Imagine if when we went to school they said you can bring in your television set, your VCR, your guitar, your paint-by-numbers, Play-Doh, whatever you want, bring it in, play with it during class. I mean, that's completely insane, and of course you wouldn't be able to learn anything. And that's what's happened since 2012.
Welcome to Radio Davos. I'm delighted to have as a guest Jonathan Haidt, who is the bestselling author of The Anxious Generation.
For the last 10 years, it's been mostly kids just staring down, and this is a big reason why they are so lonely. Smartphones with a front-facing camera, high-speed internet, and super-addictive, super-viral social media on the phone, which wasn't possible in 2010. And so it's that period in which there's a rewiring of this flow of development, and the kids are coming out different, and I would say diminished. This is a collective action problem, but if we work together, we're making amazing progress.
Hi Jon, how are you? I've been a fan since I discovered The Happiness Hypothesis, your first book. I think, is that right?
That's right. It grew out of my teaching Psych 101 at the University of Virginia, finding that ancient ideas often illuminated modern psychology. And I just collected a bunch of quotations from the ancients, and guess what? It turns out they were totally wrong about chemistry, physics, and things like that, but totally right about consciousness and social life.
You know, I love the book, and if you describe it as you've taken ancient wisdom, whatever, it sounds a bit, with all due respect to Hallmark, Hallmark-y. But what you've done in that book and what you've done in The Anxious Generation is had hypotheses and tested them against evidence. Let's talk about The Anxious Generation. This has made a real stir over the last year, I think, around the world. Tell us in a nutshell what that book is.
So The Anxious Generation is an attempt to explain why it is that the students entering my college classes and everyone's college classes in 2014, 2015 were so different from the Millennials. We thought they were Millennials at the time, but they were much more anxious. They saw threats everywhere. They wanted trigger warnings. And so I've been working on that problem since 2014, 2015. What happened? Because it wasn't just college students. It turns out it was everyone in America born in 1996 and later, and then it turned out it was the exact same in Canada and the UK and Australia, and in more recent years it's true in Europe too. We found that it's true in Europe too. And so the book is an attempt to explain that, and it boils down to a very simple formula, which is that we have overprotected our children in the real world, that is, we've blocked them from free play, independence, and risk-taking, and we've... those two mistakes that the book is trying to call attention to, and then give parents and teachers and legislators tools and ideas and simple norms to roll back this phone-based childhood and return to a play-based childhood.
You call it the Great Rewiring. Why is that?
I think developmentally, I think about a child growing into an adult within a cultural context. I think about like a river, like a flow, you know, or like electrical current or something moving along. And then the technology changed. Of course, it's changing continuously, but there's a period, 2010 to 2015, when it changes really radically. We'll come back to that in a moment. And it's that period, 2010 to 2015, that's when you find the elbows in all the graphs. That is, levels of mental illness, especially anxiety, depression, were pretty stable from the late '90s through 2010, 2011, no sign of a trend. And then all of a sudden, it's as though someone turns on a light switch, and the levels of anxiety and depression skyrocket, especially in girls. And so I'm trying to figure out what changed. And the answer, at least what I say in the book, is that in 2010 teens all had flip phones. The iPhone comes out in 2007, but teens don't really have it in 2010. They have a flip phone, they use it to call and text their friends, and so they are still going to see, they're still spending time with their friends, they're still looking at people in the eye. But by 2015, they've traded in their flip phones for smartphones with a front-facing camera, high-speed internet, and super-addictive, super-viral social media on the phone, which wasn't possible in 2010. And so it's that period in which there's a rewiring of this flow of development, and it now is not the ancient, you know, millions-of-years-old path of childhood to adulthood. It's now on screens, online, and the kids are coming out different, and I would say diminished.
And it's kind of a two-way thing. You say that having this addictive thing in your hand all the time, it blocks opportunity for what used to be social interaction in the real world, and also there's the potential damage from the content itself. So it's kind of a double hit. And I think one thing was interesting, you're talking about phone bans, and I know you're very active campaigning to get smartphones banned from schools, and a lot of schools ban them in the class, but then not at break time, at recess.
So what I found is that here in Europe, people just love the word 'ban.' Everyone wants to talk about this as a phone ban, whereas, you know, in America we don't like bans unless they're absolutely necessary. And so I call this a phone-free school. It's a positive, it's a virtue. So phone-free schools is what we need to have. I mean, think about it this way: you and I are from roughly the same time, I imagine, the 1960s. And imagine if when we went to school they said you can bring in your television set, your VCR, your guitar, your paint-by-numbers, Play-Doh, whatever you want, bring it in, play with it during class. I mean, that's completely insane, and of course you wouldn't be able to learn anything. And that's what's happened since 2012. Test scores in the US and around the world, as we know from the PISA data, were well, in the US they were rising from the '70s through 2012, and then they begin to fall. And this wasn't because of COVID. They fall after 2012, same thing with the PISA data. So as soon as we stuffed kids full of screens, and not just their phones, but also all the educational technology, they're so distracted they can't learn. So in response, some schools, and France did this first, they said we're going to ban phones in the classroom, which means that every teacher now has to be the phone police because the kids have access to their phones in their pockets or in their backpack. And what that means is that the kids are desperate to get to their phones beginning five or 10 minutes before class ends. They're thinking about it. Many of them are heavily addicted. And then in between classes, they're all on their phones. And then in the lunchroom, they're on their phones. And when schools go phone-free, and this is happening around the world, when schools go phone-free and they say, no, it's for the school day, you come into school, you need the phone to get to school, perhaps you put it in a phone lock, a special phone locker, you put it in a Yondr pouch, you put it just in an envelope at the front of your homeroom class. When schools do this, what they all say is that we hear laughter in the hallways again. They say the lunchroom is loud again, because for the last 10 years it's been mostly kids just staring down, and this is a big reason why they are so lonely. The more you connect a generation by digital technology, the lonelier they are.
Generations past would say, oh, kids watch too much television, it's rotting their brain. And then maybe a generation later, like, oh, they worry too much about that. Could this just be that, you know, it's rotting their brains? It's just you're an old fuddy-duddy, Jonathan, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, in theory it could, and that is the main argument against me, that this is just another moral panic. But let's look a little closer. It is up to me to show that this time is different. I think I can do that. First, in previous moral panics, you didn't have a sudden, instantaneous international collapse in anything, but in this you do, and there's no other way to explain why mental health goes haywire, not just in the US, but in Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, many, many countries. And television is really, really different in two ways. First, the dose makes the poison. So there were kids who watched 10 hours a day, and I bet they were messed up, but you and I probably watched one to three hours a day typically, and then you'd go outside. Even if you're with a friend, you watch TV for a while, and then you go outside and do something. We couldn't watch TV 10 hours a day. But when you go from a flip phone to a smartphone, you can. And half of all kids in the United States, half of all teens say they are online almost all the time, or rather almost constantly. The phone is always in their hand. You can't do that with TV. And so two or three hours a day of television doesn't seem to be terribly damaging. Seven to 12 hours a day of scrolling and comparing and not doing anything else is damaging. So this time is very, very different.
I read a one-line review of the book in Nature, something along the lines of, yeah, it's all good supposition, but you don't test it against evidence, which I was quite surprised by, actually. How do you respond to that?
Well, that essay in Nature by Candice Odgers, who's a leading researcher in this area, she makes a number of assertions that I think are not true. She says that I only have correlational evidence, but I don't. I have many kinds of evidence of causality. So the first is that there are about 20, 25 experiments where you have people get off social media for a couple of weeks and you look at what happens to their mental health, and you use random assignment. I mean, this is exactly what we mean by experimental evidence of causality. And when we look at those studies, what we find is that the ones that get kids off, or usually college students, the ones that get people off for a day, you think that's going to help them? No. If you're addicted to something, the first day or two is really hard, the first four to seven days is really hard. But almost all the experiments that go for two weeks or longer, or even a week or longer, they all show benefits. So like right there, that is exactly the sort of thing that she was saying I don't have, but we have it.
You're in Davos a lot. A lot of those big companies are here. Are you meeting them, and what kind of conversations are you having?
I don't have time to talk with them here, and it's just, I know the Oversight Board is here. I might stop by that booth or that place on the promenade. I've spoken with Mark Zuckerberg on two occasions. I've spoken with the head of Snapchat on occasion. No contact with TikTok. In general, they're saying nothing about me. But, you know, they have a giant PR department, and that PR department is doing its job, and they're trying to control the narrative and spread the idea that, you know, it's just correlational evidence, Haidt doesn't have evidence. So as far as I can tell, they're not doing anything directly publicly, but of course they're trying to control the narrative. That is their job.
Let's talk about, there's a chapter in the book where you move into spirituality, and this is very interesting from someone who's read The Happiness Hypothesis, because a lot of that, you test the ancient wisdom, a lot of ancient wisdom is religious as well, through Judaism or Christianity. And I've often wondered what your own religion is, because in the book you talk about, I think you say you're an atheist, but that you have a huge respect for the benefit of some religion. Could you tell us something about that, and also how then it could relate to this Anxious Generation problem?
I'm so glad you asked about that, because that's my favorite chapter in the book, chapter eight. So I wrote this whole book about the devastation of young people, what this new transition is doing to young people, and then when I got near the end of the book, I realized, wait a second, like I haven't said anything about adults. And we all feel it. We all feel it's just too much, and it's constant, and it's a deluge, and what is this doing to us? And because I wrote this book, The Happiness Hypothesis, looking at ancient wisdom, I realized, whoa, almost every great truth that we get from the ancients about how to live your life, to have a better life, to be connected to God, to become a better person, almost every piece of advice we get, the online life, the social media life, the phone-based life tells you to do the opposite. So, you know, the ancients tell us things like, you know, judge not lest ye be judged. The general theme is, and so many religions, great beautiful quotes in ancient Judaism about the dangers of anger, be slow to anger, be quick to forgive. This is ancient wisdom. What is life on Twitter? You better judge now, baby, because if you don't condemn them now, someone's going to condemn you for not condemning. And give people the benefit of the doubt, look at the context. Social media says there's no context, it doesn't matter, we're all just going to go crazy over this thing taken out of context. And the ancients tell us, try to calm the buzzing cacophony in your mind, sit quietly, and you'll get an inner harmony between your mind and your spirit and the world. But my students at NYU can never do this because they have to always be consuming content. Now they learn in my class, they learn to stop doing that, to take the earplugs out, the earphones out, walk through beautiful parks. So anyway, I realized, wow, this just matches on so beautifully that the phone-based life is the opposite of ancient wisdom and of human flourishing. So I wrote that up in a chapter. And then to get back to part of your question, so I'm Jewish, but like many American Jews, raised in a very secular way, went to synagogue on the High Holy Days, I had a bar mitzvah, and otherwise didn't do much. I was hostile to religion for a while because I was like a science kid, and I was the sort of kid who would have become a new atheist, like who thinks, oh, religion is terrible, evil, get rid of it. But because I study moral psychology, and I wrote my second book, was called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and in that book I delve very deeply into the origins of religion, the evolutionary origins. There's no doubt about this. Humans evolved to be religious. We evolved to have sacredness, to form bonds, to circle around sacred objects. This unifies us as a community. Emile Durkheim got it all right. And so once you see that, now suddenly you realize, whoa, the religious people actually have it right in terms of how to live. Now, that wasn't so clear 20 years ago, but they've been happier than secular people for a long time. After 2012, it's the secular kids who become super depressed and anxious. The religious kids only a little bit because they are grounded in a community and a moral order, and the secular kids were not, and they got washed out to sea by a million short videos and memes.
Because people who are anti-religion would say this is a way of controlling the masses, telling you what to do from on high, you know, opium of the masses. You don't think that?
No, I mean, sure, that's a hostile thing that one might say, and there have been times when religion was more organized and controlling, and it might be also, you know, I come from the United States where there never was a state religion. The religions have to compete. There's an interesting theory: why are Americans so much more religious? In part because we have a free market in religions, our churches, and they all have to compete, and so they have to attract people, they have to be innovative, and they have to be fun. So whereas in Europe, you know, you have these state religions that are stodgy and boring and old. So I have developed a great deal of respect for religion and the social functions of religion. Again, not all religions. Some religions lead to more violence, some lead to more peace and calm. But I myself, after I listened to a podcast by Ezra Klein with a woman who wrote a book about Shabbat, about the Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath, and so recently I've decided to try to start honoring that myself, even though I'm an atheist, just one day a week when I don't try to do a million things to advance my projects, but I focus on people and books and regeneration. I can like clean out my closet, I can do things, but rather than the constant striving 24/7, just one day a week, I'm making a commitment to it here publicly. I just started a couple weeks ago, so let's see if I can keep it up.
