“Social animals are smart animals,” the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explained in his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Once humans developed technologies like writing and printing, Haidt wrote, they could imagine communities beyond their immediate surroundings and thus invoke such things as a nation and even humanity. People are motivated to maintain constant, lightly mediated communication with each other, Haidt observes: “Success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
Writing just two years after Mark Zuckerberg hacked together the first version of Facebook in his Harvard dorm room and the year before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, Haidt seemed to endorse one of the core virtues of social media use. Gossip, that unmediated expression of umbrage, outrage, surprise, or excitement, is one of the practices that holds communities together and mediates public morals, he argues in the book and in some of his early, peer-reviewed, scholarly research. When people pass on gossip they feel more powerful and they share a clearer sense of what is right or wrong, Haidt wrote. Gossip, as much as anything, creates an “ultrasocial world.”
It’s this imperfect yet fascinatingly complex ultrasocial world that we have
thrust our children into. Nearly 20 years on, we are all a bit confused,
baffled, frustrated, and fearful about the maelstrom of stimuli that whirl
around us every day, and Haidt has considerably changed his mood about it all
from curious to judgmental. His most recent book, The Anxious Generation:
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
has set off alarms and panic from local school boards to the U.S. Surgeon
General about the effects of technology on kids. The very real misery young
people exhibit these days, Haidt argues, has been directly caused by too much
time staring at those little, addictive boxes that stream games and videos.
Though Haidt is far from the first person to lament the rise of the smartphone, his diagnosis has found influential supporters. This may be partly because of his track record of writing buzzy social science books that seem to encapsulate the ills of the moment: Since his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which called for mutual understanding among Americans who might, at first glance, seem to promote irreconcilable social and moral orders, he has been one of the country’s most telegenic and accessible scholars, with a run of cover stories in The Atlantic and appearances on Morning Joe and Bill Maher’s show. His third book, The Coddling of the American Mind, decried college students’ embrace of identity politics and social justice activism, in talk show–friendly terms.
The ideas behind The Anxious Generation have appealed to both pundits and policymakers: In June, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published an op-ed in The New York Times calling for “warning labels” on social media apps to dissuade young people from using them so much. Soon after, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for stricter limits on social media use by young people, and the Los Angeles School District is considering a full ban on cell phone use in schools. Rebecca Onion, writing in Slate, reported that she, like many liberals, used to regard such measures as alarmist but that now they have “come to look more and more like common sense.”
Those who agree with Haidt appreciate his well-crafted anecdotes and easy prescriptions. His critics, meanwhile, tend to point out a tendency to overlook the wider context and jump to conclusions. (Haidt “is a gifted storyteller,” developmental psychologist Candice Odgers wrote in her review in Nature, “but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.”) What few have noted, however, is Haidt’s intellectual journey away from a broad conception of society as a source of connection, exploration, and even relief. Instead of confronting the variety of effects of all this social, economic, and technological change, Haidt since his first book has offered us a narrow and desiccated sense of the social.
The Anxious Generation opens with a thought experiment: Would readers be willing to send their 10-year-old daughters to live in a colony on Mars? “The company behind the project is racing to stake its claim to Mars before any rival company,” Haidt writes, invoking the mad dash for innovation and domination that drives Silicon Valley culture. “Its leaders don’t seem to know anything about child development and don’t seem to care about children’s safety.” Add to these concerns the atmospheric and gravitational differences between Mars and Earth, plus the social and emotional consequences of experiencing adolescence in a radically new environment run by a private company, and Haidt makes the rather obvious case that no reasonable parent would make such a choice. Yet, Haidt declares, this is not too far from the choice we have made for our children by giving them smartphones loaded with applications designed to warp their behavior and capture their attention.
His book’s argument has two main parts. First, he
argues that risky, unsupervised play is essential for rich and resilient psychological
development. He describes what he sees as an overprotective parenting style,
often referred to as “helicopter parenting,” and makes a connection to the
mental health crisis. Haidt then describes real-life stories and research on
the severe consequences of bullying and online harassment. And he outlines four
ways that what he calls “phone-based childhood” disrupts development: through sleep
deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. “Between
2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto
smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and
other internet-based activities,” Haidt wrote. “This Great Rewiring of
Childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of
adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.”
It’s this last and boldest claim that defines the book and has generated the strongest criticism from other researchers. Haidt presents data, conclusions, and graphs that purport to illustrate that digital technology use and adolescent mental health problems are rising together. His evidence rests on a series of experiments in which research subjects, often college and university students, agreed to deprive themselves of access to their phones for a period of time. Overall, they reported better senses of well-being after abstaining. “When people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves,” Haidt writes.
While such studies might seem compelling to many lay readers, there are good reasons to doubt such abstinence experiments. Many studies in social psychology generate headlines by appearing to show certain causes or associations, only to have their findings modified or completely rejected when others try to replicate the findings. Because studies of small samples of diverse humans can generate a wide array of results even when methods are replicated well, scientists rely on meta-analyses of sets of studies in order to arrive at the best sense of the knowledge in the field. Most meta-analyses, understandably, generate only modest conclusions from wide collections of data and different methods. They also bake in cultural and national diversity if they include studies done around the world. For good reason, meta studies are essential to the incremental progress of any scientific field but especially one as variable as social psychology.
A recent meta-analysis of experimental studies concludes something very different than Haidt does. “Currently, experimental studies should not be used to support the conclusion that social media use is associated with mental health,” wrote Christopher Ferguson in a recent issue of Psychology of Popular Media. “Taken at surface value, mean effect sizes are no different from zero.… However, mean effect sizes aside, there are reasons to suspect that the methodology of most such studies is simply not up to the task.”
A central problem is that the subjects in abstinence experiments often have no problem guessing or assuming why they are being asked to refrain from social media use. They often are, after all, psychology students at major universities. Conversations about the effects of social media have surrounded them since middle school. They are well aware that giving up is meant to make them feel unburdened and fulfilled. “Given the very visible nature of debates regarding social media and mental health, it is likely that many participants will be able to guess the hypotheses of these studies,” Ferguson wrote.
In addition, Ferguson wrote, during such experiments many subjects drop out and decide to start using again, limiting the effects of the study in invisible ways. “This can create response bias, wherein only participants who enjoyed reducing social media time remain at posttest to indicate mental wellness, artificially inflating wellness scores posttest for the experimental group.”
Researchers may also suffer from “publication bias,” the desire to generate the sorts of publications that grab attention and thus citations from other scholars down the line. Limited findings rarely generate a story on NPR or in The New York Times, nor are they the subject of splashy books like Haidt’s.
The Anxious Generation gets several important things right. Young Americans—in fact, all segments of Americans—are experiencing higher levels of expressed mental distress and emotional distress than we have seen in some time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have concluded that during the pandemic months of 2020 and 2021, more than one in three high school students experienced poor mental health and nearly half of students felt persistently sad or hopeless. The suffering was more pronounced among girls and women and those who identify as LGBQ, as a CDC report stated: “Female students and those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, other, queer or questioning (LGBQ) are experiencing disproportionate levels of poor mental health and suicide-related behaviors.” In 2021, the report found, 12 percent of female students, more than 25 percent of LGB students, and 17 percent of other or questioning students attempted suicide compared to 5 percent of their male peers and 5 percent of their heterosexual peers, respectively.” Something is happening in this country and a few other countries that is creating acute suffering. Such a crisis demands a full examination of the range of problems young people face and strong, quick intervention.
The other thing that Haidt gets right is that, at least in the United States, expectations of parenting and the experience of childhood have undergone a steady change—at least among the middle and upper classes. Over several decades, wealthier parents have become more protective of their children and more involved in shaping what used to be free or play time. At the same time, a hypercompetitive culture has developed among the more privileged classes in the United States, where it seems like everybody’s struggling to get into the same 20 universities and everybody is trying to sign up for the travel soccer team.
Yet this has not been a universal shift: Working-class and poor parents must contend with a range of demands—from the unpredictable scheduling of low-wage work to the necessity of elder care—that take them out of their children’s daily lives. So it’s not like the free-range, latchkey child phenomenon of the 1980s is gone. It’s just alive among lower-income families because, of course, few can afford childcare and it often takes multiple income streams to cover rent and food.
So what has happened in the 2000s to crater mental health among young people? Let’s agree that moving one’s eyes and body from the park to the phone is not healthy in general. It would be hard to argue otherwise. Let’s also allow that people do engage with these screens and the apps on them for reasons that are important to them. People, young and old, have particular needs that they’re satisfying by moving time and attention to these phones. Again, that may not be ideal.
But there is a huge gap between “not ideal” or even “bad for us” on balance and being the chief cause of such a high level of distress among youth. What if there is a more reasonable and nuanced explanation? What if there is more than one contributing factor? Most likely a number of factors have worked together to affect not only an individual’s mental health state but, collectively, an entire population’s mental health state.
Millions of
American children (and adults) have families that have lost wealth, houses,
jobs, and opportunities over the cascading economic crises of the last two
decades, from the Great Recession of 2008 with its long legacy of wiping out
American wealth to the Covid crisis. The Covid pandemic killed more than a
million Americans; almost seven million worldwide. Children lost parents,
grandparents, and peers. They lost social connections and opportunities. With
two global, world-historical convulsions happening in their lifetimes, how
could mental health not have suffered?
Haidt is fond of deploying the aggregated data gathered by the CDC in its 2021 survey report on mental health. It’s the chief source of much of the evidence he deploys in his book. However, even he acknowledges in his peer-reviewed work that the statistical correlation between screen time and mental health is “very small.” Far more significant among factors that could be influencing poor mental health is something that is so much more obvious, yet for some reason ignored by Haidt and by Murthy in his calls for labeling social media as dangerous: abuse. Sociologist Mike Males reported that a mathematical analysis of the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior survey shows the association between parental abuse and teen depression is 13 times stronger than anything associated with screen use. The terrible fact of life in the U.S. is that families and friends are generally far more dangerous to children and teens than strangers and technology are.
It’s possible that everything else in society is amplifying or even causing so much of the distress, and constant phone use is a symptom and often necessary response. Researcher danah boyd noted, after interviewing more than 150 young people around the country, an increase in surveillance of their every thought and action, combined with a loss of public and play spaces. As a result, boyd has argued, young people—especially those susceptible to mental illness and distress—gravitate to digital platforms out of necessity. The ability to reach out beyond your immediate surroundings and find stories, role models, guides, and peers could be crucial to surviving some of the most stressful developmental moments that a young person can go through. So for someone in a hostile family or an uncaring or an unreasonable family, or an intolerant community or church, these tools can be lifesavers.
For many Americans smartphones have become necessary tools for survival in the absence of effective social safety nets, job security, childcare, and other basic necessities. If you are a parent working two jobs with contingent hours, you will have a smartphone to manage your hourly commitment to jobs, transportation, and whatever childcare you can hack together. And you had better give your child a phone too so you can be in constant contact. As media scholar Julia Ticona explains in her powerful book, Left to Our Own Devices, contingent workers cannot opt out from the smartphone life, and nor can their family members—including children. Living smartphone-free is a luxury reserved for the privileged and comfortable. Phones and social apps are necessary in a society that has no safety net and no decent commitment to making sure that children lead safe and secure lives.
Beyond that, researchers like Odgers and boyd have pointed out that the association between digital devices and platforms and mental health indicates the opposite of Haidt’s confident pronouncement. In fact, those who are at risk of mental health problems are more likely to seek community, solace, and distractions in their phones than those who are lucky enough to be relatively well. The more one suffers, the more one seeks connection in a world that does not afford much kindness and solidarity. Often, and especially for LGBTQ youth, electronic communities are all there is for a young person going through challenges.
None of this is to argue that smartphones and social media are net positives to society. It’s also not to argue that there are not good reasons to restrict the constant use of phones in schools—or at least in classrooms (assuming students don’t have to return to online courses anytime soon). We have been having this argument at my child’s high school for years. Many parents demanded that their children have their phones with them and have them on at all times to manage family obligations and enhance safety. Many others who are more concerned about test scores and grades insisted on prohibition. There were no simple answers that worked for every child.
If we want to make Americans less reliant on smartphones, we have to address the problems of misery among all Americans. Parental stress reflects on children and young adults, who often witness all the ugly consequences of a cruel society and economy. Direct stresses on youth, enhanced by diminishing promises of a flourishing future, a sense of planetary demise, tightening social restrictions, educational failure, and the rise of public cruelty in real life and social media, demand a much more comprehensive—and political—approach than Haidt can offer with his laser-focus on phones. The danger of emphasizing a single cause for such a widespread and deadly problem is that there is a good chance we would fail to address the range of the real contributing factors.
Haidt trained as a social psychologist in the 1980s. His early work focused on morality and the exciting area of “positive psychology”: Instead of conducting studies to measure our maladies and malevolence, competing to amend the next edition of the DSM, positive psychology explores what it takes to live a good, fulfilling life. It considers such normative and culturally specific subjects as empathy, courage, and how we build a moral character and a moral framework for society.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt drew on conversations with curious and motivated students at the University of Virginia to assemble an entertaining self-help book that posits ancient wisdom from various global traditions (not without extreme simplification, of course) with recent scholarship in positive psychology. This earlier, open-minded, refreshingly modest Haidt is a stark contrast with the grumpy polemicist of recent years.
Haidt’s political polemics tend to fit a pattern of blaming individuals and their irrational impulses for wide social problems. The Righteous Mind insisted that the center left and right could both do better if they appreciated and understood the deep moral foundations of the other’s views; the real problem in our politics wasn’t substantial differences but the intolerance of individuals toward one another. Ignoring the ugly fact that American polarization is asymmetric, with the right becoming more extreme and violent, and dehumanizing and delegitimizing anyone in its way, the book was a reasonable and lively intervention that might have made a big difference a decade earlier, before the American right turned wholly against democracy and rationality.
After The Righteous Mind one could see Haidt increasingly working in the mode of a shallow polemicist. The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with activist Greg Lukianoff, made the rather ridiculous association between college students’ strident proclamations of ideological simplicity—neither a new phenomenon nor one that is close to universal—and the rise of emotional distress and other maladies among young people. At one point in the book, Haidt and Lukianoff bizarrely draw parallels between a handful of powerless American students, peacefully demanding justice and recognition, and the Cultural Revolution in 1960s China, which destroyed families and careers and killed as many as two million people. Overall, The Righteous Mind screams more than it teaches, and laments a problem that hardly exists.
Haidt’s retreat from curiosity and complexity reaches its apex in The Anxious Generation. The book missed so many opportunities to explore with sincerity and respect how young people use the tools around them to cope with misery and to seek opportunity. That’s not the whole story of phones in our lives, any more than that of phones undermining mental health is. But if Haidt had sought to tell a more detailed and truthful story of our condition, he would have listened to the kids more.
