• Legal Trends: courts and lawmakers increasingly categorize heavy social media use as addiction despite lacking scientific consensus.
• Legislative Actions: various bills and regional bans seek to restrict minor access and mandate design changes on digital platforms.
• Definitional Confusion: public policy frequently conflates distinct concepts like physiological dependence and behavioral habits with clinical addiction.
• Diagnostic Limits: addiction requires compulsive engagement despite harmful consequences whereas many online behaviors remain simple routines or habits.
• Scientific Flaws: existing research relies on fragmented data and correlational studies that fail to establish direct causation between social media and mental health.
• Financial Incentives: recognition of a new clinical disorder expands insurance billing opportunities and fuels a growing rehabilitation industry.
• Institutional Risks: history shows that subjective diagnostic criteria lead to overdiagnosis and inflated medical spending for ordinary human behaviors.
• Policy Consequences: premature medicalization threatens individual privacy and free speech while inviting excessive government oversight of digital platforms.

A movement is underway to classify heavy social media use as a form of addiction. Advocacy groups, plaintiffs’ attorneys, and a growing number of lawmakers are treating the proposition as settled science. In a landmark California trial in early 2026, a jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing platforms that allegedly caused mental health harm, awarding $6 million in damages. 

In Congress, the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media platforms to prevent specified harms to minors, including “compulsive usage,” and to disable addictive product features by default, has advanced out of committee in both chambers. Additional bills would ban children under age 16 from using social media entirely, require age verification at the app store level, and expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to cover minors up to age 17. Australia has enacted an outright ban on social media for children under 16 years old.

The pace of legal and legislative action suggests a society that has made up its mind. But the underlying science has not. The research base on social media addiction remains fragmented, methodologically inconsistent, and far from the kind of consensus that would ordinarily justify the regulatory and legal apparatus now being built around it. As we have argued in our earlier analysis of how the American health care system rewards psychiatric overdiagnosis, when diagnosis is subjective and payment depends on diagnosis, the system will predictably expand the boundaries of illness. Social media addiction is poised to become the next case study in that dynamic, with consequences that extend well beyond health care spending into the domains of free speech, privacy, and innovation.

Addiction, Dependence, and Habit Are Not the Same Thing

Before asking whether social media is addictive, it is worth clarifying what addiction actually means, because politicians, journalists, and even some clinicians routinely misuse the term. As one of us has previously argued, the conflation of addiction with dependence and habit distorts both public understanding and public policy.

These three concepts describe very different things. Dependence is a physiological adaptation in which abruptly stopping a substance produces withdrawal symptoms. It is common and, by itself, unremarkable. Anyone who has ever quit coffee cold turkey and spent the next two days with a splitting headache has experienced caffeine dependence. Patients who take certain antidepressants, benzodiazepines (e.g., Valium), antiepileptic drugs, or beta blockers for extended periods develop physical dependence as well. If they stop abruptly, they will experience withdrawal. In some cases, withdrawal can be fatal. Yet no one would claim that patients taking beta blockers long term for high blood pressure or antiepileptic medications for a seizure disorder are addicted to those drugs.

A habit is something different still. Habits are behavioral patterns, often automatic, that people repeat because they find them pleasurable, comforting, or simply routine. Checking social media first thing in the morning, scrolling through a feed while waiting in line, or reaching for the phone out of boredom: These are habits. They may be unwise. They may waste time. They may even be difficult to break. But difficulty is not pathology. People also find it hard to stop snacking, binge-watching television, or hitting the snooze button. We do not diagnose these behaviors as diseases.

Addiction is distinct from both. The American Society of Addiction Medicine’s definition states: “Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.” Addiction can involve substances or activities. For example, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classifies gambling disorder as an addiction. 

The defining feature is compulsive behavior: repeated engagement despite clear harm to relationships, finances, or health. This pattern reflects changes in the brain’s reward and decisionmaking circuits that erode self-control. But people with addiction do not completely surrender agency; they are not zombie-like automatons at the mercy of a substance or activity. Even in the grip of addiction, many will avoid use in certain settings, delay it when consequences are immediate, or respond to incentives—evidence that agency, though impaired, is still intact.

When the term “addiction” is applied loosely to heavy social media use, it skips over the crucial middle category of habit and confers a clinical gravity that the evidence does not support. Someone who checks Instagram too often or finds it hard to put down TikTok almost certainly has an unhealthy habit. Calling it an addiction equates that behavior with the compulsive, life-destroying patterns seen in substance use disorders.

This distinction matters because “addiction” is not a neutral word—it has specific consequences enshrined in policy. Once applied, it unlocks diagnosis codes, insurance payments, treatment industries, lawsuits, and regulation. We don’t create Medicaid billing categories for habits. We don’t pass federal laws to shield children from habits. Label something “addiction,” and the entire policy engine comes to life. That label should follow the science, not lead it.

What Does the Research Actually Show?

Much of the existing research on social media and mental health suffers from serious methodological limitations. The majority of studies rely on self-reported measures administered at a single point in time. They can identify correlations between heavy social media use and negative mental health outcomes, but they cannot establish the direction of causation. It is equally plausible that individuals already experiencing depression, anxiety, or social isolation turn to social media as a coping mechanism rather than social media causing those conditions.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics analyzed 143 studies examining the effects of social media use on mental health among over one million adolescents worldwide. Overall associations were small and inconsistent across studies and often confounded by other factors such as personality and social support. The evidence base being cited to justify sweeping policy interventions is built on faulty scientific ground, as one of us recently argued in the Washington Post.

None of that means excessive social media use cannot be harmful for certain individuals. Some people undoubtedly experience significant distress and functional impairment related to their online habits. But the question of whether a behavior causes harm in some people is different from the question of whether it constitutes a discrete clinical disorder, and the latter question is far from resolved.

Why We Should Not Trust the Diagnostic Authorities to Get This Right

Proponents of recognizing social media addiction as a disorder often point to the DSM and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as the bodies that will eventually resolve the question. But formal inclusion in these manuals would not settle the science. It would settle the payment. And the track record of these manuals should inspire caution, not confidence.

Formal classification matters because of what it triggers financially. In the American health care system, a diagnosis unlocks reimbursement. A recognized social media addiction diagnosis would trigger insurance coverage under the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which requires health plans, including Medicaid managed care, to cover behavioral health services at parity with medical and surgical services. Under fee-for-service billing, providers increase revenue by increasing the volume of services delivered, and subjective diagnostic criteria provide the discretion to do so. The system fixes the price of a service but introduces no effective mechanism for governing whether the service was clinically necessary. 

The DSM has progressively broadened the boundaries of psychiatric illness over successive revisions, often without corresponding improvements in diagnostic precision. Its fifth edition collapsed previously distinct autism categories into a single spectrum elastic enough to encompass both nonverbal children requiring constant care and socially awkward adolescents who prefer solitude. It loosened ADHD criteria, allowing symptom onset as late as age 12 rather than requiring it by age 7, and reduced the symptom threshold for adults. Generalized anxiety disorder requires only that worry be “excessive” and cause “clinically significant distress or impairment,” judgments that depend entirely on a clinician’s interpretation of where normal worry ends and disorder begins. Each revision has expanded the population eligible for diagnosis and, with it, the population eligible for treatment and reimbursement.

As we documented in our recent analysis of Medicaid-funded autism therapy, the broadening of autism spectrum criteria, combined with Medicaid’s open-ended reimbursement structure, produced an explosion in spending on applied behavior analysis therapy that far outpaced any plausible change in the actual prevalence of disabling autism. The broadening of ADHD criteria produced a parallel surge in stimulant prescriptions. In each case, the combination of subjective diagnosis and financial incentives that reward diagnosis pushed the boundaries of illness outward.

Social media addiction, if formalized, will follow the same trajectory. A social media addiction rehabilitation industry is already emerging: Specialized retreats, counseling programs, and screen-time management apps are marketing themselves to anxious parents and burned-out professionals. That industry will expand dramatically the moment a formal diagnosis is established—a new special interest group, funded in significant part by taxpayer dollars and private insurance premiums. 

We have already seen this dynamic play out when unhealthy habits become medically pathologized. The inclusion of “gaming disorder” in the ICD-11 in 2019 is a cautionary example rather than a reassuring precedent. A large group of scholars published an open letter opposing the classification, warning that it rested on a low-quality evidence base, that the diagnostic criteria leaned too heavily on substance use and gambling frameworks without adequate validation for behavioral contexts, and that official classification would generate a “tsunami of false positive referrals to treatment.” The scholars were particularly concerned that premature classification would pathologize ordinary recreational activity and cause significant stigma. That gaming disorder made it into the ICD-11 despite these objections is not evidence that the process works. It is evidence that diagnostic classification is driven as much by political and institutional momentum as by scientific rigor. Anyone who believes that social media addiction will receive more careful treatment from these same institutions is not paying attention.

What Comes Next

This pattern is by now familiar. Subjective diagnostic criteria and financial incentives that reward diagnosis have repeatedly produced policy responses that were disproportionate, costly, and harmful. The social media addiction debate is following the same trajectory. If we do not insist on scientific rigor before enshrining a diagnosis in law and policy, we will once again find ourselves managing the consequences of a premature consensus.

The question is not whether social media can be used in unhealthy ways. Of course it can. The question is what happens when we reclassify those behaviors as a medical disorder before the science supports that classification. When diagnosis is subjective and incentives reward diagnosis, the boundaries of illness expand. More diagnoses generate more treatment, more spending, and more regulation—along with greater government intrusion into choices that were once considered matters of personal judgment.

That reclassification also invites litigation. Once courts accept the premise of “addiction,” lawsuits will pressure platforms to alter or restrict lawful content and design features, often through settlement agreements negotiated outside the legislative process. Lawmakers, responding to a perceived epidemic, will layer on additional restrictions—limiting access, mandating intrusive age verification, and expanding regulatory oversight of online speech. As our colleagues at Cato have argued, these interventions threaten free expression and innovation while doing little to address the underlying concerns about children’s welfare and risk undermining online speech and privacy for users of all ages. The costs will be measured not only in dollars but also in diminished speech, eroded privacy, and the further medicalization of ordinary human behavior.

When the science is unsettled and the incentives to expand diagnosis are strong, we must be cautious. At bottom, this is a question of restraint.

We should be especially careful before turning a widespread human behavior into a medical disorder, because once we do, the consequences will extend far beyond the people we are trying to help.

• Legal Victory: the high court ruled that live facial recognition technology complies with domestic and european human rights laws
• Court Oversight: lord justice holgate and mrs justice farbey determined that the police policy is sufficiently prescribed by law
• Police Argument: the metropolitan police service views the decision as a critical advancement for public safety and operational efficiency
• Crime Statistics: the metropolitan police service reports thousands of arrests facilitated by the technology including violent and sexual offenders
• False Identifications: legal challenges highlighted incidents where individuals were mistakenly identified and detained by automated systems
• Demographic Disparity: data indicates that the technology produces higher rates of false positives for black individuals compared to other groups
• Independent Assessment: the national physical laboratory performs safety tests while the police maintain that demographic imbalances are not statistically significant
• Ongoing Litigation: challengers intend to appeal the verdict to address concerns regarding mass surveillance and the potential for wrongful criminalization

Financial crises are never alike. What they all have in common is a proliferation of strange stories. The 1929 crash came with stories of shoeshine boys giving stock tips based on something they overheard. Investors thought in the early 2000s that complex financial instruments and modern methods of mathematical finance would make it safe for them to invest in dodgy mortgage products. The stupidity of these narratives was captured in a book, This Time is Different, written by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. Financial euphoria usually arises from amnesia about financial history.

The shoeshine boy of our age is the US soldier who placed a $400,000 wager on Polymarket, a betting exchange, ahead of the January capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. But the strangest story of all is one that most people have easily missed for it is hidden deep inside the financial pages. America’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that several Gulf States, including the United Arab Emirates, have requested dollar swap lines with the US. In a swap two parties agree to exchange something — in this case, US dollars for the UAE’s own currency, the dirham. A swap line would be an arrangement where UAE can trigger a swap at a moment’s notice.

But why would they want to do this? The UAE is very wealthy. The amount of dollars it already holds is more than 10 times the size of the US administration’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, which would be the counterparty to the swap. Gita Gopinath, a former deputy director and chief economist of the IMF, says this may indicate that “the consequences of the Iran conflict are far greater than what we see priced in markets. Such explorations do not arise lightly, even behind closed doors.”

Brad Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that there is something radically new happening here. To him, it looks like a dodgy off-balance sheet transaction “with the Emirates getting the upside”.

Manipulation of betting markets and dodgy swaps are plausible tell-tale signs of a coming financial crisis. I do not know how the Iran war will end, but the diplomacy is more difficult than President Donald Trump pretends; this was illustrated over the weekend when the US President called off the planned trip to Pakistan by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. A full diplomatic solution will take time to prepare and agree. Once agreed, it will take more time to put into place. This will take months. Even then, oil and gas prices will not drop back to where they were before because the war has caused permanent damage to infrastructure such as pipelines and processing facilities. Shipping and insurance companies will take time to assess when it will be safe to resume travel through the Strait of Hormuz.

If Iran were to receive any revenues from traffic through the strait, as Trump has suggested, that would set a costly precedent for the world economy — a tax on international shipping. Inspired by the Revolutionary Guards, the Indonesian finance minister, Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, said his country, too, was considering imposing a toll on ships passing through the Strait of Malacca. This strait is even more important to the global economy than Hormuz. Approximately 40% of global trade passes through it.

These measures would defy the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which establishes the principle that no state has sovereignty over the seas. If we gave up on this idea, it would be a leap back into the ages of pirates and gunboat diplomacy. We would not only be undoing the past 30 years of globalization but the last 200. Times would indeed be different if we went down that path.

We should not think for a moment that a quick and dirty peace deal, a US capitulation, would be the least bad outcome for the global economy. The biggest risk for the world economy is not a spike in oil prices, nor temporary shortages of urea and helium. Supply shocks are bad, but they are the kind of shocks for which you can prepare.

The bigger short-term risk would be a new global financial crisis, one that could be triggered not only by a long war, but also by a bad settlement. By that, I do not mean a collapse in stock markets as a primary driver of the crisis. If the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz were to lead to a global recession, it could unleash a whole sequence of crises in other parts of the financial sector, for sovereign private debt in particular. That’s why people like me, who follow global financial flows, are so spooked when they hear about the US/UAE conversations regarding a currency swap. If this were just a dodgy deal, that would probably be the most benign explanation. But it could also mean that they are preparing for a cardiac arrest in the global financial system. In this scenario, UAE banks might find it suddenly very difficult to borrow dollars; and in this case, a swap line would help keep the global financial system moving. But that system would be under extreme stress. And in this scenario, we would no longer be talking about the price of diesel or shortages of kerosene but about a Greater Depression. And, yes, stock prices would fall too. But that would be the least of our problems.

There is one big difference, though, between today and 2008. Back then, world leaders came together to fix the crisis. The Group of Twenty, until then a debating club of central bankers and finance ministers, held its first G20 summit at the level of heads of state and government in November 2008 in Washington. The Americans, the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans were all sitting around a table, ready to set up new financial rules and agree a coordinated economic stimulus. For the first time, European leaders whose countries took part in the euro met as a distinct Eurozone. Our multilateral governance system was still intact then.

I have no nostalgia for those days. What the leaders decided back then worked in the short term but caused long-term damage to Western economies and democracies. Monetary quantitative easing and fiscal austerity were the most disastrous economic policy decisions anyone has taken this century. Both happened without democratic checks and balances. The reasons why the multilateralists got so upset about Brexit was that it was the first successful backlash against multilateralism.

So I am not mourning the passing of the age of multilateralism. But we have to understand the consequences of its passing. If the global economy went into a cardiac arrest, as it did in late 2008, we should not expect our politicians to come together as they did then and agree on a quick fix — or any fix. They will blame each other, as they do now. This new financial crisis will play out without proper intervention.

In such a world, one that has abandoned multilateralism, it will be more important than ever for the superpowers to exert strategic restraint. China looks superficially restrained politically, but its economic policies are beyond reckless. Indeed, China is by far the biggest contributor to global economic imbalances. And China may, at some unknown point in the future, launch a military attack on Taiwan.

Vladimir Putin is no man of restraint either, and nor is Trump. We know that Trump is, by nature, an impulsive gambler. There is no chance that anyone would confuse him with a strategic actor. He clearly miscalculated when he ordered the attack on Iran. It would be a triumph of hope over experience if Trump were to embrace the idea of strategic patience going forward. Trump and his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, have surrounded themselves with yes-men. There is nobody in the administration left willing to speak truth to power. Hegseth fired critical generals together with senior officials, most recently John Phelan, the secretary of the Navy. Trump has no permanent national security adviser. Mario Rubio, the secretary of state, fills this role part-time. We know that JD Vance was a war skeptic, but he is not going to stand up to Trump either.

The current generation of Europeans leaders are rules-based creatures, none more so than Prime Minister Keir Starmer. They are mourning the passing of the multilateral age. Strategic, long-term thinking is alien to them.

Amid the gloom, there is, however, one big potential upside. AI remains the optimists’ most plausible story, a rational reason for market valuations being as high as they are today. AI is potentially the most significant innovation since electricity. It could change the way we work and live more than any other technological innovations we have experienced in our lifetimes.

But the age-old rules of investment still apply. This time can only ever be different to the extent that AI will affect economic productivity growth. The effects of AI have only just started to show up in some economic figures in the US. I myself believe that AI will be a life-transforming technology. But we won’t know for sure for some time yet.

This, in turn, means that the spoils of AI will almost surely not arrive in time to save us from the folly of this war, and the commercial and financial havoc it will unleash. In that sense, this time will indeed be different, but not in a good way.

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Wolfgang Munchau is the Director of Eurointelligence and an UnHerd columnist.

EuroBriefing

Lighting up a Marlboro Red after a lovely tapas lunch at one of my favorite restaurants recently, at a pavement table in the shameless sunshine, feeling very pleased with the world, I was cross to read in my newspaper that Parliament had at last settled on a final draft of the legislation which seeks to prevent anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 from ever knowing the pleasures of a post-prandial fag. The legislation, which is due to receive royal assent this week, will make it illegal for shops to sell tobacco to anyone currently aged 17 or younger, thereby creating a “smoke-free generation”. It’s interesting how the expectations of generations have become so banal down the decades; from the Love Generation to the Smoke-Free generation, a cohort defined by an absence.

This strange plan — with a soupçon of science fiction about it, due to the odd device of the cut-off point, achieved by raising the legal smoking age by one year, every year — is a minor reminder that Rishi Sunak was ever prime minister. Our Glorious Leader Keir Starmer seems to have been with us for so long now — like a kind of political psoriasis — that it seems oddly time-warping to recall that it was only two years ago that the “loveless landslide” happened, making lady columnists feel “fruity” and their male counterparts deeply relieved that “the adults” were “back in the room”.

But before him, there was that nice Mr Sunak, who once admitted at the age of 21, in a 2001 television program called Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, that he had no working-class friends: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are working-class…well, not working-class.” Though it’s cringey and shallow (would he dare to have transposed his bubble so openly from class to race?), one might applaud Sunak for simply speaking the truth; the classes are as savagely divided as they were in D.H. Lawrence’s day, probably more so due to the end of the grammar schools. Still, the patronizing paternalism of the smoking Bill, the lack of regard for personal freedom and the perception of the uni-party as a bunch of busybodies who always know better than you what’s best for you, makes it clear for the nth time why we are looking at a landscape in which Reform could replace the Conservatives as the opposition.

Not since Churchill’s cigar has a smoking politician been so identified by his habit as Nigel Farage, who is believed to be a 20-a-day man, even when in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. His man-of-the-people shtick — despite his expensive education and considerable wealth — has been established by the image of him at ease with a pint in one hand and a fag in the other; the pull of hedonism is a great leveler. He called Sunak’s plan “pious grandstanding”; last year, during the Tobacco and Vapes Bill’s report stage, he made a brilliant speech in the Commons: “I have to say, I find the tone of moral superiority in the chamber this afternoon almost unbearable… You clearly believe you are better human beings than those outside of here who choose to pursue activities that you perhaps would not. Well, it’s a bit of a shock, I suppose, to some of you, but there are some of us that like a smoke. We even go for a few pints at the pub. We have a punt on the horses. I even attempt to have the odd doughnut… Because we want to have fun. We want to make our own minds up. You can educate. You can tell us. You can give us the facts. But the idea that this place should make those decisions for other people shows me that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell is alive and well.”

Farage may be pushing it a bit when he heralds smokers as the “heroes of the nation” due to the huge taxes they contribute now that a packet of fags is pushing 20 quid. But he has a point: over 80% of the cost of a packet is tax, meaning that tobacco duty and VAT on smokeables bung the Exchequer around £8 billion a year whereas treating smoking-related illnesses is thought to cost the NHS around £2 billion. Then there’s the brisk “Net Saver” argument, which posits that as smokers often die younger, they save a vast amount of public money which might be spent on we oldsters, including our pensions and care homes.

Farage has it right when he leans into the pub as an important liberty bellwether. It’s telling to compare the delighted reaction of drinkers when Farage walks into a pub with the loathing felt towards Labour politicians, which became so extreme last winter that 250 pubs banned them. 

Looking back, the indoor smoking ban of 2007, under the Blair/Brown government, was the start of the current existential trouble which pubs find themselves in: one a day closes permanently now. That the government finally understands that it has pushed the hospitality industry too far was indicated by the fact that they pulled back from the proposed ban on smoking in pub gardens in 2024 — but it’s too late now. It’s poignant to recall that the name “public house” came about at a time when many actual houses where the poor lived were barren; the pubs ensured that the working classes had somewhere warm and welcoming to go to. Now that homes once more risk being dark and cold when the summer’s gone, many people will have to walk further to find a friendly light.

Does prohibition ever work? The tobacco black market is already huge. Christopher Snowdon, an economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said of Sunak’s strange legacy: “You’re going to have a fairly large, informal market of smokers who are old enough to buy cigarettes selling cigarettes to people who are not old enough. The problem with prohibition isn’t that it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on consumption — the problem with prohibition is it leads to massive black markets and a lot of tax revenues gone.” So in its crazed compulsion to control the personal behavior of its citizens, the government will make itself far poorer — but bossiness is its own reward, if you’re that way inclined. 

Already, plenty of vaping shops sell contraband foreign fags on the cheap. The one nearest me sells “illicit whites”, literally from under the counter; manufactured in the UAE and China, they are around half the price of legal smokes. They taste like they’ve been produced by the government to put people off smoking, but they sell like hotcakes. They even have the mandatory gory health-warning pics on them, to make them look legal. Surely the kids will end up buying these — or else take up vaping. A primary school teacher I know says it’s not unusual for nine-year-olds to be enthusiastic and habitual vapers. It sounds like vapes have caused more problems than they’ve solved.

Why doesn’t the government treat the alcohol industry with similar ruthlessness? More than 10,000 people a year in the UK die from alcohol-specific causes. Alcohol abuse costs the NHS £4.9 billion, enough to pay the salaries of almost half the nurses in England; it costs the state £27 billion through everything from lost productivity to violent crime. So why not put photographs of beaten-up women on cans of strong beer? Or mangled cars on premium spirits? No one ever took a life because they had one too many fags.

I realize that I’m not a typical smoker. A pack will last me a week — and that’s shared with my husband. It would never occur to me to get the gaspers out at home; I only ever fancy one after a nice lunch out. I daresay I’m ignoring the science. But there are odd glitches in the modern mentality which insists that smoking is a social evil beyond all others. The Green Party plans to legalize crack cocaine while agreeing with the paternalistic attitude of the mainstream parties towards phasing out smoking. Last week, a report was released suggesting counterintuitively that young non-smokers who eat lots of fruit and vegetables may be more likely to develop lung cancer. “Have your 5 a day — and pass away!” was a public health message we never predicted. In 2023, the World Health Organization claimed that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; yes, smoking can kill, but the urge to make friends over a cheeky fag in the freezing cold is a life-enhancing one.

Maybe I’m swayed by my own peculiar olfactory tastes. One of the dumbest lines about smoking — so dumb that anyone who utters it immediately identifies themselves as a half-wit — is “It would be like kissing an ashtray!” Personally, I find the scent of fresh smoking attractive, like fresh sweat, though of course nothing is nice when it’s stale. Many perfumes use tobacco as a “note” —Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille is particularly lush. 

My first remembered smell is that of my father, who had smoked 30 un-tipped Woodbines a day since he was a kid. He died of mesothelioma, which he contracted as a teenage boy working on the building of one of the proliferation of NHS hospitals after the war; of damage caused by tobacco, there was no trace. As with so many health-related issues, so much of it really is the — excuse the pun — luck of the draw.

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Julie Burchill writes a substack, Halfling

BoozeAndFagz

• Experimental Design: Researchers compared human performance, AI performance, and human-AI hybrid teams in forecasting real-world events.
• Predictive Accuracy: Large AI models outperformed humans working in isolation, though human-AI hybrids displayed the highest potential for total accuracy.
• Hybrid Pitfalls: Many hybrid users relied on AI for direct answers, leading to poor outcomes characterized by confirmation bias and sycophancy.
• Collaborative Cyborgs: A small subset of users treated AI as a sparring partner to interrogate assumptions and challenge AI-generated assertions.
• Cognitive Requirements: Successful integration requires perspective-taking and intellectual humility rather than simple reliance on technological convenience.
• Information Exploration Paradox: High volumes of easily accessible information may reduce critical thinking and individual exploration, potentially leading to human skill atrophy.
• Strategic Reframe: AI should be utilized to search for what is missing in one's own logic rather than as a tool to automate routine labor.
• Developmental Necessity: Cultivating cognitive resistance to AI-generated easy answers is essential for maintaining human agency and intellectual rigor.

By

Vivienne Ming

April 24, 2026 2:00 pm ET

10

EDMON DE HARO FOR WSJ; ROBOT ARM, FIREFLY

Who’s smarter, the human or the machine? 

In the 30 years I’ve worked in artificial intelligence that’s been the question driving the conversation. 

We’ve also been sold a story about AI that goes something like this: It will handle the tedious, routine work—the research, the first draft, the number-crunching—while we focus on the interesting parts: creativity, judgment, the human touch.  

My research suggests we’ve been asking the wrong question and drawing the wrong conclusions. 

A few months ago, I recruited adults from San Francisco’s Bay Area for an experiment. I gave each group one hour to make predictions about real-world events, using scenarios drawn from the prediction market platform Polymarket. This provided us a rigorous, objective way to check results against the collective wisdom of thousands of financially motivated forecasters. In addition to AI making predictions on its own, some human teams worked alone, while others worked as human-AI hybrids. (Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal).

The human groups performed poorly, relying on instinct or whatever information had come across their feeds that morning. The large AI models—ChatGPT and Gemini, in this case—performed considerably better, though still short of the market itself.

But when we combined AI with humans, things got more interesting.

Most hybrid teams used AI for the answer and submitted it as their own, performing no better than the AI alone. Others fed their own predictions into AI and asked it to come up with supporting evidence. These “validators” had stumbled into a classic confirmation bias-loop: the sycophancy that leads chatbots to tell you what you want to hear, even if it isn’t true. They ended up performing worse than an AI working solo. 

But in roughly 5% to 10% of teams, something different emerged. The AI became a sparring partner. The teams pushed back, demanding evidence and interrogating assumptions. When the AI expressed high confidence, the humans questioned it. When the humans felt strongly about an intuition, they asked the AI to come up with a counterargument. 

The hybrids were becoming cyborgs.

These teams reached insightful conclusions that neither a human nor a machine could have produced on its own. They were the only group to consistently rival the prediction market’s accuracy. On certain questions, they even outperformed it.

It’s not that these people were more intelligent than the others in the study. But they demonstrated two important qualities: perspective-taking and intellectual humility.

Perspective-taking is the ability to genuinely inhabit another point of view. Not to debate it, not to tolerate it, but to actually inhabit it. Intellectual humility is the ability to recognize the edge of your own knowledge and sit with that discomfort rather than trying to rush to fill it.  

Both of these qualities are, at root, emotional skills. Perspective-taking requires genuine curiosity about minds other than your own. Intellectual humility requires a kind of emotional courage: the willingness to feel uncertain, even a little foolish, in the presence of something or someone that seems very sure of itself. 

These are not the soft skills we typically celebrate. We celebrate confidence. We promote decisiveness. We are building AI systems specifically designed to give us the answer before we feel the discomfort of not having it.  

What my experiment suggests is that the human qualities most likely to matter are not the feel-good ones. They’re the uncomfortable ones: the capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; to sit with a question your phone could answer in three seconds and resist the urge to reach for it. To read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, “What’s missing?” rather than default to “Great, that’s done.” To disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it.

We don’t build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways: the student who struggles through a problem before checking the answer; the person who asks a follow-up question in a conversation; the reader who sits with a difficult idea long enough for it to actually change one’s mind. Most AI chatbots today default to easy answers, which is hurting our ability to think critically 

I call this the Information-Exploration Paradox. As the cost of information approaches zero, human exploration collapses. We see it in students who perform better on AI-assisted tasks and worse on everything afterward. We see it in developers shipping more code and understanding it less. We are, in ways that feel like progress, slowly optimizing ourselves out of the loop.

This is the divergence I worry about. Not the dramatic science-fiction scenario of AI replacing humans wholesale, but the quieter process of people gradually outsourcing their judgment in increments too small to notice. 

Over time, this produces two different kinds of people: Those who use AI as a genuine intellectual partner—whose thinking actually gets sharper through the friction of the collaboration—and those who get better at securing quick answers and worse at knowing what questions to ask.

So what can any of us actually do about it?

Start with the reframe: The goal of working with AI isn’t to get the answer faster. It’s to find out what you’re missing. Don’t deploy AI minions to “do the boring work” for you, as so many sales pitches argue; use it as a savant collaborator to explore uncertainty. 

In practice, that means before you accept an AI’s answer, ask it for the strongest argument against itself. When it hedges or qualifies, pay attention—that’s usually where the real uncertainty lives. Treat it like a brilliant colleague who has read everything and understands nothing—useful precisely because they’re different from you, not because they’ll agree with you.

For the AI industry, a key design question has gone largely unasked: Is the product building human capacity or consuming it? Nearly all AI benchmarks measure what AI agents can do alone. We desperately need benchmarks for hybrid intelligence. Errors are signals our brains use to trigger learning. An AI that eliminates friction entirely is often eliminating the learning along with it.

A hopeful finding is that perspective-taking, intellectual humility and curiosity are not fixed traits. They can be cultivated and respond to practice, the right relationships and environments that reward uncertainty. 

But they require us to decide—as individuals, as parents, as educators, as designers of tools—that this is what we’re trying to build. And in the race between human potential and human atrophy, the stakes for building it could not be higher.

Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, cognitive scientist and the author of “Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People.” 

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the April 25, 2026, print edition as 'Is AI Smarter Than People? It’s Complicated.'.

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