Background information
How the Federal Council wants to regulate social media platforms
by Florian Bodoky
Short videos encourage shallow thinking
20.11.2025
Translation: machine translated
Young adults learn less from short videos than from reading the same content. And that's not all: the short videos put them in a different thinking mode.
The current discussion about social media bans for children is mostly about risks such as cyberbullying, addiction and psychological consequences such as stress and loneliness. There is now increasing evidence that short Tiktok-style videos can also simply make you stupid: Just a few minutes of watching Tiktok - and your thinking falls flat. Thorsten Otto from the Institute of Educational Psychology at TU Braunschweig has described such an effect in the specialist journal «Computers & Education».
For his online experiment, the psychologist randomly divided 123 test subjects, on average 25 years old, into four groups. One half was first shown entertaining short videos for three minutes, the other half was not. The two groups were then further divided: One part was shown a short Tiktok-style educational video on the topic of the German language, while the other part was shown a text with the same content, also on screen. Among other things, it dealt with the correct plural of «word» - depending on the context, sometimes «words», sometimes «words». Finally, all test subjects answered questions about the content and completed further tests on their thinking mode: Did they really want to understand something - or just listen passively? And how deeply did they think about the tasks they were given?
The worst results in the knowledge test were achieved by the group that had watched both the entertainment films and the educational videos. But the short films also had an unfavourable effect individually. Those who had received the information in video rather than text form were less able to memorise it. Watching entertainment videos beforehand did not measurably reduce learning success, but the test showed a tendency towards superficial thinking.
Thorsten Otto suspects that the fast-paced short videos stimulate the release of dopamine in the brain and thus promote passive, superficial thinking. He speculates that this could become a permanent mode if consumed frequently. Other studies have already shown that intensive media use and poor thinking performance are linked. For example, experiments have suggested that watching short videos impairs memory and analytical thinking in students.
«This does not mean that short videos are fundamentally unsuitable for teaching», writes Otto. However, they should be designed differently, for example by slowing down the pace and ensuring that viewers do not become passive consumers. They could also be suitable for arousing interest and attention for a topic that is then dealt with further in the classroom.
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