ought to go. So, nudges are typically a form of libertarian paternalism. that is they preserve your freedom as when you see a nutrition facts panel at the grocery store. It kind of pushes you a little bit but it doesn't take your freedom of choice away. away. away. And so what would libertarian paternalism look like in the social media case?

media case? media case? I'd like to see a lot of libertarian paternalism in the social media case in the first instance from the companies. So if a company says you've been on for 5 hours, consider getting off. That's libertarian paternalism. A little like cars will say if you've been driving for a long time, you want to take a break. That's libertarian paternalism. The company could nudge people to take breaks to be off their platform at certain hours to join the growing number of people, let's say, who aren't using social media late at night.

There are any number of nudges that companies could use. We can also imagine the government requiring disclosure of the policies companies adopt to hook users. So sunlight just as Brandise said is the best of disinfectants. We could have very light touch regulation and that would be designed to liberate people maybe from product traps. The good news is it's sounding like even though these things are traps, if we can team up with our communities, there's ways we can get out of them. Sure. And if we look at the arc of human history, even in the last 20 years, there's been an implicit understanding that certain things are not good for us and people have found their way out again with massive success stories.

Social media may feel like something we're stuck with, but history shows that when we start to recognize patterns that make us worse off, we often find ways to change them. Step one is to name the problem. The next time you're feeling stuck on social media or with some other product you're using just because everyone else is, name what's going on. You can even say to yourself, "There's a reason I'm feeling this way because I'm dealing with a product trap." Step number two, take action. Sometimes that means working with your community to set new norms.

Sometimes it means advocating that the companies involved redesign their products, and sometimes it means government stepping in with new rules. Recognizing product traps for what they are can help us reshape the environment around these technologies so that they serve our well-being rather than quietly undermining it. That's all for today, but if you'd like to learn more about how social media functions as a product trap, check out this year's World Happiness Report, which you can download for free at worldhappiness.report. worldhappiness.report. worldhappiness.report. And if you have thoughts about today's episode, we'd love to hear them.

You can email us at happinesslabpushkin.fm happinesslabpushkin.fm happinesslabpushkin.fm FM or leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website drlissantos.com. website drlissantos.com. website drlissantos.com. That's dr rau r i e s a n os.com. We'll be back in 2 weeks with a brand new season about how to spring clean your well-being. And we'll be doing our own in-house spring cleaning as we head back into the happiness lab archive to dig up some of our favorite tips.

So, be sure to come back soon for the next episode of the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Avari Santos.