Leonardo Bursztyn, the Saieh Family Professor of Economics, became interested in the puzzling fact that young people spend so much time on social media and at the same time experience negative mental health effects from it.
Last fall, he co-authored a paper on “social media traps” that combined experiments and surveys to show that a large fraction of college students who use popular social media platforms actually wished the platforms did not exist.
Motivated by these findings, Bursztyn built a team and is now launching an app called NOMO: No Missing Out that aims to help users reduce time on social media by “combining community, fun and social good to drive real change.”
A Less Social Media, More Real Life NOMO challenge for UChicago College students launches on October 20, and we sat down with Prof. Bursztyn to talk a bit about the project and how it works.
What did your research find?
Students told us that while they would need to be paid to stop using social media platforms for a month, they are willing to pay to get these same platforms removed from their college campus for a month.
This and other parts of research imply that a large number of young people would like to spend less on social media but find it hard to do it because their friends are all active on it. This is a problem of coordination.
What is NOMO?
It's unrealistic to get people to delete their apps, and it is also difficult to get them to reduce their use of social media alone—most people would feel FOMO. So we are providing a tool we think will be helpful called NOMO. It allows users to start or join groups with their friends to reduce their social media usage together via fun challenges.
The app offers challenges in which users spend less than one hour per day on popular social media platforms, together with their friends. If the group wins the challenge, the app makes charitable donations and also gives the users other perks.
How do challenges work?
It’s easy to join, students can download the NOMO app and register using their email address. From there, they can also invite their friends to join.
On October 20, NOMO is launching a two-week Less Social Media, More Real Life challenge open to UChicago students, aiming to help them spend less time on social media. All they need to do to get started is register for NOMO with a UChicago email.
Prizes for the UChicago challenge include Starbucks drinks, donations to local animal shelters and tickets to Billie Eilish’s sold-out Chicago show. The House that gets the largest share of students completing in the challenge will win free tickets to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
Students choosing to take time away from social media will have time on their hands—what are some suggested activities on or around campus?
UChicago's campus has an incredibly rich selection of activities—from museums to movie screenings, athletic events to lectures from the top scholars in the world, and more.
NOMO provides a schedule of campus activities and we hope students will take advantage and go explore real life on campus, with their friends!