Kostadin Kushlev

• Comment: Although I believe they have potential to in the future, I'm not seeing a pass of WP:NPROF at this time. Sulfurboy (talk) 05:11, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of interest guideline, I disclose that I have a conflict of interest regarding the subject of this article. Windowtree349 (talk) 23:46, 25 August 2026 (UTC)

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Kostadin Kushlev is an experimental social psychologist and tenured faculty in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University. He studies how digital devices, social media, and artificial intelligence impact health and well-being. Kushlev was awarded the Rising Star designation by the Association for Psychological Science in 2021.

Early life and education

Kostadin Kushlev grew up in a small town in Bulgaria and lived there during the post-communist transition.

Kushlev completed his undergraduate studies in psychology at Reed College in 2008. He then earned a master’s degree in psychology from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), where he began studying happiness and subjective well-being and completed his master’s thesis exploring parental well-being. He continued his studies at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Elizabeth W. Dunn, receiving his PhD in psychology in 2015 supported by the prestigious Vanier Graduate Scholarship from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). While completing his PhD, Kostadin got his first smartphone and began noticing that all of its useful features came at a cost: fragmented attention. This observation ultimately led him to the topic of his dissertation, focused on how smartphones interfere with the emotional benefits of face-to-face social interactions.

Career and research

Kushlev completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Virginia with Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi (2015–2018). His work focused on designing and testing the efficacy of a positive psychological intervention called ENHANCE to improve health and well-being.

Kushlev joined the faculty at Georgetown University in 2018 and received tenure in 2025. At Georgetown University, Kushlev leads the Happy Tech Lab, where he and his team study the effects of constant digital connectivity on health and happiness. The lab examines the effects of a range of technologies, including smartphones, artificial intelligence, and social media. This work aims to better understand the psychological implications of digital technologies as they become increasingly integrated in daily life.

His research considers both the positive and negative consequences of pervasive digital technologies, integrating competing perspectives through the Displacement-Interference-Complementarity (DIC) framework. This model suggests that smartphones and other digital technologies influence well-being in three ways. Complementarity is the idea that new technologies afford increased access to information, new, often more efficient, ways of doing things, and entirely new ways of spending one’s time. The effects of technology on well-being, therefore, depend on how people use their devices and the content they consume. Regardless of the effects of content, however, Kushlev proposes that the effects of technology use also depends on how it interacts with other activities. Displacement is the idea that, given limited time, engaging in a digital activity necessarily leaves less time for other activities (e.g., sleep, book reading, seeing friends and family). Interference is the idea that, given limited attention, our increasingly omnipresent technologies are interfering with concurrent activities by fragmenting attention. Within this framework, Kushlev emphasizes that the effects of smartphones on well-being depend not only on the digital content but also on the nondigital context.

In 2026, Kushlev proposed an extension of the DIC framework distinguishing displacement from substitution. He argues that displacement is strictly about the limited nature of time. In contrast, substitution captures the idea that new technologies provide new ways of achieving the same goals, thus gradually replacing other activities. For example, watching short videos on social media is replacing reading or watching TV as a form of entertainment. Similarly, apps like Google Maps have replaced physical maps or asking other people for directions as a way of getting information. While often more efficient, these new methods of achieving the same goals may have hidden costs for well-being.

Selected awards and honors

• 2026 Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award, Georgetown University
• 2021 Rising Star, Association for Psychological Science
• 2020 Teaching Fund Award, Association for Psychological Science
• 2019 Small Research Award, Society for Personality and Social Psychology
• 2012–2015 Vanier Graduate Scholarship, University of British Columbia

Selected grants

• $1,529,894 R01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for Causal Effects of Exposure to Social Media on Adolescent Mental Health, serving as principal investigator.
• $235,678 grant from the McCourt Tech & Public Policy Program for Assessing The Costs and Benefits of Social Media Legislation, serving as principal investigator.

Selected publications

• Kushlev, K. (2026). “An opportunity cost framework of digital well-being.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass. doi:10.1111/spc3.70144
• King, D., Moon, K., & Kushlev, K. (2025). Time-specific digital detox interventions: Effects and effectiveness among college students. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 6(3), 259–267. doi:10.1037/tmb0000173
• Moon, K., Green, A. E., & Kushlev, K. (2025). “Homogenizing effect of large language models (LLMs) on creative diversity: An empirical comparison of human and ChatGPT writing.” Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, 6. doi:10.1016/j.chbah.2025.100207
• Castelo, N., Kushlev, K., Ward, A. F., Esterman, M., & Reiner, P. B. (2025). “Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus, 4(2). doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017
• Kushlev, K., Heintzelman, S. J., Lutes, L. D., Wirtz, D., Kanippayoor, J. M., Leitner, D., & Diener, E. (2020). Does happiness improve health? Evidence from a randomized controlled trial. Psychological Science. doi:0.1177/0956797620919673
• Kushlev, K., & Leitao, M. R. (2020). “The effects of smartphones on well-being: Theoretical integration and research agenda.” Current Opinion in Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.05.001

References

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