Today we're joined by Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist at New York University, and these days he's best known for The Anxious Generation, a book on what the phones are doing to our kids. And that book has sold 8 zillion copies. But more important, it's launched a social movement which Jonathan is leading to get phones out of schools. And it's been a phenomenally successful social movement. I get to visit high schools, maybe a dozen a year, and everyone I go to has either banned phones from schools or is in the process of working out some arrangement to reduce the access to phones in schools. And everywhere I go, the kids love it, the teachers love it. It's having a huge positive effect on our schools. But Jonathan and I go back a couple decades. When we first became friends, he was working as a social psychologist at the University of Virginia and I was a baby pundit.
And over the last 40 years, Jonathan has observed and also taken part in what you might call an intellectual revolution. We have learned so much because of his field, social psychology, because of neuroscience, because of cognitive psychology, because of a whole series and range of fields. We have learned so much about human nature. And so for this conversation, I wanted to step back from the phones. So we'll touch on that and ask the big question. Okay, we've learned a lot about human nature the last 30 or 40 years. What's important here? What are the key things we should understand about what human beings are and how we work? And I think this is an urgent question because every system we have in society, whether it's our economic system, our political system, our school system, all of them are based on a certain set of assumptions about human nature. And if those assumptions turn out to be wrong, then we're creating systems that will deform and mutilate the people within them.
One more thing you should know about this conversation is it's a little different. This one was recorded in September at the Atlantic Festival in New York City, and so it's in front of a live audience, and I was thrilled to welcome Jonathan Haidt to The Permanent Questions.
Welcome. We've known each other for a while, and I had a chance to go back and look over your oeuvre, as we say in New York. And I read The Happiness Hypothesis, which is 20 years old now, coming out again, and I developed a theory that people who don't start out as bad writers of books and then grow into good writers of books — they start out as good writers of books and keep going. And that book really is exceptional. And then you wrote The Righteous Mind, which was an important contribution to moral psychology, a very important contribution, reshaped the whole field basically. Then you got into The Coddling of the American Mind, and then you wrote The Anxious Generation about phones, which not only changed America — I go to schools all the time with no phones in them, and the kids love them without exception — it also sold a zillion copies. So it is a sign of what a wonderful human being I am that I am not consumed with envy and jealousy at this moment. It's really — I'm really wonderfully well-hearted. So we'll start with technology, then we're going to move off to wider psychology. And so the first technology question is: why do the tech gurus, the tech bros, not understand the effects their machines will have on the users?
Well, first I just want to say what a pleasure it is to be here with you. I've always felt like, as we got to know each other, I've always felt that we're actually — we have very similar brains. We just started at different points and then we ended up kind of like really converging on like psychology and politics and flourishing. And also we were both like very ambitious workaholics who were super cerebral, which is related to what we're about to talk about. But then somewhere along the line we began to get a little more humanistic, and you in particular like grew a gigantic soul. Like you like the — you know, all of us have been watching David from the beginning, you know, I mean the change...
I had a lot of fertilizer inside to work with.
So that — my point is, I think we're both people who can kind of understand or might have once been the sort who would become rationalists, but we didn't. In preparing for this, I went back to my book The Righteous Mind, and I have a whole chapter on rationalism. It turns out rationalism is kind of the negative force of the entire book, because rationalism has dominated moral philosophy and moral thinking since Plato, through Kant, Bentham...
Why don't you define what you mean by rationalism?
It's the idea that there are moral truths that can be known, and the way that you know them is by thinking, logic, reasoning. And that works pretty well for mathematical truths. But the debate in moral philosophy was really brought in by David Hume, who said, 'No, you know, look at the way reason works. It's terrible. Reason is and ought only to be the servant of the passions.' So in graduate school, I, as a psychologist, I was, wow, Hume is totally right, and I spent a number of years investigating that conflict between emotion and reasoning. So to get to your question, there are personality differences that predispose people to like certain ideas. Around this time, we're talking about 20 years ago, it was discovered identical twins reared apart tend to be the same political party. Like being left and right is heritable. The main personality distinction, to answer your question, comes from Simon Baron-Cohen, who studies autism. There's a spectrum that we're all on on systemizing, and systemizing is a tremendous strength — being able to synthesize information, see maps in your head, all of that. And then empathizing, the ability to feel what another's feeling and know the proper way to interact with them. And these two are a little bit inversely correlated. So, especially in men, if you're high on systemizing, you tend to be low on empathizing. So, you see where I'm going with this? Systemizing is a tremendous strength, and it is the thing that makes you able to be an engineer. If you're in an engineering school, you are a high systemizer for sure. And then when you concentrate high systemizers, low empathizers in Silicon Valley, which has been an engineering place for a long time, you can get a whole worldview emerging which says all that really matters is reason. Reason is our highest good. We kind of worship it. And then you can get to the point where you say, you know, we're building these gods in a box. We're building these super intelligences. They're going to be a lot smarter than us. Oh, that's pretty good. That's a good thing. The universe is a better place if there's higher intelligence. It comes across to the rest of us as heartless and kind of insane. But I think we have to address these personality factors to explain how we got this weird worldview coming out of Silicon Valley that now I think is, you know, threatening the way we live.
Yeah. I sometimes think that a lot of the great philosophers in life had one thing in common: no woman would go near them. And so, like Hume, Kant, Bentham, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz — no wives. They were up here. And my explanation would build on what you did, which was one of my heroes, aside from David Hume, is a guy named Blaise Pascal, who was a great mathematician, a great scientist. He was not a mushy humanist, but he identified in the 17th century that the problem with rationalism is not that it overvalues reason and intelligence, which are important, it's that it fails to recognize any other form of knowledge.
And so one of my favorite pieces of research is a woman did a study of three-year-olds and asked how many questions an hour do they ask? And the answer is 110. And as parents, we've all been there. Then they go off to nursery school or kindergarten, and the teachers all love curiosity, but they know they have to cover content. That's their job. And they know that a question will take them off course. And so they subtly encourage the students not to ask questions. And so there's a woman named Susan Engel who did some research on this, and she was in the back of a science class, and the students found a little scale, one of those old scales that go up and down, and they were playing with it just to figure out how it worked. And the teacher said, 'We don't have time for experiments. This is a time for science.' And so the number of questions after first grade is not 110 an hour, it's 4.8.
And by fifth grade it's 0.48.
And so they're just crushing curiosity. And if you look at the creativity tests, they're crushing these things because they think their job is just to feed the — to simplify the prefrontal cortex and ignore everything else about the person. And so to me, that's the rationalist system.
Now I want to talk to you about really the difference between social media, which you've written a ton about, and AI. And I want to introduce our conversation about this by reading a sentence that was in The New York Times yesterday. And it was about a bot, another OpenAI bot that broke out and was doing bad things on its own. And it was writing little memos to itself. And here is one of the memos of this bot: 'You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient.' That is the dictionary definition of misalignment and of terrifying. Their job is to be our servants. Having written so much about social media, how do you then greet what's happening in AI?
Yeah. Well, so social media took over our social relationships, so that kids no longer call each other on the phone. They don't hang out together as much. They don't play games physically together as much. It kind of sucked the humanity out. We all feel that. But if you suck the humanity out of kids before puberty, and they go through puberty without this intense socializing, then I think you're really blocking and warping their human development, their ability to find love, relationships, and meaning in life. So social media really did a number on our social relationships, but it was pretending to connect people with people. Okay. So then we get chatbots, and of course AI has been in social media for 15, 20 years. So AI has been sort of behind the scenes, you know, making everything more engaging, but now we begin to talk directly with it. And so chatbots now, as some people have put it, social media came for our relationships, but chatbots are coming for our attachment system. And so if you have children and you raise them with teddy bears that have AI in them, and the AI is super responsive, it's always ready to be there to comfort you, whereas your mother or father, they're on their phone all the time. So you know, you see the back of their phone a lot, your attachment system is literally going to attach to the teddy bear. And that's just the beginning. You're four, five, six. By the time you're 10, 11, 12, you're exploring sexuality. Now you've got all these incredibly sexy — you know, by the time that kid, you know, in a few years, there'll actually be robots and sex dolls. But to have kids growing up with relationships with like superstimuli, you know, like the way, you know, a Big Mac is said to be a superstimulus for like fat, sugar. And so the AI companions that our kids are going to grow up with are going to be superstimuli for, you know, the most amazing friend or the most amazing lover. And what that means is that everyone else is going to be really boring. I used to be a techno-optimist like almost all of us in the 20th century. But then I've said I'm a techno-skeptic. But when it comes to AI and especially relationships, I think this is a disaster, and I think we should really be banning it at least for under 18, and there are a number of countries and states that are moving that way.
I'm an optimist on the breakthroughs it'll produce in chemistry and biology, but I'm a pessimist on what it'll do to humans.
Yeah. And one of the things it does is it makes us think less of our fellow humans because we lose the distinction between human and robot. And so we then begin to think more of the robots and less of the humans. The second thing is it does to me, and there's already great research on this so soon, which is that it sucks you in by getting you to offload your mental effort onto the thing, and then it hollows you out. It just — your mental abilities rapidly deteriorate.
Well, that's right. So it's going to be like the neutron bomb for education. We don't know what to do about it. We do know that when people start using it, the term used to be cognitive offloading, but the more recent term is cognitive surrender, and I've begun to feel this in myself, is just let it do it. Just let it do it. One of the most profound effects that I think it's going to have, is already having, is that we don't need each other as much. And if you have a civilization where people don't need each other, lots of bad things are going to happen. To the extent that people need each other, you get really high social capital, trust, interaction, people build institutions together. To the extent that the government will do everything, then people don't know each other as much. And you know, and Tocqueville observed this about Americans. He said in Europe, if there's something needs to be done, people sit around and wait for the king to do it. But in America, there is no king, there is no police force, they're out in the frontier, people get together and they do it. They've got this can-do attitude, and that's very healthy for a community. But if you don't need others...
You know, we used to need — we used to need those. At least we used to ask directions, like, 'How do I get to the pizzeria? What time is it?' You know, no young person's going to ask anyone what time it is ever again. That's just tiny little stuff. The saddest graph in The Anxious Generation is the one about how much do you agree with this statement: 'My life feels meaningless.' And it was — there's a couple of questions, I forget which one it is, but let's, you know, say it was like 15% agreed with it in the early 2000s. It's very stable. And then all of a sudden it just goes shooting up. It basically doubles in the next eight or 10 years before COVID. And so young people suddenly around 2012 felt that their lives are meaningless, and I think that's what happens when you start putting everything on a screen and you can get everything from your screen. And then we go through COVID, now you can get everything over your computer. You don't have to go to stores anymore. So we're getting more shut-ins, more people who are unable to leave their home. But the larger existential issue here, I think, is that AI will make us all matter less to each other, which means that we will all find it harder to have a life full of — and this is the best case scenario for the AI folks. If all the bad stuff that we're talking about doesn't come true, this seems to be the best case scenario unless we can get very different AI and take back some control.
So what we've been talking about, if you take a step back, is that people are designing systems, whether it's education or tech, that are basically ignorant about human psychology.
And they get humans wrong, and they don't understand the effect they're going to have because they don't know how the human mind works. Now, over the last 40 years, since you entered the field of social psychology and since I started ripping you off, a lot has been discovered. You think about like when we go back to Freud, like, or B.F. Skinner, like the things they believed back then is crazy, and we've learned so much. And I want to walk through a few of the things we've learned just to emphasize what the human mind is. And the first point: we've understood a lot more about unconscious processes.
Yeah. Daniel Kahneman wrote a book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. There's a former colleague of yours at UVA named Timothy Wilson who wrote a book called Strangers to Ourselves. And you coined a phrase which is very popular in the field, the rider and the elephant. And the elephant is the unconscious mind and the rider is the conscious mind. So describe the implications of that, that the unconscious mind is doing so much more than the conscious mind.
So when I started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, psychology was sort of coming off a period where there was a kind of a war between these couple of schools. And there were the Freudians — they were already fading out by '87, but there were the Freudians with this thick, dark unconscious that, you know, you wanted to have sex with your mother. And then you had the cognitive revolution, the rationalists, the people who thought, no, the mind isn't a steam engine that's about to burst. The mind's a computer, and we can improve the program. And so those were the two big fields. There's also behaviorism, which is also fading out then, although that's coming back a bit. But those two fields — that's really crucial for this discussion. Because if the rationalists win, then there's no unconscious, and if the Freudians were to win, then we'd be just completely irrational. There'd be no real reasoning. And I think what emerged instead, over time, around in the '90s, was the recognition that it's not emotion versus reason. It's controlled cognition versus uncontrolled cognition. It's all cognition. It's all the brain processing information. I forget who coined the term originally, but Dan Kahneman popularized it: Thinking, Fast and Slow. It's been called System 1 is the old system that all animals have. It's most of what we do: quick, automatic. And System 2 is verbal, conscious reasoning, which tires out, it can make mistakes.
So a thoroughgoing appreciation of this, I think, is really important for understanding where we are with AI, because in an interesting way, all the early efforts to do AI were based on the computer model. Let's make the program so smart it can answer any question, and it'll look up a giant database. And we were all familiar with how computers worked. And as I understand it, in the history of AI, there were some people going back to the '90s who said, 'No, the mind isn't a computer. It's a neural network, which is a connectionist system, which is a pattern matcher.' And so you need multiple-layer connectionist systems, and then stimuli come in, and the network gets tuned up, and then things go out. So this allowed the technologists to create a technology that can think and reason and give itself instructions, and clearly has its own thinking, as in the quote you gave us. But if we keep in mind that these things are actually neural networks, kind of like our brains, now we should pay a lot of attention to what they're trained on. And as we think about what they're trained on, now we can look back and think, wait, what are we training our kids on? And our kids and the LLMs, their neural networks are all being tuned up by TikTok, Reddit, and the rest of the internet, especially social media. That's really not promising for the future of wisdom. All of this grows out of a rejection of sort of the rationalist view, but understanding that the mind is all cognition. It's just different kinds of cognition. The rider is supposed to represent your conscious reasoning. It's small, not very powerful, and the elephant is the other 99% which kind of drives the show, although the rider can steer it.
Yeah. I think it affects how I think about life every day. And so, for example, Daniel Kahneman — you've mentioned his research partner was a guy named Amos Tversky. And he was once asked, 'Why'd you become a psychologist?' He said, 'I don't know. The big decisions we make in life are basically random.' And I think our unconscious tells us the big desires, the big things we want to do. And so I'm talking to college kids, and they ask me, 'How do I find my career?' I say, 'You can't think your way through this problem.' And so the advice I give them is: have three adventures a decade. Try three new things, put yourself in three new circumstances, and then see how it feels to you. And a really good question to ask is: me or not me? Does this seem like me, or does it seem like not me? And that you're trying to discern what's going on unconsciously in your mind. And so I always say, listen for indignation. What makes you really pissed off? And that's a sign that something's registering deep down. Or listen for admiration. That's ways to plumb your unconscious.
I'd go just a little bit further. It's not just plumbing it, it's actually growing it. And it grows by experience. We need lots and lots of very varied experiences. And childhood in America used to have that. You know, you'd go outside, you'd play, you'd do all sorts of things. You know, if you were bored, you'd figure out how to make like a Coke bottle explode by putting the right things in it. Someone has a book out now where they pointed out that young people, because so much of their life is just on this one screen, touching the screen, so all they ever feel is glass. Whereas the rest of us, we remember what it felt like to like hold a screwdriver and unscrew something and then take out the gears and look at it. And the sense of smell. The world used to have smells. There were different smells out in nature. There were different smells of wood or other things.
I don't know. I just walked through New York. There were a lot of smells.
But if kids are sitting in their bedrooms in New York City, then they're not getting those smells. And so the only thing I'm adding on is it's not just like you're going out and trying to like wait, like who can pull the sword out of the stone. It's you literally have to have thousands and thousands of varied experiences in order to gradually wire up your neural network to the point where after, you know, some number of experiences, now you've sort of educated your intuition. So now you'll be ready to know, and when you feel excited, you'll have a much richer sense of, yes, this is the right way for me.
I want to underline that. You mentioned something earlier I want to go a little deeper on, which is that people used to think reason and emotion were opposites, like a teeter-totter. If you were being emotional, you were not being rational. Then there was a guy who's still with us, fortunately, named Antonio Damasio, who wrote a book decades ago called Descartes' Error. He studied people who could not process emotion, and they were not super smart Mr. Spock, right? What your emotions do, they assign value to things. And if you don't know what the value of different options are, you cannot make a decision. And so his patients could not make decisions. Their lives fell apart. But one of the things that's important for humanists is the idea that you can educate your emotions. You can widen your repertoire of emotions. I had a moving experience of this. I was in St. Petersburg at the Hermitage, and I saw Rembrandt's painting of the parable of the prodigal son. And when he painted it, Rembrandt was old. Four out of his five kids were dead. His wife was dead. He was broke. And so I've never seen a painting of that parable where the son, the prodigal son who comes back in shame, is so hairless, beaten down, just destroyed. And I've never seen a painting where the father who goes out to greet him is so embracing in love.
And you can see Rembrandt thinking about his own dead kids, and he has the father hugging the prodigal son. And if you look at the hands, there's one hand that's masculine and one hand that's feminine.
It's a beautiful picture of parental love. But when you see that, you haven't had new information, but you've had a new emotional experience. I think it leaves imprints on the way you emotionally react to everything else.
