I'll chuck autism and overstimulation in there too. There's a reason that there's the stereotype of the autist wearing their noise-cancelling headphones.

> Correlation ... causation

Yeah, I'm surprised this isn't highlighted more in these comments. "A small study" and "an article" and such seems to be the basis for this article, and yet there's seemingly no work done to identify if it's actually that people's attitudes have changed, and they're adopting headphones because of that.

It's not as if there's been major, literal earth-changing events that happened in incredibly recent memory that might have changed how people socialize or interact or anything, right? Let's just blame a specific brand of a piece of technology that has existed for decades, instead.

>> It seems equally likely to me that other factors are driving increased social anxiety

Social anxiety thrives on avoidance. It's a feedback loop. So likely it's correlation + causation. Your anxious so you wear the headphones to block out the world which only breeds more anxiety.