There are important distinctions to be made between categories such as being unaware of the cause of a problem (likely many of the children), aware but unable to redress it (most gambling addicts), and intentionally choosing to make a tradeoff for various circumstantial reasons (many but certainly not all developers working in C).

There's a lot of inertia and social pressure in both phone use and language choice.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to get at.

I doubt the children (or even their parents for the most part) realized the extent of the impact. Now that they're aware they have the option to attempt to mitigate it if they so choose. Of course they might try and fail (second case) or consciously choose to tolerate the downsides for some perceived gain (third case).

As to language choice, inertia can be a perfectly valid reason. I strongly prefer writing Scheme but I generally choose to work in other languages due to the surrounding ecosystems.

Social pressure is a very fuzzy term that can refer to any number of things. It could be "won't even stop to consider the possibility of using the new tool" or alternatively something more like "my coworkers aren't willing to entertain my idealism when it negatively impacts their ability to get things done".

I mean 's hard for an individual to go against what the rest of their peers are doing. The same applies to schoolkids as for programmers. There are a lot of costs to going against the crowd.