I was looking for a more digestable figure describing the extent of improvements, not whether the study found them confidently distinguishable (which I just assumed they did based on the wording, good to know they didn't for Instagram).
It's real, but barely noticeable for most people—unless you're in a more affected subgroup (e.g. undecided voters or younger women). Your experience feeling way better likely means you were an outlier (in a good way).
In general, 0.2 is considered a small effect. So 0.06 is quite small — likely not a practically noticeable change in well-being. But impressive to me when I compare it to effect sizes of therapy interventions which can lie around 0.3 for 12 weeks.
Quote:
> “50 randomized controlled trials that were published in 51 articles between 1998 and August 2018. We found standardized mean differences of Hedges’ g = 0.34 for subjective well-being, Hedges’ g = 0.39 for psychological well-being, indicating small to moderate effects, and Hedges’ g = 0.29 for depression, and Hedges’ g = 0.35 for anxiety and stress, indicating small effects.”
(Source: The efficacy of multi-component positive psychology interventions, 2019 — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331028589_The_Effic...)
So, if 0.3 is 12 weeks of therapy, then 0.06 is ~2.5 weeks of therapy (0.3/0.06 = 2.4), assuming you pick any 2.5 random weeks of the 12 week course.
Yes, I'm sure the first session is the most important and then a logarithmic curve of blah blah blah.
Essentially, deleting FB is not much, but it's not nothing either.
So to put it colloquially, if you have 4 friends, and you were in the middle of them (3rd happiest aka happier than 2 of them), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them (aka happier than 3 of them).
AKA for every 4 friends you have you can jump ahead of 1 of them in the happiness race by quitting facebook.
If you were average happiness, and you improve that by 1 stdev, you are now happier than 87% of your peers (when you were at 50%ile before). 0.6 stdev improvement would be vs 72% of your peers.
So to put it colloquially, if you have 7 friends, and you were in the middle of them (4th happiest), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them.
