David Remnick: Stories about mental health and school-aged kids are a constant now, both in the news and in our conversations with family and friends. Every parent I know is talking about this. The rates of anxiety, of depression, and self-harm are all up sharply. Trends that began in the 2010s.

The social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, argues that the current generation, people born after 1995, have experienced what he calls a 'great rewiring'. In other words, having smartphones and social media accounts from childhood has affected not just their emotional lives, but their neurology, too. Haidt's new book is called The Anxious Generation and it's clearly connected with countless readers. The book debuted at number one on the nonfiction bestseller list.

I was raised on the 'you're sitting too close to the television, your eyes will burn out, your brain will turn to jelly from watching The Three Stooges or whatever we were watching' and it was an incredibly powerful instrument. There were books written like Ten Arguments For Getting Rid of Television.

Jonathan Haidt: Oh, cool.

David Remnick: I think I'm getting the title semi-right anyway, but there were such-

Jonathan Haidt: Sure.

David Remnick: -polemics. Polemics not unlike your own, in a way.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

David Remnick: They were evidence-based, however controversial. They seemed to have at least a grain of truth.

Jonathan Haidt: Very possible.

David Remnick: We survived radio. We survived television. Why is this so different?

Jonathan Haidt: First, let me acknowledge because there are really only two arguments I get. One of them is this one. It isn't just another moral panic. Oh, Socrates said writing was going to do us in. What do you know? Whatever the young people are doing, it's going to be terrible, and then it turns out not to be, but this time is incredibly different because before there was just kids are watching TV, and then much later there is a crime wave, but it can't be tightly linked to TV. The evidence doesn't show that when kids watch TV, they go out and hurt people or kill. There was a lot of research. This time, there's never been anything like it.

Here's what happens. The internet comes in in two waves. In the '90s, we get personal computers, the '80s and '90s, personal computers, and then we get dial-up internet. Slow, but it allows you to connect to the world. It's amazing. The technological environment in the '90s was miraculous. We loved it. The millennial generation grew up on it. Their mental health was fine. A lot of the indicators of teen mental health are actually steady or improving in the late '90s and then all the way through the 2000s.

In 2008, the app store comes out. Before then, there were no apps. There were just the things that Apple gave you. I think it's 2009, something around there, is where push notifications come out. Now, you have this thing in your pocket in which thousands or millions, literally, of companies are trying to get your attention and trying to keep you on their app. 2010, Instagram comes out, which was the first social media app designed to be exclusively used on the smartphone. The environment that we adults were in suddenly changes where now the iPhone isn't just a tool, it actually is a tool of mass distraction.

Then in 2012, 2013, boom, the graphs go way, way up. Mental health falls off a cliff. It's incredibly sudden. You can give me whatever theory you want about trends in American society, but nobody can explain why it happened so suddenly in 2012 and 2013, not just here, but in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe. I'm waiting for someone to find a chemical that was released just in those areas and a chemical that especially affects girls, and especially young girls. If someone can find that, you got another story, but until then--

David Remnick: You put a name to this. You call it, the period between 2010 and 2015, you call it the 'great rewiring' of childhood. What's happening then in a granular sense?

Jonathan Haidt: Sure. What I mean by the great rewiring is the day that you change your flip phone for a smartphone and you have a front-facing camera, and you have Instagram, and you have high-speed data, which you didn't have before, that's the day that this device can become your master. Not for all kids, but for a lot of them.

David Remnick: How does it become your master?

Jonathan Haidt: First of all, even if there was no social media, kids are just much more subject to, "When the thinking gets hard, I start looking for entertainment." I do this myself. When I trying to write something and it's hard, I say, "What's the weather? Let me go look at the weather. What's my email?" I'm looking for anything that's more interesting and easier than the thing I'm trying to do, but I have a fully formed prefrontal cortex and I have trouble with it.

Teenagers don't. They don't have a fully formed prefrontal cortex. It's still in the child form. It's not very good at impulse control. As long as you have all these toys and games and interesting things happening on your phone, it's going to call you away. That's without social media. Now, let's add in social media.

David Remnick: When does that come online in a way that has a marked effect, in your view?

Jonathan Haidt: Social media before 2009 was just about connecting and it was about performance. It might make some kids anxious, but it was not particularly toxic. After 2009, now it's much more about not who you know, it's more about the things that people are putting out that went viral, that got a lot of likes. Once we get super viral social media in 2009, 2010, now a lot of things change.

Now it's not just, "Hey, I'm bored. Let me play a video game." It's, "My phone is pinging me saying, "Someone cited you in a photo, or someone linked you in a photograph. Come check it out. Someone said something about you. Somebody just joined. Somebody liked your post." We've allowed companies to reach our children, to manipulate them, to send their notifications whenever they want and the kids don't seem to turn off the notifications. They seem to leave them on.

David Remnick: What you're describing, if I'm understanding your book correctly, and I spent a lot of time with it, is a change in human consciousness.

Jonathan Haidt: Absolutely. Absolutely.

David Remnick: What does that mean?

Jonathan Haidt: There's a long history of interesting scholarship on how tools change our consciousness. I read some, I think it was, I can't remember, it was Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. When you get a change in technology, whether it's a change in what we do or how we communicate, or how we can affect the world, it changes our consciousness. It's almost as though we were growing a third arm. I think McLuhan talks that way. It's the move to smartphones. This thing now moves to the center of your life. Just the sheer number of hours that you spend looking at it.

David Remnick: Can we quantify the sheer number of hours?

Jonathan Haidt: Yes. Common Sense Media and also Gallup and Pew, those three have given us really great data over the years. The estimates vary. The most recent ones are seven to nine hours a day of entertainment screen time. That's the phone, it's video games, it's iPads, it's all the internet-connected stuff, not including school, not including school or work.

David Remnick: When I think back on my own adolescence, there was a lot of watching television and wasting time. Was that so much more socializing or psychologically healthy than spending more time with smartphone?

Jonathan Haidt: Were you alone or did you have siblings or friends?

David Remnick: Both.

Jonathan Haidt: That's much better. Watching television, right--

David Remnick: No, both alone and both with siblings.

Jonathan Haidt: Oh, okay. My point is that watching television, while our parents complained about it, when you look back on it, my recollection was usually social. You're with another person. You're talking about the show, so you're together. It is social. Now, what happens? I've heard stories from Gen Z. Sometimes they do go over to their friend's house, not that much, but they do go over to their friend's house and what happens?

David Remnick: They're on their phones together.

Jonathan Haidt: Separate. You're right. One might be watching her shows on Netflix. One might be checking her-- Even when they're physically together, Gen Z, there's a wonderful phrase from Sherry Turkle, because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere. We're never fully present.

David Remnick: The problem is, and I don't think you'd disagree with me on this, that there are aspects to social media, just as they are to the internet writ large, that can be terrific. Whether it's about finding community or staying connected to friends. How does society, technology, legislation or parents possibly separate out that which you describe as legitimately harmful from what is potentially beneficial or fun or harmless?

Jonathan Haidt: Sure. First, let me be very clear. The internet is not the same thing as social media. We're not talking about giving up the internet. I'm not talking about keeping kids off the internet. I'm talking about not allowing them to sign a legal contract. That's not enforceable because they're minors, but it is a contract, the terms of service, to give away their data and some rights to a company that does not have their interests at heart, that is using them as the product to sell to their customers who are the advertisers. That's what I don't want done to 11, 12, 13, 14-year-old kids. I think they should be 16 before they can be exploited in that way.

David Remnick: Now, and this is a crucial part of your book, you write about sharp rises in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm that began showing themselves in a very concerning way in the 2010s. You say that girls were hit hardest. Why does it affect girls differently than boys?

Jonathan Haidt: There's several reasons. The first is that when kids got smartphones, and then tablets come in very soon and all these devices, they made different choices. Boys gravitate towards coalitional violence, sports, team things, video games that--

David Remnick: Coalitional violence is the term for sports?

Jonathan Haidt: That's the social-- Well, it's--

David Remnick: You're clearly not a sports fan.

[laughter]

Jonathan Haidt: It's true. I'm not.

David Remnick: I can tell.

Jonathan Haidt: It's a social science term for how we just love making teams to do combat. Football, sports. You can't understand team sports unless you understand we evolve for war and we enjoy it. We enjoy fake war. The boys gravitate to video games and especially multiplayer video games, which are amazing. I didn't let my son on Fortnite in sixth grade and he does resent me for that but I finally let him on in eighth grade. Thank God we did just before COVID because it was helpful during COVID. For the boys, they go for that mostly.

They also spend a lot of time on YouTube. They're on social media. YouTube is technically social media but it's used more as a video library. The boys, they'll have Instagram accounts and things like that, but they're not as into it as the girls are. The girls spend a lot more time on social media. They spend more time, they went especially for Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, the visual platforms, and their interactions are asynchronous. The boys are laughing it up at the same time, which is better than--

David Remnick: Together.

Jonathan Haidt: Together. Even if they're separate, even if they're in separate rooms, at least they're communicating. Whereas the girls are making a post, they spend an hour crafting the post and the picture, and they're waiting for other kids to just comment on it, including strangers, including adult men. They're waiting for strangers and friends to comment on it and that's kind of anxious. It's not play, it's performance, it's brand management.

David Remnick: Now, I also read your earlier book The Coddling of the American Mind and in it, you critique emotional safety. The notion that we worship or valorize safety above all else. How does that jive with your understandable desire to safeguard our emotional safety in this book?

Jonathan Haidt: Sometimes you want a high level of safety, sometimes you want a low level of safety. If the dangers aren't really-- if there are not much in the way of dangers, we don't want to force kids to wear a bike helmet when they're playing in the field. It depends on the context. My argument in the book is that we have vastly overprotected our children in the real world, we have to give them more freedom, and we have vastly underprotected them in the virtual world where there are no safeguards, no age limits, no protections. We can't even sue the companies that are harming them.

A lot of kids are getting severely damaged in many, many different ways. Am I contradicting myself? Well, then I contradict myself. No, we're overprotecting in one place and I'm saying, "Lighten up, let your kids out," and we're underprotecting in another, and I'm saying, "Don't let your kids spend nine hours a day on the internet talking with strange men. It's just not a good idea."

David Remnick: There was a review in the science journal, I'm sure you're aware, Nature. It's gotten a lot of attention for saying that your assertions that digital technologies are somehow rewiring our kids' brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not quite supported by the science.

Jonathan Haidt: She didn't say not quite supported. She said I have no evidence.

David Remnick: Well, I'm such a polite guy.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Candice Odgers, I believe you're referring to, Candice Odgers writing in this essay says, "The adolescent brain cognitive development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the US has found no evidence of drastic changes associated [crosstalk] technology use." How do you answer her?

Jonathan Haidt: First, her main charge was that I have no evidence. She said I don't know the difference between correlation and causation, and that she could use my writing in her intro stats class. That's just not true. When it was mostly correlation, when it was almost all correlational, that was a fair criticism, but over time there have been now dozens of experiments. There are a variety of sources of data, different kinds of experiments.

David Remnick: She just missed that.

Jonathan Haidt: Well, but note her wording. Well, when she said I have no evidence, I think that was just an incorrect statement, because I do have evidence. She is free to say, "I disagree with it, I think these studies have problems." That would've been fine if she said, "He presents experiments, but I think that they're wrong." Fine. That would've been a reasonable thing to say, but it was just-- I thought she--

David Remnick: She was too categorical in your [unintelligible 00:14:16].

Jonathan Haidt: Yes, to say that I have no evidence, I thought was not really correct. That's what I said in my response.

David Remnick: It's not social media causing these issues that you describe at length in kids. What else could it be?

Jonathan Haidt: Well, that's a good question and that's the second problem with that review in Nature. I keep asking for alternative theories. I keep saying, "Okay, you don't think it's the smartphones and social media, what is it?"

David Remnick: Well, the world is terrible. That's an alternate theory.

Jonathan Haidt: No, that doesn't make any sense.

David Remnick: Hang on. That kids have a greater sense of ecological imperilment, the politics of the world are pretty awful, we're facing an election in November just as we did in 2016 that has blah, blah, blah, blah.

Jonathan Haidt: Oh, sure. Today things are terrible. I agree with you, things are terrible today. Go back to Obama's first term, how terrible were things in Obama's first term, 2008 to 2012 where we're recovering from, or 2009 [unintelligible 00:15:10]. We have the global financial crisis, we're recovering. The economy is getting better and better in his second term. That's when mental health collapses? That's when kids suddenly decide, "Oh my God, things are so terrible." It's not high school kids who are reading the newspaper perhaps, it's middle school girls are the ones who are most devastated by this. I don't think you could make a case that all of a sudden in 2013, 11- to 14-year-old girls suddenly freaked out about the political state of the world. This happened not just here but in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand.

David Remnick: Or ecological or other conditions.

Jonathan Haidt: None of that makes sense, that's right. The other thing is about the world being terrible hypothesis, when bad things happen, do people suddenly get depressed? No. You get depressed not because you think the world is bad, you get depressed because you feel isolated or alone. You and I grew up, I don't know how you felt about this, but I thought there probably won't be a nuclear war this year, but what are the odds we're going to go 20 years? It seemed to me like there's a good chance there's going to be a nuclear war, and the overpopulation is going to kill us. There were a lot of things wrong with the world in the '70s, but our generation didn't get depressed by it.

David Remnick: You mentioned earlier in our conversation the critique of you and your work as somebody who's worried about moral panic or inciting them. How would you describe the critique and how would you answer it?

Jonathan Haidt: Oh, well, the critique is what we started off with, which is, this is no different from comic books and television. I think in Thomas Jefferson's time, in the 18th century, it was novels that were supposed to excite the sexual passion. I'm glad that I live in a world in which there are skeptics who keep alarm ringers honest. Otherwise, everything would be a moral panic. I understand their frustration, the skeptics, that a lot of moral panics, we see them all the time, they end up being nothing. It is up to me to say, "Actually, this time is different and here's why."

That's what I tried to do in The Anxious Generation, to say this time really is different. In 2017, it wasn't so clear, but now what I'm finding is now that COVID is behind us and our confusion is lifting, they're kids who are messed up and it wasn't from COVID. It was actually in place before COVID. Everybody sees it. Most journalists who interview me, they'll say at some point in the interview, "I read your book and this is happening to my daughter. She's right out of your book."

David Remnick: Am I wrong, Jonathan, to discern, and I haven't, but possibly discern a politics emanating from your work. In other words, your book on The Coddling of the American Mind could be put in a line with other books with similar temperament and argument like Allan Bloom, for example. Maybe you think I'm being unfair. This book, I've heard, not me but people around the office who've read it, it's alarmist and it's just an old guy panicking about the latest cool thing. An impression begins to form that Jonathan Haidt is a social conservative in some matter. Is that fair or is it wrong?

Jonathan Haidt: Yes, I'm glad to hear that. I was going to ask you how am I perceived around here and I could guess. We live in age of polarization with negative politics where you're judged by--

David Remnick: Which you've also written about, too.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. You're judged by who you criticize. I've always thought of myself as a liberal. I'm also a David Brooks sort of meliorist, like, let's do the social science, let's think about systems, let's think in a really subtle way, not just this narrow quantified way, but let's bring in cultural trends and let's see, can we make things a little better? When I saw universities going off the deep end in 2015, Greg Lukianoff and I both were very alarmed. Now, does that make me a conservative?

David Remnick: You were seeing it in your own students.

Jonathan Haidt: I've seen it in students at NYU and hearing it from other professors and the stories coming in from all over. It wasn't like that in 2013. It's just something changed around 2015. Anyway, my point, to get back to your question, I love universities, I love being a professor. I feel as though I am a member of an honored guild that stretches back to Socrates and Plato, and I see my institution getting corrupt. In social sciences, it's not that people are doing things for money, but what I saw as corruption, I started talking about in 2011, was in my field everyone is on the left. All social psychologists are on the left. I gave a talk in 2011 where I went through many steps to find a conservative, I found one. I did find one, but everyone else is on the left. I said, "This is going to be a problem for us because---"

David Remnick: Did you have an explanation for the why of that?

Jonathan Haidt: Yes. Part of it is normal self-selection based on personality. The arts are always going to lean left. Just the nature of the psychological differences between those with a conservative and liberal temperament, so the arts, the social sciences, especially sociology. If you're questioning the social order, you're more likely-- there's a natural ratio. In the 20th century, it was about three to one in psychology, three to one, left-right. Let's say that's the natural ratio. I would never expect it to be 50-50. You don't need balance, but you need--

David Remnick: That was a quantifiable thing?

Jonathan Haidt: Yes. There were a number of surveys of who professors voted for. There were self-report surveys of whether you're liberal or conservative, and they all converged on about the same thing. My concern was we don't need balance, we don't need evenness, but there has to be someone in the room who's willing to speak up and say, "That doesn't make sense." What I was seeing was any conclusion that was conducive to the progressive view, that would get waived into publication. Oh, yes, we want that one to be true, but any conclusion that went against it would have to climb mountains, and the reviews would be scathing, and they'd be rejected--

David Remnick: When you say reviews, just to be clear, you mean scholarly reviews-

Jonathan Haidt: Yes, peer review.

David Remnick: -peer reviews allowing publication in university press books and publications.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. Just for example, Steve Ceci at Cornell and Wendy Williams, they had a line of work looking at gender bias in the sciences. To what extent do women in the sciences face a disadvantage in hiring and promotion. What they found was that overall, it's a benefit, that overall, I can't remember which decades they were looking at, but I think it was in the 20th, 21st century, that overall, at least in recent years, there's not a bias against women. There's a bias for them.

I think that's a perfectly plausible finding. It was incredibly difficult for them to publish that because what you need to show is that there is sexism and racism everywhere. That is the popular view. Now, my argument in 2011 was, if we go down this road, if we continue to make fun of Conservatives, which we do, we tell jokes about them to our students, it was really a hostile climate for Conservatives in the academy, if we continue to do this, we're going to hurt our own science, and we are going to lose any support from Republicans and red states.

When I watched what happened last semester, in the fall semester, and especially in that Senate hearing room where those three presidents testified, the country was disgusted with higher ed. The survey data shows this, the trust in higher ed--

David Remnick: Just to be clear, you're referring to the Congressional hearing about October 7th in the aftermath on college campuses, specifically Harvard, MIT [crosstalk].

Jonathan Haidt: And MIT. That's right. Yes, correct. It was a House hearing. It was in the Senate.

David Remnick: Representative Stefanik, who is herself not absent, political ideology and motivation was behind the microphone for the crucial moment.

Jonathan Haidt: The point is there was a whole series of events. I'd been writing about the decline of trust in higher ed. Look, you asked me what my politics is. My mission-- my mission, when I moved to NYU Stern, I wrote a mission statement. My mission is to use my research in moral psychology and that of others to help people understand each other across divisions and to help important institutions work well.

David Remnick: Jonathan, finally, what will happen to the anxious generation if nothing changes? Will they grow up feeling lonely and disconnected forever, or is this something they grow out of.

Jonathan Haidt: We don't know. What we can say is that young people in their 20s used to be the happiest people. There was what was called the U-shaped Curve of Happiness, where young people in their late teens and 20s are the happiest along with people in their 60s and 70s, and it's people in middle age who are less happy. That was true across the world until a few years ago. Now, a paper just came out by James Blanchflower, who's an expert on this topic. The U-shaped Curve of Happiness is over internationally.

He looked at 27 countries, and he found that the late teens and early 20s, they're actually the least happy now or the most anxious, whatever the measure is. There's been a huge change in young people. They used to be the happiest, and now they're the least happy. Are they going to grow out of this in their 20s? It doesn't look like it yet. There could well be lasting changes in their brains because we didn't protect them in puberty, and puberty is such an important time--

David Remnick: Essentially in the wiring of their brains.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes, the brain is literally rewiring, literally in the sense of neurons are seeking each other out. Neurons are fading away if they're not used. Synapses are forming or fading away. That happens very rapidly in the first couple of years of life, then it slows down, but in puberty, it speeds up. Puberty is a time of really important rewiring. Traditional societies would give young people some guidance into how do you make the transition to adulthood. We don't do that. We give them an iPhone and an iPad, and we say, "Here, we're going to let you be guided into adulthood by a bunch of random people on the internet chosen by algorithm for their extremity, whatever it is." That's how you're going to rewire your brain.

It is possible that there are lasting effects and that Gen Z, for the rest of their lives, will be more anxious and fragile. That is possible. Just don't know. The optimistic thing I can say is that there's a lot they can do to make themselves better quickly. I teach a course at NYU Stern called Flourishing. It's an undergraduate positive psychology course. One of the most important things I do with the class is I say, we go through their notifications, how many do you get? 200 to 500 a day, typically is how many the students get. I say, "Turn off notifications for everything except for five."

If you could only keep on five apps like Uber, you surely want to keep on Uber and Lyft because you need to know, is the car coming or not? Do you need an update from The New York Times or from The New Yorker or anybody else about--

[crosstalk]

David Remnick: Other than The New Yorker, yes.

Jonathan Haidt: Okay. I tell them that. The New Yorker is different.

David Remnick: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Jonathan Haidt: Most of them get a notification every time an email comes in. If they get a piece of spam on email, they get interrupted in their daily life. This has just become normal. They haven't learned to protect their attention. I try to convince them, and it's easy to convince. Your attention is the most precious thing you have. You could make huge amounts of money. There's no limit to how much money you could make, but there's a very severe limit on how much attention you have, you can't get more of it. Who are you going to give it away to? Tell me which companies you're going to allow to take your attention every day.

Once you phrase it like that, they turn off almost all their notifications and we get remarkable results. They say that for the first time, they can think clearly, they're able to do their homework, they're less anxious. Modern life is fragmenting all of us, and it's really doing a number on young people. If we reverse that, we improve their mental health.

David Remnick: It seems that it requires the same discipline that it once did for someone to go off to a Zen Buddhist monastery to do what you're prescribed.

Jonathan Haidt: No, turning off notifications is easy. We do it in class. Self-control is hard, but turning off notifications is easy.

David Remnick: Jonathan, thank you very much.

Jonathan Haidt: David, my pleasure. Always a pleasure to talk with you.

[music]

David Remnick: Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and a professor at the Stern School of Business of New York University.

[music]

 

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