Jonathan Haidt: How Social Media Has Fragmented Everything and Made It Harder to Run and Staff Orgs

hi I'm John height as I said from NYU and downtown restaurant um and uh so I think I've been coming to this conference since since about 2015. um I love it I love the variety of the variety of perspectives that we get here um always learn I always learn something to do and just to be refreshed on the the vision of a good capitalist Society because one that creates abundance and mass flourishing widely shared prosperity new opportunities uh uh uh more decency less discrimination so to have that Vision refreshed every year it's something I really enjoy and my talk today is going to be on on two major threats to that I'm a social psychologist and my takeoff point is this major technological change that happened basically in the 2010s so what you see here is you can find these grass all over the Internet and certainly on our world and data uh the spread of varied Technologies I just picked a few and so there's a certain point it would say everyone everyone's getting a radio and over the course of 10 or 15 years America it just becomes the thing everyone's got radio and same for colors TV but what I what I wanted to show here is that the the the the the online world that we now live in came in two ways two very different ways with very different effects so in the 1980s people started buying microcomputers but there's not a lot you can do with them until you connect them up and oh once we get the internet so you see those first two those uh the blue and the gold bar there micro computer internet so that's the first wave and by the end of the 1990s Americans are very largely they had a computer at home they're online through some service this is a big big change connecting everybody to everything is amazing and what happens mental health is fine it doesn't drop democracy isn't anything getting better the period from 90s to 2012 is the greatest period of democratic flourishing in human history so the microcomputer and internet were were wonderful [Music] it begins with social media platforms go back they begin in 2003 with Myspace and Facebook so people start getting on that on their on their home computers but it's not until we get the smartphone of course beginning in 2007 but it's not been until like 2009 to 12. that's the period where suddenly now everyone people giving up their flip phones so really is in the early 2010s that everything changes that now pretty much everyone or most people that you know have a smartphone with social media on it this is incredibly new and as you see from the steepness of that smartphone adoption curve there's never been a technological change in human history that happened as fast and when you combine the smartphone with social media I would say there's never ever been a change and so radically rewired our thinking our social relationships our Consciousness and everything now in a room full of economists most people look at things like this and they they see progress they see possibility they see Innovation and of course that's all there I'm a social psychologist who studies morality and politics and the culture work and I've been alarmed since 2004 that we're coming apart and now I'm terrified I think that what we've gone through is a radical transformation within which is not clear that liberal democracy is compatible let me tell you the two specific threats the stupid the two specific problems I think that this this technological revolution has created uh that are relevant to people in this room especially if you care about Prosperity so um I've read all my concerns in a variety of articles in the Atlantic especially but now I'm really expanding them into two books uh the first is about what social media did to team mental health especially that of girls and the second is about what it's doing to Liberal democracy so I'll start with this one and it's funny when I Was preparing this talk I sat down a few days ago what should I say I said you know what didn't I say something about the common American Idol and I went back to my first talk at this conference in 2015 here was my title and I was beginning to get concerned about what I was seeing on college students in 2014 it wasn't like this in 2012. in 2014 I started seeing some things were very alarming about the future of about the future of this gen Z we didn't really know at the time gen Z um and so here's what I did I started with these images that many of you know about uh you know from the world value survey about how values change as societies get prosperous and the values move you know countries move from sort of the bottom left they move sort of up first towards secular rationalism as they industrialized and then later they go to the service Industries where they worry about equality and things like that so there's a general movement up and then to the right and as that happens the values change and they change in a very consistent way around the world so this is I think one of the most important findings in the social sciences right here and so what the authors of the world value survey say is that dating accidental pressure control you don't worry about war and starvation and and you know you can sort of like look to the Future and plan for it fading existential pressures open people's minds making them prioritize Freedom over security autonomy over Authority diversity over uniformity and creativity over discipline and this sounds wonderful particularly if you're politically Progressive this is heaven this tells you you know what we should just really hope for making every country Prosper because people move to the left they'll start tearing out human rights Gator rights women's rights animal rights the environment this is what happens all over the world so this is great right but what I began to see in 2014-2015 is that as you move to these new values the way we raise children changes radically in ways that my friend read Luciano when I began thinking like whoa this is doing some really weird things to kids so in general what we know is if you get wealthier and you start investing more on your kids strangely you have fewer and fewer kids so you begin to have very few children they become economically worthless but emotionally Priceless in other words I think it was from Jan senior's book um we change our childhood becomes much more Humane we there's not much there's much less discipline and now it's much more helicopter parenting it's all about getting hit in college protecting them from threats we we stopped letting kids out because we're not allowed outside uh unsupervised because we get to be kidnapped so we literally stopped letting kids play outside in the 90s until around the age of 10 or 12. we don't have been out until 10 or 12 in America written in Canada uh but there's this basic psychological principle that kids are anti-fragile what doesn't kill us makes us stronger and if we protect kids from all unpleasant circumstances they will not grow they do not grow they cannot grow and that was the theme of our article the Covenant the American mind in 2015. now it just so happens that the so we published this article in August of 2015. uh and then I gave my talk here on I think it was November 9th or 5th or something of 29 of 2015 is 25th of 2015. and it was literally a day or two after the big Halloween protest said yeah at least none of you have heard about I don't go in detail but this was sort of like the the opening National Salvo of a change in College culture this attitude spread uh student protests demanding um all kinds of changes and protections from word speakers books and ideas and speech codes and biased response teams and microaggression training all this stuff it wasn't there in 2012 it was Everywhere by 2016. and um Greg and I connected this to some interesting sociological work on the rise of the victimhood culture and people talk about this since the 70s there's certain sort of psychological patterns that go along with an attitude of seeing everybody's oppressors and victims so this is not a new thing but it really it really spread once everyone was on social media social media was the biggest most I put in oxygen on a fire and boom it just blew up because ideas about oppression and victimhood vocabulary they all spread very very rapidly and the point I made when I spoke in 2015 was that victim of code culture is incompatible with individual initiative and with the dynamism agenda that many people here in this room have it gives you a link-based view of the world you see it's us against them it's group versus group when people accept the status as being a victim or being marginalized it tends to give them an external locus of control that makes them more passive victims become moral dependents there's a big decline in self-help solving problem costs for yourself at NYU on to back of everybody's ID of your student ID it tells you here's the police the emergency device response team it's all there thick if someone says and it offends you you call this number don't work it out for yourself call this number we'll take care of it we'll investigate what the professor said so there's this big change in academic culture between 2012 and 2016 or so um you get reduced freedom of speech people say they're walking on eggshells and you get because of social media extraordinary increases in fear of saying anything that contradicts the majority of you because you will be crucified live surgeon after that students are paid much more great to speak of in class because you don't know what the other students will do to you the students are not afraid to professors they're afraid of each other so Greg and I wrote all this stuff we learned so much more after the article came up and wrote this all up in a book that came out in 2018 and I've learned so much since then that these are Graphics as I'm working on this new book on his mental health so what we didn't fully realize when we were reading the the article and even the quote is that there's a gigantic generational change in into analyst that began in 2012. it wasn't there in 2010 but beginning in 2012 members of GNC become much more anxious you can see that the Baby Boomers and Gen X don't increase at all during the 2010s in their anxiety but the Millennials go up somewhat to a red line but it's really gen Z that suddenly becomes very very anxious it's only anxiety and depression and it's mostly hitting the girls especially the young girls so as you see here well depression is up for both sexes but boys are at a much lower level so the absolute increase is much larger for the girls for some things like self-harm it's only the girls that are up and the girls are up between one and two hundred percent depending on the age huge increase in hospitalizations for self-harm was that was there was no sign of this in 2011 but by 2015 you have 100 and hospitalizations for self-harm for girls now we know and I didn't notice when we wrote the book we speculated maybe social media is something to do it as we didn't know but now four years later it's really clear social media is a major cause of this I laid out the argument in an Atlantic article I don't want to go through it now it's not just the studies that Facebook did there's a huge amount of correlational evidence that shows small correlations if you look at screen time for all kids but when you zoom in on social media for girls the correlations get quite large larger than most other public events uh there are many tier experiments as well so my point is social media drove especially young women to anxiety depression and a very defensive threat sensitive attitude it wasn't there in 2012 but this was The New Normal in 2015. there's never been a rapid transformation of mental health in human history as this it shows up in the business world now even in 2018 as soon as gen Z began to graduate from college Kansas City begins roughly birth year 2000 1996. so as soon as gen Z goes out to the Work World we start seeing attitude in the society for human resource management that anxiety is a big issue companies have to deal with we start reading with the generation of War at work the same conflicts over speech and I know the contest on campus are rarely about ideas it's not this person made this argument it's this word this person used this word and then we fight about it for weeks and then just notified and now this has come to the Work World constant conflict often intergenerational um uh so the argument again um almost almost all the slides I've shown you up until now but half of them were from my 2015 presentation I just updated with you this was one from 2015. I I suggested to this group that the things we're doing to children and the things we're doing in our universities may soon undermine Democratic happiness because gen Z is not going to have that Spirit of innovation creativity go forth do something try something gen Z is more fragile interest and risk-averse than therefore may be less creative Dynamic entrepreneur as I suggested in 2015. and secondly because gen Z is more easily offended and morally dependent they may be less able to manage compromise the main way you learn the skills of democracy is on the playground a group of kids has to work on what are they going to do together we don't all agree but how are we going to figure out what to do um how are we going to enforce rules what do we do when they're in fractions we stopped back in the 90s we literally stopped kids from learning the skills of democracy and GNC comes to college they have a great deal of difficulty working out conflicts we've taught them to go to Administration to solve the problems so I am concerned about the future Democratic capital for that reason so that's my first reason for uh being very very alarmed what we've done to gen Z in ways that I think will undercut the move towards Mass flourishing and prosperity the second book which I'm going to write soon which I started but I'm going to really write as soon as I can turn into the first is what it's done to attain mental health um let me just check my time that's a counting down okay so uh life after doubt so I want to take you through a story most of you in the room remember this story others of you have read about it um that there was this long 20th century with all kinds of horrible things in it uh I missed the worst of it but grew up under the threat of nuclear war the the Cold War and then all of a sudden one day was the most amazing thing that threat was just lifted the Berlin Wall fell the Civic Union fell and there was this ecstatic time where the best decades ever of the 1990s when we thought wow the nightmare history is over and of course what's going to happen but now we know his Direction it's liberal democracy if you just let people get some property and prosperity they want rights and so if you just wait for China and North Korea and Iran just wait no let's invite them to give them a little bit of a middle class they're going to become liberal democracies too that's what we thought that's the early 90s and the internet really comes down and we think like wow wow now everyone's connected everyone has a voice Dad good luck China keeping up the internet you know good luck dictator standing up to people who are connected and empowered so we're even more confident this was the era of techno Democratic optimism we thought liberal democracy is the only way now with social media with technology everyone's going to have it smooth sound from here on end we thought um and the peak year of this techno-democratic optimism was 2011 an extraordinary year that begins with the Arab Spring and we think wow what happened in Eastern Europe is finally coming to the Arab world it's going to be liberal democracy everywhere it ends with Occupy Wall Street and then people think wow you know this technology this social media enabled movement is gonna finally bring down the plutocrats and push the legislation and change that's going to give us more equality an incredible year for techno Democratic optimism um Mark Zuckerberg is times person of the year in 2010 and in 2012 he takes Facebook public and this is a very important passage from his letter to the potential shareholders he says today our society has reached another Tipping Point and he was right this was the Tipping Point he says everybody has access to phones the Facebook aspires to build services to give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries now if you're Progressive or libertarian this was the promise of the future yes let's rebuild things but if you're a social conservative if you've ever had Edmund Burke if you are conservative of a disposition then you're probably not in this world you're not in Silicon Valley but you're saying wait a step in let's just let 23 year olds rebuild institutions that we've built gradually over centuries this isn't a recipe for complete disaster it is so easy to tear things down it's really hard to build things so what do we do social media comes in spreads widely and my argument is that everything is collapsing our institutions are collapsing and cannot be rebuilt in the present environment so I I laid this fall out in Oregon the Atlantic in April the title I gave it was life after dabble but they gave it you know the A B test titles everybody's now focused on social media so the a b testing found this type of superior by the past 10 years of American Life had been uniquely stupid and I won't go into the whole argument I just want to give you the central metaphor is the story of battle which is an extraordinary story a very short story few Generations after Noah and the flood the human population is expanding the people are spraying out they come to a plane in um in uh and um they build themselves a city with a tower and they want to make the tower East the heavens that so that God can't love them again now this is hubris this is resisting God's Authority God is not pleased he says behold the people is one and they have all one language and this they begin to do and now nothing will be restrained from them so he says let us go down and there confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech and while in the story God doesn't literally not go over the tower he just makes them unable to understand everybody's Pizza data language and so it's chaos and they spread out but in the common understanding we've seen images of like God you know like William comes in the terror gets knocked over it's a robe so I want you to imagine imagine what it'd be like if you and all of your cousins were descended from Noah you build this incredible City with this gigantic Tower imagine the pride and safety you would feel and then imagine that one day one day it all goes to hell and you can't even talk to each other everything is confusion what would that be like in my argument is we know what that would be like because that is America today we cannot understand each other we will never again understand each other in large quantities we never again have shared stories as my argument why we shared stories so how did this happen to get a bit more specific um the internet is great I love the internet there are some bad things that have happened overall and when I asking some audiences everybody loves to answer that um social media comes in it's just one of those internet things that are new uh kind of thing you can do uh enabled by the internet amazing you can post pictures of your dog and your vacation and people can see it it's easy to keep in touch with people so early social media was uh not toxic at all not harmful to democracy Connecting People is generally a good thing okay um so no problem but everything changes beginning in 2009 because that's the year we get Super viralized Hyper viralized social media first Facebook introduces the like button and now you have all this data on engagement and now they've been playing with algorithms before now they can algorithmicize everything to maximize engagement even more importantly Twitter introduces the retweet button it used to be you'd see stuff and you could you know you could have by effort full you know you could put in your own timeline but now click and you send it out to all your followers and as we all know from the coronavirus we all understand the difference living in a world where something has an r0 of 1.0 you know an r and off of 1.0 versus 2.0 I mean the the extra reality from that increase is world changing so social media becomes super duper viral after 2009 was not like this before 2009. and so the order of events goes like this one of the engineers who created the retweet button on Twitter and of course both platforms copied their ideas Innovations and then everybody copies those two innovations so with the man one of the men who worked on the the retweet button you thought that this was going to give more voice to you know everybody can get their word out yeah everybody can get their word out not just the people you want to get the word out so before the retweet he said well we all missed what they are this is the author of the article before the weekly Twitter is a largely convivial place after all hell broke loose and that was my experience of it too uh but as this man persuel said we when he saw the Twitter mosque forming we just handed a loaded weapon to a four-year-old it wasn't like this in 2007 or 2008 but this is the 2010s everyone has a gun a dart gun whatever you want to call it everybody's shooting a lot is just trying to keep our heads down so in 2009 we get those Innovations in 2010 Facebook fully algorithmicizes its news feed and really commits to the business model that is breaking the world which is the people using it are not their customers they're the product and the goal is to keep them on the platform um Upworthy Masters headline repackaging and all the other major media outfits have to adapt to the fact that now everything goes through Facebook you don't need your own customers anymore um a big a big innovation was Facebook introducing credit comments which says to everyone even if you only have seven followers you can attack someone in the comment section whatever someone says in the comment section you can attack them and then millions of people will see your attack and it's like let's all fight with everybody in public so this is again what makes what makes social media not a place where we can have conversations but it puts us it puts Democratic discourse into the Roman Coliseum everybody's fighting in front of an audience this is you cannot run a democracy if that's your Public Square and my argument is that this did not Mark Zuckerberg always says how could it be wrong to give more people more voice but he didn't what he did was he ended a super empowering four groups at the far left the far right trolls and Russian agents James Madison in Federalist 10 knew that our founding fathers knew the problems of democracy that they knew about our tendency towards faction that were much more likely to Vex and oppress each other than to corporate for their common good and they Design Systems that were damped in that debt would force the necessity of compromise in Congress and elsewhere that's what it used to be like you know where I did a um and Madison knew that were prone to triviality uh this is the next sentence after in Federalist 10 is this so strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities that were no substantial location presents itself the most frivolous and sensible distinctions of insufficient to Kindle to unfriendly passions this is a description of Twitter this is what Twitter's done to a political discourse it's all about some stupid little thing that we wouldn't waste time on beforehand but now life is a succession of stupid little things um Martin Gorey pointed out that social media is great at tearing things down it fragments us the public isn't one thing it's highly fragmented and basically hostile because the digital Revolution is now people mostly uh uh yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another so we are now living in James Madison's nightmare this is not a world in which you can have a liberal democracy I believe we're gonna have to make major changes if if liberal democracy in the United States is to survive our politics begins very very different in the late 2010s this is not just a few anecdotes by all the measures I've seen of the of the number of democracies and their quality it's going down in the late 2010s I'll skip this article except to say that countries that have really dropped in their Democratic quality are precisely those countries that have most increased in political polarization that is hatred on the other side because when you hate the other side you are activism your violence even is necessary people began to justify violence because it's necessary given how terrible the other side is so to conclude I believe we're now in the post-babel era I think this is enormous implications for um uh for the private sector and the public sector this incredibly rapid change uh that transformed our social lives and our Consciousness which I'm writing about in these two books has radically changed the business world so we first saw it after Donald Trump was elected we saw CEOs get a much more political responding in part to pressures on social media we've seen generational conflicts it caused in part by the changes in social media and we're just seeing a lot more conflicting companies I mean talk to people not in all sectors but certainly in journalism media the Arts Tech the more the more Progressive sectors of the economy talking about what corporate life is like now and it's just like academic like walking on eggshells fear of a fear of being publicly shame amazing part to cooperate makes it hard to trust makes it hard to enjoy enjoy work anymore and so that's what I began to suggest that in 2015 I think things have gotten a lot worse since then and that's why I think that social media is fragmented everything and made it harder to run as pet organizations thank you we have some time for questions yeah um yes you choose to go ahead sorry James holster too um it's very interesting I just wonder if you can talk a bit about how the tribalism that we see in the television media perspective because that seems to have risen perhaps slightly earlier but who are just a great an extent yes you didn't mention it but it's discussed as a major impact on podcast it is yes so I I didn't say it now but I did say in the Atlantic article that if you look at the graphs of polarization and I only focus on affective polarization that is that we should hate the other side political polarization is fine how do people with different policies is no problem it's it's going to behavior and if you look at the graphs uh it was actually very low in the 40s 50s 60s 70s begins rise in the 80s 90s in part because of cable TV microcasting the end of mass media we moved to narrow casting so you're right that's a big part and that that really contributes especially radicalizing the Republican the right in particular and the lines just keep going up through the year of social media this is one of Facebook's revivals to me is hey it started before you know before Facebook so we can't be responsible and there's some truth to that if you just look at cross-partisan hostility my argument here is twofold first this isn't just about cross-partisan this is about the fragmentation of everything look within left main movement they're all each other's throats now and of course my pythonics argue that that was always that way but it's much more so now because of social media um and um the other piece of it is look what's happened to cable TV cable TV like let's take Fox News they used to be very good at finding stories that would outrage people but like they had to have a producer they have someone like look into it like and it took a while to find a good story now all you do just open it in the morning open up Twitter trending topics you have this incredible market research firm telling you what is the most outrageous thing that I can take out of context today put on in five minutes all day long so cable TV is much nastier because of Twitter everything is much nastier because of Twitter uh this guy here and then uh okay no I'll go over there okay yes so you know the expression that the twitterverse is not for the whole world um the focus on social media as driving everything is there a risk going to be too limited sample like restaurant downtown right um 2009 you had to retweet and and the like button you also have the financial crisis wiping out huge savings of people around the world people losing their homes a global phenomenon we have from Chile to Sweden populist movements coming in I mean can that be explained by people on social media shouting at one another no doubt that's an exacerbating Factor but yeah for rightly and popular we're actually for populist movements that are against the elites yes they're there you do find a clear influence of economic factors and the global financial crisis I'm there I would agree with you for tea mental health yeah but there's no chance because it's the opposite team mental health craters so the economy creators in 2009 but there's no sign of a problem for team mental health until 2013. and then as the economy is getting better and better and unemployment is going down and down team mental health is getting worse and worse um uh also the decline of democracy doesn't start right after the global financial crisis it's only after 2016. it's only after uh I think it has more to do with social media I have if you go to jonathanike.com social media I have several collab review docs where I've collected hundreds of studies on all sides about uh about what is the probability of social media here so we're I'm debating with other Scholars economic factors surely play a role but I think that social media with each decade through the 2010 social media faced a bigger and bigger role and economic factors play less of a role also is everything is now filtered through with social media so even we don't know what reality is hard to find but stories about it are now stuck down your throat all the time so that's cool okay uh let's see this woman here in the front row thank you a lot of food for thought there my name's Diane Coyle University of Cambridge um I've got a question about the kids part and it's whether the problem is the parenting more than the social media if you look at a country like the Netherlands where there's a very different style of parenting are the outcomes different and secondly isn't a dynamic process and won't Whatever the generation that's supposed to see whatever we call it a or double A B itself different and much more sophisticated um so parenting matters a lot it's not so much individual parenting I believe it is the culture of Parenthood such that kids so in into Germanic countries kids still are allowed out kids are taught how to make fire when they're six years old Untold there are there are Forest uh schools so the Germanic countries have done a good job of not over technicates all the Anglo country did the exact same thing at the same time except for Australia New Zealand they were a few years delayed but U.S Canada Britain doing exactly the same thing over protecting the kids so culture matters for whether it be as childhood or not um your second uh the second point was about future Generations some things in life are negative feedback systems like pendulum where the further out it goes the more the pressure is to come back others are positive feedback systems like a tower where the further if it goes the faster it's going to fall Gen X and the older Millennials are the last Americans who who played outside without their without guards and um they're raising their children overprotected in about 20 10 20 years there'd be nobody left who remembers what it was like to let kids go outside and not think that they were going to get kidnapped so I don't see and plus since gen Z is so anxious so this is one of the reasons I think we're in a positive feedback loop where race of mental illness are going to just keep climbing until 120 of our kids are mentally ill okay thank you very much

Channel: The Center on Capitalism and Society

Views: 29,346

Keywords:

Id: zVxmfUPlPaQ

Length: 33min 41sec (2021 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022