Digital well-being research is being slowed down by a deceptively simple problem: scientists cannot agree on what their key terms actually mean. In a new comment article published in BMC Global and Public Health, psychologist Christian Montag of Ulm University and Jon D. Elhai of the University of Toledo argue that the field is trapped in what measurement researchers call the jingle jangle fallacy, a pair of naming errors that makes it nearly impossible to compare studies or build knowledge cumulatively. The authors contend that until researchers reach consensus on how to define and measure both technology use and well-being, the science of healthy technology use will keep producing findings that cannot be stacked on top of one another.
The jingle jangle fallacy comes in two halves. Hanfstingl and colleagues, cited in the comment, explain it this way: jingle fallacies arise when two or more distinct psychological phenomena are erroneously labeled with the same term, while jangle fallacies occur when different terms are used to describe the same phenomenon. In plain terms, one word may hide several different things, and several different words may hide one and the same thing. Both errors are rampant in the vocabulary of digital well-being, and both quietly corrupt the conclusions readers draw from headlines about screen time and mental health.
Consider a typical study examining associations between excessive technology use and life satisfaction. Both critical terms can be conceptualized in various ways. Some researchers understand excessive technology use as simply spending much time online, while others describe it as addictive or compulsive online use. Two research teams could both claim to study excessive online use, using the same label, yet be measuring fundamentally different behaviors. That is the jingle fallacy in action: identical terminology concealing distinct phenomena, which then makes their results look contradictory when they are merely incomparable.
The well-being side of the equation fares no better. Different assessment methods for life satisfaction can be chosen, and some researchers even treat the absence of depression as a valid well-being measure. Depression and life satisfaction are inversely linked, the authors note, but they tap very differently into the overall well-being theme. One belongs to clinical psychology, focused on psychopathology, while the other belongs to positive psychology, which centers on the well-being of persons rather than their disorders. A study scoring well-being as low depressive symptoms and another scoring it as high life satisfaction are not measuring the same construct, even if both publish under the banner of digital well-being.
The jangle fallacy, its mirror image, shows up when researchers assess addictive technology use by administering items based on an addiction framework but then attach different terminology, such as problematic technology use or addictive technology use. The authors flag a particular hazard here: problematic technology use is very broad and could also mean cyberbullying or other problematic online behavior. A reader encountering the phrase problematic use cannot know whether a study measured addiction-like symptoms, harassment victimization, or something else entirely. These problems arise both when researchers operationalize variables in the realm of digital terms and when they operationalize variables involving the term well-being.
Compounding the naming chaos is the absence of a generally accepted definition of digital well-being itself. One prominent proposal describes digital well-being as a subjective individual experience of optimal balance between the benefits and drawbacks obtained from mobile connectivity. But what does that optimal balance look like in practice? Can it simply be assessed by counting the hours spent in the digital versus the analogue realm? The authors argue it likely cannot, because prolonged time spent on social media platforms is only weakly associated with well-being. The balance view might also depend on the user’s age group, since for younger users it may be important to reduce technology use to leave sufficient time for fulfilling important psycho-developmental tasks.
Other definitions push in different directions. Recent work cited in the comment describes digital well-being as referring to the impact of digital technologies on what it means to live a life that is good for a human being in an information society, drawing on the philosopher Luciano Floridi, whose original book the authors could not access. Meanwhile, the researcher Büchi writes that digital well-being concerns individuals’ subjective well-being in a social environment where digital media are omnipresent. This perspective moves away from well-being while interacting with a specific device or platform and instead investigates the larger picture of people’s well-being in societies where a growing amount of everyday life and human communication happens in the digital realm. The comment illustrates these competing framings with a figure distinguishing the balancing of one’s digital and analogue life from well-being during interaction with a specific platform.
What would a way out look like? The authors argue that consensus must be found among scientists regarding the appropriate choice of survey measures, and they propose that larger expert panels could rank the relevance of questions tapping more or less into digital well-being. Such a panel would face real conceptual choices. Should researchers directly tap a psychopathological approach to understand digital well-being, or choose research-oriented approaches stemming from positive psychology? When speaking of digital well-being, do studies need to probe the dark side of human nature, such as depression or anxiety, or can they instead identify measures that could lead to improvement in well-being while people still spend some time on a platform or live in digitally connected societies?
The authors are careful to say that research on addictive use of technology or on links between social media use and problems such as eating disorders is not forbidden. Their suggestion is that this line of research should perhaps be labeled differently, with digital ill-being offered as one candidate term. This touches an old dispute in psychology, namely whether the absence of negative affect results in well-being. Practical measurement problems also lurk in established questionnaires. One of the most prominent measures of problematic social media use, the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, consists of six items using classic symptoms of substance use disorder transplanted into the context of social media. It has become clear that some of these symptoms translated to social media use are not related with psychopathology, so administering the questionnaire as is might lead to over-pathologizing everyday life behavior.
To structure a research program, the comment proposes concrete guiding questions for assessment. On the technology side: is the time or addictive behavior measured on a device, a group of applications, or a specific application? Do researchers speak of active or passive use, for instance more social activity versus passive scrolling? On the well-being side: do studies mean life satisfaction, emotional well-being, negative emotions, depressed states, or even full-blown psychopathology? The authors conclude that the digital well-being complex suffers from the jingle jangle fallacy and that, in the absence of a unifying definition and theory, progress will be difficult. Science makes progress when studies can build on each other, allowing cumulative insights, and only by considering the different operationalizations of the digital well-being complex, and perhaps by convening a much-needed expert panel to find consensus, can scientific progress in this field be accelerated. As a comment piece, the article offers an argument and a proposed agenda rather than new empirical data, but its diagnosis is pointed: the field’s biggest obstacle may not be the technology at all, but the words used to describe it.
Subject of Research: The jingle jangle fallacy and the lack of a unified definition of digital well-being
Article Title: The jingle jangle fallacy in digital well-being research is hindering scientific progress
Article References: Montag, C., & Elhai, J. D. (2026). The jingle jangle fallacy in digital well-being research is hindering scientific progress. BMC Global and Public Health, 4(1), Article 89. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44263-026-00327-1
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s44263-026-00327-1
Keywords: digital well-being, jingle jangle fallacy, technology use, life satisfaction, problematic social media use, Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, positive psychology, psychopathology, measurement, expert consensus, BMC Global and Public Health, screen time
