Public conversations about “screen time” in adolescence often start and end with worry that time online must be stealing attention from school. Our newly published paper asks a different question: What if some of that unstructured time on social media, video games, and general web browsing builds skills that help students do better in school?

Synthesizing fifty-six experimental studies of the “Proteus effect” (meta-analysis), we examined what conditions make the proteus effect stronger rather than whether or not it exists. The cautious answer: the Proteus effect is robust but probably a bit smaller than headline estimates, and still stronger in VR.