Amy Orben
British experimental psychologist
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Orben was an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge where she studied natural sciences. She moved to The Queen's College, Oxford for graduate studies, where she specialised in experimental psychology. During her doctoral research, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Tübingen and Eindhoven University of Technology. After completing her doctorate Orben was made a Cambridge Research Fellow at Emmanuel College.
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Research and career
As a PhD student, Orben questioned the methods applied by Jean Twenge and others who had arrived at claims about the negative effects of technology and social media use. In 2021, Orben was appointed a programme leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Her research considers novel methodologies to understand how screen time and use of social media impacts psychological well-being in adolescents. Post-millennial mental health (in particular stress, depression and anxiety) is reportedly worse than in previous generations, which is often attributed to social media. Orben showed that this wasn't the entire story: statistically speaking, eating a potato every day had a worse impact on well-being. She argued that social media can be helpful in times of anxiety and loneliness. Orben believes that significant quantities of high quality data about how children engage with technology could be provided by technology giants such as Google and Facebook.
Orben has criticised several of the methodologies currently being used, which largely rely on self-report methods and generate incorrect results. She is also an advocate for open science, and created ReproducibiliTea, an international journal club for researchers to discuss improving science.