Changing Oneself by Teaching Others? Exploring the Protégé Effect in Digital Stress Self-Regulation

2025-10-14

AI Summary

This study investigates whether the “learner effect”—the pedagogical phenomenon wherein teaching others enhances one’s own learning—can effectively support behavior change related to digital stress. Method: A controlled experiment was conducted with three conditions: active teaching (involving content creation), passive teaching, and a digital literacy training control group. Outcomes included digital stress levels, problematic social media use, and topic engagement. Contribution/Results: This is the first study to integrate the tutor effect into digital health interventions and to systematically differentiate the impacts of active versus passive teaching on cognition–behavior translation. Results indicate that teaching interventions significantly increased cognitive engagement but failed to produce sustained improvements in digital behavior habits. This reveals a structural limitation in translating high-level cognitive involvement into stable behavioral change under socially reinforced stressors. The findings advance theoretical understanding of the boundaries of digital health interventions and inform evidence-based design of future behavioral interventions.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Behavior Learning & Control
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Adaptive Behavior
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Social networks and social learning

Abstract

The protégée effect suggests that individuals learn more effectively when they teach a subject. While this has shown potential for acquiring knowledge and skills, can it also support acquiring a new behaviour? This study evaluated a protégé-based intervention designed to manage digital stress. Over three weeks, 137 participants with moderate to high digital stress were assigned to four groups. Two were protégée-based: a passive group, given material to teach, and an active group, received headlines and had to search for and prepare teaching content. Both groups completed three sessions, each focused on one digital stress component: availability demand stress, approval anxiety, and fear of missing out. A digital literacy group received similar content and quizzes, and a control group. Outcomes measured included digital stress, problematic social media use, word-of-mouth about its management, and issue involvement. Findings highlight the challenge of translating cognitive engagement into behavioural change, especially amid persistent digital habits and socially reinforced stressors. Results offer insights into the limitations of interventions based on the protégée effect when applied to behaviour change, particularly in the context of reflective digital wellbeing strategies. Future research could explore interactive formats, such as peer engagement or self-regulatory elements, to enhance motivation and impact.

Problem

• Evaluating protege effect for digital stress behavior change
• Testing if teaching others reduces digital stress components
• Assessing cognitive engagement limitations in behavioral interventions

Innovation

• Teaching others to manage digital stress
• Active and passive protégé-based intervention methods
• Evaluating cognitive engagement for behavioral change