Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU and author of The Coddling of the American Mind, The Righteous Mind, and The Happiness Hypothesis. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Jonathan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/JonHaidt
Jonathan's Website: https://jonathanhaidt.com
Documents & Articles:
1. Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVAtMCQnz8WVxtSNQev_e1cGmY9rnY96ecYuAj6C548/edit
2. Teen Mental Health Testimony: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testimony.pdf
3. The Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
Books:
1. The Coddling of the American Mind (book): https://amzn.to/3MW4HqL
2. The Righteous Mind (book): https://amzn.to/3to0tkj
3. The Happiness Hypothesis (book): https://amzn.to/3Mb1xP2

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:25 - Social media and mental health
15:14 - Mark Zuckerberg
24:51 - Children's use of social media
35:36 - Social media and democracy
51:42 - Elon Musk and Twitter
1:08:13 - Anonymity on social media
1:14:12 - Misinformation
1:21:06 - Social media benefits
1:23:50 - Political division on social media
1:30:22 - Future of social media
1:36:14 - Advice for young people

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The following is a conversation with Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at NYU and critic of the negative effects of social media on the human mind and human civilization.

He gives a respectful but hard hitting response to my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg.

And together, him and I try to figure out how we can do better, how we can lessen the amount of depression and division in the world.

He has brilliantly discussed these topics in his writing, including in his book, The Coddling of the American Mind, and in his recent long article in The Atlantic titled, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.

When Teddy Roosevelt said in his famous speech that it is not the critic who counts.

He has not yet read the brilliant writing of Jonathan Hite.

I disagree with John on some of the details of his analysis and ideas, but both his criticism and our disagreement is essential if we are to build better and better technologies that connect us.

Social media has both the power to destroy our society and to help it flourish.

It's up to us to figure out how we take the lighter path.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Jonathan Haidt.

So you've been thinking about the human mind for quite a long time.

You wrote the happiness hypothesis, the righteous mind, the coddling of the American mind, and today you're thinking, you're writing a lot about social media and about democracy.

So perhaps if it's okay, let's go through the thread that connects all of that work.

How do we get from the very beginning to today with the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media?

So I'm a social psychologist, which means I study how we think about other people and how people affect our thinking.

And in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I picked the topic of moral psychology.

And I studied how morality varied across countries.

And in the 90s, I began, This was like, I got my PhD in 1992.

And in that decade was really when the American culture were kind of really began to blow up.

And I began to notice that left and right in this country were becoming like separate countries.

And you could use the tools of cultural psychology to study this split, this moral battle between left and right.

So I started doing that, and I began growing alarmed in the early 2000s about how bad polarization was getting.

And I began studying the causes of polarization, you know, bringing moral psychology to bear on our political problems.

And I was originally gonna write a book to basically help the Democrats stop screwing up because I could see that some of my research showed people on the right understand people on the left, they know what they think.

You can't grow up in America without knowing what progressives think.

But here I grew up generally on the left and I had no idea what conservatives thought until I went and sought it out and started reading conservative things like National Review.

So originally I wanted to actually help the Democrats to understand moral psychology so they could stop losing to George W.

And I got a contract to write The Righteous Mind.

And once I started writing it, I committed to understanding conservatives by reading the best writings, not the worst.

You don't understand anything until you look from multiple perspectives.

And I discovered there are a lot of great social science ideas in the conservative intellectual tradition.

And so, and I also began to see, you know what?

Things are really, we're coming apart here.

So I began to really focus my research on helping left and right understand each other and helping our democratic institutions to work better.

Okay, so all this is before I had any interest in social media.

I was on Twitter, I guess, like 2009 and Not much, didn't think about it much.

And then, so I'm going along as a social psychologist studying this, and then everything seems to kind of blow up in 2014, 2015 at universities.

And that's when Greg Lukianoff came to me in May of 2014 and said, John, weird stuff is happening.

Students are freaking out about a speaker coming to campus that they don't have to go see.

And they're saying it's dangerous, it's violence.

And so Anyway, Greg's ideas about how we were teaching students to think in distorted ways, that led us to write the Coddling the American Mind, which wasn't primarily about social media either.

It was about, you know, this sort of a rise of depression, anxiety.

But after that, things got so much worse everywhere.

And that's when I began to think like, whoa, something systemically has changed.

Something has changed about the fabric of the social universe.

And so ever since then, I've been focused on social media.

So we're going to try to sneak up to the problems and the solutions at hand from different directions.

I have a lot of questions whether it's fundamentally the nature of social media that's the problem, it's the decisions of various human beings that lead the social media companies that's the problem, is there still some component that's highlighted in the coddling of the American Mind, that's the individual psychology at play, or the way parenting and education works to make, sort of emphasize anti-fragility of the human mind as it interacts with the social media platforms and the other humans through the social, so all that beautiful mess.

That should take us an hour or 2 to cover.

You said you wanted to challenge some of the things that Mark Zuckerberg has said in a conversation with me.

What are some of the ideas he expressed that you disagree with?

Okay, there are 2 major areas that I study.

1 is what is happening with teen mental health?

It fell off a cliff in 2013, it was very sudden.

And then the other is what is happening to our democratic and epistemic institutions?

That means knowledge generating, like universities, journalism.

So my main areas of research, where I'm collecting the empirical research and trying to make sense of it, is what's happened to teen mental health and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor?

And then the other areas, what's happening to democracies, not just America, and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor to the dysfunction.

So I'm sure we'll get to that, because that's what the Atlantic article is about.

But if we focus first on what's happened to teen mental health.

So before I read the quotes from Mark, I'd like to just give the overview.

And it is this, there's a lot of data tracking adolescents.

There's self-reports of how depressed, anxious, lonely.

There's data on hospital admissions for self-harm, there's data on suicide.

And all of these things, they bounce around somewhat, but they're relatively level in the early 2000s.

And then all of a sudden, around 2010 to 2013, depending on which statistic you're looking at, all of a sudden they begin to shoot upwards.

More so for girls in some cases, but on the whole it's like up for both sexes.

It's just that boys have lower levels of anxiety and depression, so the curve is not quite as dramatic.

But what we see is not small increases, not like, oh,

depending on which group you're looking at.

Suicide for preteen girls, thankfully, is not very common, but it's 2 to 3 times more common now.

So something is going radically wrong in the world of American preteens.

So as I've been studying it, I found, first of all, it's not just America.

Australia and New Zealand are very similar.

So whatever we're looking for here, but yet it's not as clear in the Germanic countries.

In continental Europe, it's a little different, and we can get into that when we talk about childhood.

But something's happening in many countries, and it started right around 2012, 2013, it wasn't gradual.

It hit girls hardest and it hit preteen girls the hardest.

Nobody has come up with another explanation.

That wouldn't have hit preteen girls the hardest.

The complexity here in the data is, of course, as everyone knows, correlation doesn't prove causation.

The fact that television viewing was going up in the 50s and 60s, or in the 60s and 70s, doesn't mean that that was the cause of the crime.

So what I've done, and this is work with Gene Twenge, who wrote the book, iGen, is because I was challenged, you know, when Greg and I put out the book, The Coddling of the American Mind, some researchers challenged us and said, oh, you don't know what you're talking about.

You know, the correlations between social media use and mental health, they exist, but they're tiny.

It's, you know, like a correlation coefficient of 0.03 or, you know, a beta of 0.05, you know, tiny little things.

And 1 famous article said it's no bigger than the correlation of bad mental health and eating potatoes, which exists, but it's so tiny it's 0, essentially.

And that claim, that social media is no more harmful than eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses, it was a very catchy claim, and it's caught on and I keep hearing that.

But let me unpack why that's not true, and then we'll get to what Mark said.

Because what Mark basically said, here, I'll actually read it.

Just to pause real quick, is you implied, but just to make it explicit, that the best explanation we have now as you're proposing is that a very particular aspect of social media is the cause, which is not just social media, but the like button and the retweet, a certain mechanism of virality that was invented, or perhaps some aspect of social media

I mean, overall, the more you connect people, the better.

Giving people the telephone was an amazing step forward, giving them free telephone, free long distance is even better, video was, so connecting people is good, I'm not a Luddite.

And social media, at least the idea of users posting things, like that happens on LinkedIn and it's great, It can serve all kinds of needs.

What I'm talking about here is not the internet, it's not technology, it's not smartphones, and it's not even all social media.

It's a particular business model in which people are incentivized to create content.

And that content is what brings other people on.

And the people on there are the product which is sold to advertisers.

It's that particular business model which Facebook pioneered, which seems to be incredibly harmful for teenagers, especially for young girls.

10 to 14 years old is where they're most vulnerable.

And it seems to be particularly harmful for democratic institutions because it leads to all kinds of anger, conflict, and the destruction of any shared narrative.

I suspect it's gonna end up having a lot of really bad effects because the teens are on it so much.

And to be really clear, since we're doing the nuance now in this section, lots of good stuff happens.

There's a lot of funny things on Twitter.

I use Twitter because it's an amazing way to put out news, to put out when I write something, you and I use it to promote things.

Well, there's could be, now this is harder to measure and we'll probably, or I'll try to mention it because so much of our conversation will be about rigorous criticism.

I'll try to sometimes mention what are the possible positive effects of social media in different ways.

So for example, in the way I've been using Twitter, not the promotion or any of that kind of stuff, it makes me feel less lonely to connect with people, to make me smile, a little bit of humor here and there.

And that at scale is a very interesting effect, being connected across the globe, especially during times of COVID and so on, it's very difficult to measure that.

So we kind of have to consider that and be honest.

We have to be honest about the positive and the negative, and sometimes we're not sufficiently positive or in a rigorous scientific way about the, we're not rigorous in a scientific way about the negative, and that's what we're trying to do here.

And so that brings us to the Mark Zuckerberg email.

Okay, but wait, let me just pick up on the issue of trade-offs, because people might think like, well, how much of this do we need?

No, that's a one-dimensional conceptualization.

And a lot of people seem to think like, oh, what would we have done without social media during COVID?

Like we would have been sitting there alone in our homes.

Yeah, if all we had was, you know, texting, telephone, Zoom, Skype, multiplayer video games, WhatsApp, all sorts of ways of communicating with each other.

Oh, and there's blogs and the rest of the internet.

Did we really need the hyper-viral platforms of Facebook and Twitter?

Now those did help certain things get out faster, and that did help science Twitter sometimes, but it also led to huge explosions of misinformation and the polarization of our politics to such an extent that a third of the country, you know, didn't believe what the medical establishment was saying.

And we'll get into this, the medical establishment sometimes was playing political games that made them less credible.

So on net, it's not clear to me, If you've got the internet, smartphones, blogs, all of that stuff, it's not clear to me that adding in this particular business model of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, that that really adds a lot more.

And 1 interesting 1 we'll also talk about is YouTube.

I think it's easier to talk about Twitter and Facebook.

YouTube is another complex beast that's very hard to, because YouTube is many things, it's a content platform, but it also has a recommendation system.

That's, Let's focus our discussion on perhaps Twitter and Facebook, but you do in this large document that you're putting together on social media called Social Media and Political Dysfunction Collaborative Review with Chris Bale.

That includes, I believe, papers on YouTube as well.

But yeah, again, just to finish up with the nuance.

Yeah, YouTube is really complicated because I can't imagine life without YouTube.

It also obviously helps to radicalize terrorist groups and murderers.

So I think about YouTube the way I think about the internet in general.

And I don't know enough to really comment on YouTube.

So I have been focused and it's also interesting.

1 thing we know is teen social life change radically between about 2010 and 2012.

Before 2010, they weren't mostly on every day because they didn't have smartphones yet.

By 2012 to 14, that's the area in which they almost all get smartphones and they become daily users of the...

So the girls go to Instagram and Tumblr, they go to the visual ones.

Those don't seem to be as harmful to mental health or even harmful at all.

It's really Tumblr, Instagram particularly, that seem to really have done in girls' mental health.

So now, Okay, so let's look at the quote from Mark Zuckerberg.

So at 64 minutes and 31 seconds on the video, I time coded this.

You ask him about Francis Haugen, you give him a chance to respond.

So he talks about what Francis Haugen said.

He said, no, but that's mischaracterized.

Actually, on most measures, the kids are doing better when they're on Instagram.

And then he says, I think an accurate characterization would have been that kids using Instagram, or not kids, but teens, is generally positive for their mental health.

That Instagram is overall, taken as a whole, Instagram is positive for their mental health.

So first, just the simple, okay, now here, what I'd like to do is turn my attention to another document that we'll make available.

So I was invited to give testimony before a Senate subcommittee 2 weeks ago, where they were considering the Platform Accountability Act.

Should we force the platforms to actually tell us what our kids are doing?

Like, we have no idea, other than self-report.

You know, they're the only ones who know, like the kid does this, and then over the next hours, the kid's depressed or happy.

We can't know that, but Facebook knows it.

So should they be compelled to reveal the data?

So you raised just, to give people a little bit of context.

And this document is brilliantly structured with questions, studies that indicate that the answer to a question is yes, indicate that the answer to a question is no, and then mixed results.

And questions include things like, Does social media make people more angry or effectively polarized?

So I've got 3 different Google Docs here because I found this is an amazing way, and thank God for Google Docs.

It's an amazing way to organize the research literature, and it's a collaborative review, meaning that, so on this 1, Gene Twenge and I put up the first draft and then we say, please, you know, comment, add studies, tell us what we missed.

Oh yeah, we specifically encourage, because look, The center of my research is that our gut feelings drive our reasoning.

That was my dissertation, that was my early research.

And so if Gene Twenge and I are committed to, but we're gonna obviously preferentially believe that these platforms are bad for kids because we said so in our books.

And I'm a devotee of John Stuart Mill, the only cure for confirmation bias is other people who have a different confirmation bias.

So these documents evolve because critics then say, no, you missed this, or they say, you don't know what you're talking about.

So I put together this document, and I'm gonna put links to everything on my website if users, sorry, if listeners, viewers go to jonathanheit.com slash social media.

I'll put everything together in 1 place there and we'll put those in the show notes.

Like links to this document, and other things like it that

So, yeah, so the thing I wanna call attention to now is this document here with the title, Teen Mental Health is Plummeting, and Social Media is a major contributing cause.

So Ben Sass and Chris Coons are on the Judiciary Committee, they had a subcommittee hearing on Nate Priscilli's bill, Platform Accountability Transparency Act, so they asked me to testify on what do we know, what's going on with teen mental health.

And so what I did was I put together everything I know with plenty of graphs to make these points.

That first, what do we know about the crisis?

Well, that the crisis is specific to mood disorders, not everything else.

It's not just self-report, it's also behavioral data because suicide and self-harm go skyrocketing after

The increases are very large and the crisis is gendered and it's hit many countries.

So we have a pretty clear characterization and nobody's disputed me on this part.

So can we just pause real quick, just so for people who are not aware.

So self-report, just how you kind of collect data on this kind of thing.

You have a self-report, a survey, you ask people.

How many hours a week do you use social media?

And you do, it's maybe, you can collect large amounts of data that way because you can ask a large number of people that kind of question.

But then there's, I forget the term you use, but more, so non-self-report data.

Where you actually have self-harm and suicide numbers.

So this is from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

So the federal government and also Pew and Gallup, There are a lot of organizations that have been collecting survey data for decades.

And what you see on these graphs over and over again is relatively straight lines up until around 2010 or

And on the X axis, we have time, years, going from 2004 to

And the Y axis is the percent of US teens who had a major depression in the last year.

So when this data started coming out around, so Jean Twain's book, iGen, 2017, a lot of people say, oh, she doesn't know what she's talking about.

Like Gen Z, they're just really comfortable talking about this, this is a good thing.

And literally the day before my book with Greg was published, the day before, there was a psychiatrist in New York Times who had an op-ed saying, relax, cell phones, Smartphones are not ruining your kid's brain.

It's just that they're giving higher rates, there's more diagnosis, but underlying there's no change.

No, because it's theoretically possible, but all we have to do is look at the hospitalization data for self-harm and suicide, and we see the exact same trends.

We see also a very sudden, big rise around between 2009 and 2012.

You have an elbow, and then it goes up, up, up.

Those are actual kids admitted to hospitals for cutting themselves.

So we have a catastrophe, and this was all true before COVID.

COVID made things worse, but we have to realize, you know, COVID's going away, kids are back in school, but we're not gonna go back to where we were because this problem is not caused by COVID.

Well, just again, to just go through the point, then I'll stop.

I just feel like I just really wanna get out the data to show that Mark is wrong.

So first point, correlational studies consistently show a link.

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Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #291