Clinical vs. Legal Standards of Proof

A label or diagnosis useful for treatment (helping regardless of cause) is not automatically valid as a fact for assigning legal liability, which demands actual causal proof — the same word can be loosely diagnostic in one context and legally consequential in another.

Also known as: clinical vs legal standards, diagnostic label vs legal fact, evidentiary standard for liability

Documents (1)

• “Social Media Addiction” Is Way More Complicated Than You Think Sally Satel & Stephen J. Morse (Persuasion) · 2026-07-07 Reader 🖥️
  “Social media addiction” is a clinically reasonable diagnosis but a legally unproven one, so courts adjudicating liability should hold it to a much higher evidentiary standard than the one that satisfies therapists.

Open gaps (2)

• uninformedThe piece cites 'one study' suggesting ~$500B in sought compensation without naming or vetting it, and doesn't engage the broader empirical debate on social media and adolescent mental health (e.g., whether population-level correlational evidence supports or undercuts an 'addiction' framing at all).
  “Social Media Addiction” Is Way More Complicated Than You Think — read next: Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' and its empirical critics (Candice Odgers, Andrew Przybylski) for the state of that debate.
• illogicalThe authors' own slippery-slope argument — that recognizing social-media-addiction liability would necessarily extend to gambling and fast food — is asserted rhetorically, not demonstrated; it mirrors the same kind of unproven causal leap the piece criticizes plaintiffs' lawyers for making about dopamine and addiction.
  “Social Media Addiction” Is Way More Complicated Than You Think — read next: Legal literature on whether liability doctrines actually generalize across analogous industries in practice (e.g., the doctrinal legacy of tobacco litigation vs. the slippery-slope fears voiced at the time).