Haidt haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (strictly: social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business) has a new book out: “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”1 It’s shot to the top of the NY Times hardback nonfiction list, because everyone wants to feel that their child—well, children generally, maybe not their own child—is struggling because of the combination of smartphones and social media.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Haidt explains:
The millennial generation grew up on [the internet]. Their mental health was fine. A lot of the indicators of teen mental health were actually steady or improving in the late nineties, and all the way through the two-thousands—even up to 2011. And then in 2012 and 2013: boom. The graphs go way, way up. Mental health falls off a cliff. It’s incredibly sudden.
A little later, the interviewer asks if this isn’t just like TV for the previous generation. Not so, says Haidt:
Well, watching television, though our parents complained about it, when you look back on it, my recollection was that it was usually social. You’re with another person, you’re talking about the show, you’re going to stop and go get something to eat. So you’re together. It is social.
Now what happens? I’ve heard stories from Gen Z. They go over to their friends’ houses sometimes—not that much—and they’re on their phones separately. One might be watching her shows on Netflix. One might be checking her social. So even when they’re physically together . . . There’s a wonderful phrase from the sociologist Sherry Turkle: “Because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere.” We’re never fully present.
His basic suggestion is that children should not be able to go online before the age of 16, because girls especially are vulnerable to the way that the social media platforms manipulate them—or that they manipulate themselves:
the girls are spending an hour crafting the post and the picture, and they’re waiting for other kids to comment on it, including strangers, and sometimes adult men. They’re waiting for strangers and friends to comment on it. And it’s not play. It’s performance. It’s brand management. So that’s just one of many reasons why social media affects girls more. It draws them in. It plays on their insecurities.
As you might expect, the certainty with which Haidt makes his points has annoyed lots of people—principally, but not only, other psychologists who disagree with him.
That includes Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behaviour and technology at the University of Oxford. He told The Times:
“I don’t think that we would allow Substack and business professors from the US to tell us how to handle maternal health or diabetes management. I have no idea why we’re letting this happen with adolescent mental health and suicide.”
It so happens that I spoke to Przybylski for Social Warming, mostly for the (sadly excised for length) chapter about the effect of social media on children. I’ve written about this before on this Substack, and I’ve quoted Przybylski himself here: in August 2023 he published a big study, which was written up most approvingly, suggesting that Facebook et al didn’t create the depression whirlwind at all.
The key quote from him at the time was “the best global data does not support the idea that the expansion of social media has a negative global association with well-being across nations and different demographics.”
But here’s Haidt saying the exact opposite. Haidt really has his haters (ironically enough: perhaps social media isn’t making children sad, angry and argumentative, but it’s sure doing that to psychologists and professors of human behaviour. Haidt at least has the advantage that parents tend to feel, deep down, agreement with what he says: it just feels right that the more time children spend on these networks, the more likely they are to be unhappy.
Unfortunately I can’t find the work I did analysing the graphs from the OECD’s PISA assessments of schoolchildren, but what sticks with me is that a very simple pattern emerged, and keeps emerging in these analyses. It goes like this:
• children who spend low amounts of time online tend to be unhappy. They’re missing out, they’re shut out of online discussion, they’re unable to participate as others do.
• those who spend a moderate time online are connected, participating, happy. Of course the key thing is that they don’t spend all their time online. The big question is what the top and bottom limits of “moderate” are.
• those who spend a large amount of time online are connected, over-participating, unhappy. Whether their unhappiness is due to the amount of time they spend online, or if they spend a lot of time online because they’re unhappy (and in effect seeking people who they can connect with, to make friends).
This means that both Haidt and Przybylski can be right: using social media does make some children unhappy, and using social media hasn’t got a global association with well-being.
As noted above, the problem is figuring out what the boundaries—even the fuzzy ones—are between each of those. It may vary from child to child. It may be that a child will drift between two or three of the groups above: they’re unhappy, they spend a long time online; then things improve externally and they reduce their use. Is the answer to raise the age at which a child can buy a smartphone to 16, as the UK government is suggesting? That would immediately put them all into the first group, except it’s impractical and stupid because the people who buy the smartphones for the children are the adults, and by definition they’re well over 16. (Teen pregnancy has plummeted.)
Haidt is quite happy to have his ideas challenged: he’s got a page linking to all the research on the topic, and there’s a huge amount of it.
I do find the continued gap between the findings of the groups—on the one side including Haidt, on the other including Przybylski—intriguing. But the problem is in trying to find significant differences when those three groups of users are mixed together, and keep shifting between the groups, and when the content they’re consuming varies from being beneficial to bad. The amazing thing is that they can elicit anything from the studies at all.
But at least it gives them something to argue about.
The AI tsunami is having a quiet week.
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I’ll never not be annoyed by the Random Initial Capitalisation of WORDS in American headlines, which makes them more difficult to read and consumes space which could be used to write better headlines. (Technical explanation: every headline space has a “unit count”—say, 25. Most letters consume 1 unit, though f, i, j, l, and t occupy ½, while m and w consume 1½. Capitals consume 1½; so using them Randomly uses up space that could be used for lower-case letters. British journalists at a loose end in the US often rewrite terrible American headlines in their minds, using all the spare units from decapitalised words.)
That’s where you’d need to control for at least one of the variables - perhaps outside time, which you would think is possible. But maybe when kids have phones they spend less time outside because they’re on their phones..
Wow, if there was ever an example of the idea "The technology you grow up with normal; the technology after you're adult is the downfall of society", it's this: "Well, watching television, though our parents complained about it, when you look back on it, my recollection was that it was usually social.". Does he have any idea of how much television was decried as "The Plug-In Drug"? That it corrupted the youth, was destroying their thinking ability, oh woe, it would be the downfall of civilization. But he remembers it differently. The doomsayers then were wrong. However, the doomsayers now are right - the real corruption of youth, destroying their thinking ability, etc, etc. is the newfangled stuff. Decades from now, his successor is going to be saying something like "Yes, back then the smartphone was The Threat. Yet my recollection was that it was usually social - you were connected to the entire world-wide-web. Those fears were wrong. But now we're right, the real threat is the horrible damage wrought by the neural-link, which obliterates the boundary between the self and the crowd. It can literally destroy the delicate developing mind of a child, it's that bad."
I suppose nobody reads comic books nowadays, so they can't be blamed.