The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Why You're Still Using Social Media (Even If You Want to Stop) with Dr. Cass Sunstein

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Why is social media so hard to quit? We waste hours scrolling, feel worse when we log off, and still find ourselves going back for more. Dr. Laurie sits down with Dr. Cass Sunstein, co-author of (00:00:57) Nudge, to explore a new concept from the 2026 World Happiness Report: the “product trap.” Together, they unpack why we keep returning to platforms that make us unhappy — and what it might take to finally break free. Resources mentioned in this episode: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness “World Happiness Report 2026” “The Problem of Social Cost” “Valuing Facebook” “The Welfare Effects of Social Media” “When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media” “Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin, 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 TikTok. 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. You might know Cass from his influential book Nudge, which he co-authored with the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Richard Thaler. 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 cast 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, and 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 at kicking and screaming. But do I like this status quo?

I do not like the status quo at 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. All that, when the Happiness Lab returns right after some quick ads from our sponsors. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Behavioral scientist and legal scholar Cass Sunstein spends a lot of time thinking about 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 things. 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 hour scrolling on Instagram or TikTok, 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 would 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 presence would only go, to children. And everyone thought that was an extremely great thing, because for years, we'd been giving each other presence 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 fussy your 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 say, 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 canceled, do you think life is a little 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. 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. much as they like equivalent gains. If you think that I'm going to miss out, let's say, on

Instagram something or on a TikTok 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 entrap almost anyone by triggering fear of missing out. One of the domains where 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, the cheat bot 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 cheat bot tools that everyone else is. It seems like many of them aren't using it because of 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. 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 you don't post your number, you were 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. 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 bug 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 irrational actors' willingness to pay should work. For example, the idea that people should be. 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 a 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 social media platforms. And the average average average. answer was pretty low, like $5 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 $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 1.

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 the rest, how much will you pay? They'll say zero or they'll maybe adjust a little bit up from zero to five or ten. 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. On 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 weird. The authors of the study don't know how to explain that. But Cass did have an explanation. Cass reasoned that the participants may totally recognize that they don't enjoy being on TikTok 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 Kaz'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, TikTok 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 at kicking and screaming. But do I like this status quo? I do not like the status quo at all. If you ask me what I want to live in a world that didn't have TikTok 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 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. There are companies and they're 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 eighth 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 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 send them to 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 six 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 TikToks and reels, 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. 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 non-isolated 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's stiff cigarette taxes which have contributed to the extraordinary reduction in smoking rates of the United States. And for many young smokers, it took exactly the same form as what we're talking about for social media platforms. people who say, I'm going to smoke, sure. Do I wish there was 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? 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, paternalists, 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, nodges are typically a form of libertarian paternalism. That is, they preserve your freedom, as when you see a nutrition fax panel at the grocery store. It kind of pushes you a little bit,

but it doesn't take your freedom of choice a woman. And so what would libertarian paternalism look like in the social 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 five hours, consider getting off. That's libertarian paternalism. A little like cars will say if you've been driving for a long time, do 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 could also imagine the government requiring disclosure of the policies companies adopt to hook users. So sunlight, just as Brandeis 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 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 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.org. And if you have thoughts about today's episode, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at Happiness Lab at Pushkin.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, Dr.Larysantos.com. That's d R-R-L-A-U-R-I-E-S-A-N-T-O-S dot com.

We'll be back in two 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. Alvari Santos. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.