Jonathan Haidt on the Rise of The Anxious Generation (Part 1)

[Applause] [Music] thank you so much and what a treat to be here now almost everywhere you turn at the moment you will see hear read discussions about whether we should be getting our children off social media and off phones much of it of course driven by this man his book The anxious generation has been on the New York Times B seller list for the past 4 weeks he argues that a whole generation has been damaged by growing up with unrestricted access to social media and to an adult online world but also by being so overprotected and overp parented that it's a generation of young adults unable to cope with the rigors of normal life his book The an anxious generation how the great we wiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness may be doing so well because he is tapping into something uh in society a concern a very widely held belief among parents that there is something going wrong he is very much the man of the moment uh he is of course Jonathan height and now listen I should explain uh to both our online audience and to those of you here in the room I'm hogging things for almost the next hour um after that though you will get your chance and I know if you're online you will be able to send some questions in which I'll get through here to here and we'll be able to get a discussion going in the room as well but as I say I'm kicking things off now Jonathan I mean the response in the room when you walk on stage it's just an illustration in a way of what you're tapping into but I was astonished to read that actually you didn't intend to read this book I mean of course you had you know um Hannah mentioned the Righteous Mind you had the happiness hypothesis you had the coddling of the American F mind it didn't come out of anywhere but you set out to write a different book didn't you that's right yes I did but I I first just want to say um just what a pleasure it is for for an American to come to to come to Britain uh and to be able to to speak to be hosted in a in a room like this because we have rooms like this in America but they were all built about a 100 years ago as copies of this and and in so many ways you know in so many ways coming you know coming to Britain is is kind of like seeing the platonic forms of the things we have copies of in America in a lot of ways not just our architecture but our political institutions as well um and so to get such a warm welcome in such space so thank you um now to answer your question yes I actually set out to write two other books um that haven't been written because I wrote this one so in 2015 I got a contract to write a book called three stories about capitalism the moral psychology of economic life I had recently moved to a business school to the NYU Stern and I thought I would continue the Righteous Mind which was about social left right and I let's do economic left right got a contract for that went to Asia for a semester did a lot of research came back uh published the cing the American mind article thought I'd go back to work on the capitalism book and then our universities blew up in 2015 and that was such a change of my home institution I've been focused on that what the hell happened why are we now all afraid we're afraid of our students we're afraid to speak we're afraid of of of of social punishments for expressing ideas so that led me to work with Greg lukanov to spend the whole time writing this other book the coding of the American mind and then I had a sabatical in 2020 I said okay now I'll get back to the capitalism book but my country was blowing up and dividing and things were just getting weirder and worse and I kept having ideas for why why it has something to do with social media something's changed about the way we're all connected and so then I had the idea to write eight essays for the Atlantic on like eight different reasons why everything is going to hell um and the editor of the Atlantic said don't write eight write one and so I wrote one which was titled ultimately why the past 10 years of American Life have been uniquely stupid so that was my first and it's gotten much worse since then um so that was that was my first pass at what then became a book contract of let this really should be a book and that book is going to be called U life after Babel adapting to a world we may never again share and I got the contract to write that book so I have two you know they give me a lot of money here to write two books that I still haven't written um and I started writing that book and chapter one was going to be what happened to teenagers when they moved their lives online because I'd done all this research on Teen Mental Health but that was a side project I study moral and political psychology but I have this side project on what's Happening to Jen Z and at all this data and I was the story was really becoming clear so okay chapter one we're going to show how you know when teenagers moved on to social media around 2012 almost instantly they became depressed and anxious and then the rest of the book is about what happens to democracy when your public life moves on to social media but by the time I finish that first chapter and you'll see the graphs in it they're absolutely unbelievable it was like someone flipped a switch in 2012 and all the rates of anxiety depression self harm they go shooting up especially for girls and I realized I can't just I can't just like drop this and say all right now let's move on once I wrote that chapter I had to write another chapter on explaining you know how did this happen and what's what is childhood why don't and then I had to have a chapter on girls cuz that's a special story and then I have to have a chapter on boys and so by the time I had four chapters I realized I'm never going to finish this book it's going to be gigantic I need to cut the book in half so I got a contract for another book so so I have three book contracts and now I actually have written one of them so that's that's where we are okay well let's try and unpick that very first chapter which is the scale of the problem which you write this chapter you realize I mean there are some terrifying graphs in there um how would I mean the best way to illustrate the scale of the problem how would you set it out um so and I'm talking about the harms first yes okay let's talk about the harms so when we we track in the UK and the us we have very good running studies better than most parts of the world and so you can track how rates of depression anxiety and self harm those are the clearest ones that the central problem is anxiety and it's related to depression it's that's related to self harm let's focus on those three um from the '90s through the 2000s we're talking the millennial generation which many of you in this room are if you're born between 1981 and 1995 you're a millennial your mental health was actually fine com a little better than gen next before you so all the numbers are going along they go up down up you know sort of moving along and then all of a sudden those numbers all start Rising right around 2012 2013 and the level of the rise especially when for for boys it's a little slower it's it's not such a sharp elbow that's a different story but for girls it's a very sharp elbow and when we look at the younger teen girls ages 10 to 14 that's where we see the hugest Rises so they that those younger girls they didn't used to be hospitalized for self harm that was very very rare but after 2012 the numbers go way up um for the older teen girls I think it's like 70 or 80% increase for the younger teen girls it's more like 150 um that's in America in Britain you have data that 10 to 12 year old girls are up 3 180% increase it's it's more than a more than a quad quadruple for self Haring for self harm that's right so um something happened that especially well when girls got super connected and began sharing the idea of self Haring and the idea of anxiety became just much more widespread okay now there is definitely something going on which is to do with people being more open and more likely to report and there will be plenty of people who old people who will say look I selfed harm when I was in my te oh I see it can you strip out that factor the fact that people are more likely to come forward yes so there are a couple of critiques that I get one of them the important null hypothesis is nothing's going on the kids are all right this is just changes in their willingness to report and changes in diagnostic criteria concept creep we consider smaller things to be problematic now perfectly reasonable hypothesis um but the fact that the behavior curves match the self-report curves so the curves for self harm match the self-report now you're saying even self harm could be you know sure there could be generational differences but why would it be between 2012 and 2013 why would it suddenly change that year in America Canada the UK Australia New Zealand northern Europe like so you can't explain why it changes everywhere at the same time and hospitalizations went up and these are hospitalizations like psychiatric emergency department visits there's something else going on with suicide isn't there because in girls I don't think suicide is gone up but in boys it has now hold on in the us it's up a lot for both boys and girls and um the increase percentage wise is actually fairly similar boys have a higher rate because they boys when boys make attempts they don't make as many atts attempts but they tend to use irreversible means they tend to use a gun in my country um or a tall building so boys have much higher rates about three times this the rate they both are way up it starts a little bit earlier than 2012 the boys start the suicide rate begins going up a couple years earlier but but both sexes are up a lot in America now then I'm in a debate with people who say oh but you know suicide is declining around the world which is true suicide rates have been going down since the early 2000s that's great but if you break it out by age and sex you see all these different groups going slightly down down down for 20 years and then right around 2014 you see one line going way up and this is a graph you can find in the economist it's the the teen girls even though the world's going down teen girls suddenly start going way up and a little later teen boys go up somewhat so in Britain so what what you should look at is whatever the rate is if you zoom in on your younger teen girls you'll see they are much worse off than everyone else okay so you now talking to 2012 2013 2014 something happened now I know you are convinced about what it is what would you posit is the cause behind this um so the cause behind it is that we Chang childhood more radically than it has ever been changed um in just a few years I mean the change from agriculture to the Industrial Revolution that was a pretty radical change but that was over 100 years whatever you want to say um so what I want you to do is is those of you who had children or those of you who were children in 201 10 what was your technology life like you had a flip phone your phone you had to press the seven key three times to make the letter s some of you remember that okay so did you spend all day typing about your feelings with your friends no you say see you at three you know you meet up so technology for Millennials was a tool that they could use to improve their social lives they might have had Facebook um which they used on their parents computer you couldn't use it on a phone so there was Facebook there were cell phones but you were not spending 5 hours a day on social media or on your phone um also your phone didn't have a front-facing camera also you had to pay for text also you didn't have high-speed internet so all the way up to 2010 children had what we might recognize as a human childhood but between 2010 and 2015 the technology changes such that by 2015 almost everybody you can see see it's very sharp adoption curves by 2015 almost all teenss now they've traded in their flip phones for a smartphone with a front-facing camera unlimited data and Instagram or Tumblr or other social media platforms uh now the boys and the girls all Rush on the boys go for video games and YouTube especially um the girls go much more for visually oriented social media so Instagram Tumblr Pinterest um so what is a boy's life a boy life is more video G games which are not particularly harmful but we'll get back to that I I hope because it ends up taking them out of life the girls in the other hand their life now revolves around photographs ratings of photographs what people are saying about the photographs why someone like so the girls you take all the worst parts of being a teenage girl um and then you multiply them by 10 because now all of that is is magnified The Bullying the social comparison so that's why I'm calling 2010 to 2015 the great rewiring of childhood what childhood now is in our countries and in most of the developed world if you're a boy you're sitting at a video game console because you can't go to your friend's house if you go over your friend's house you can't play video games you have to go home alone you can put on your headset your video game controller so boys are sitting alone playing video games girls are sitting alone they might be next to another girl but they're sitting alone they're on social media so this is not a human childhood um this is if you remember the opening scene or that key scene in The Matrix where you see suddenly The Matrix is revealed field and you see all the people lying in pods with something sucking out their brain juice that's kind of what happened so Jonathan the the graphs are amazing and in a way they look like gosh they match look what's happening at that point look what's happening to across countries ex so you have a correlation but the charge that you will know that is often leveled against you is it doesn't necessarily mean that you have causation that's right and in a way I don't know perhaps you would argue perhaps you can't you could I don't know how one would ever prove because you can't sort of take the group of people that aren't on social media who've never self hared but that is a particular challenge for what you're positing isn't it yes yes but it's one that I've been addressing since 2019 so as everyone knows in the social sciences correlation doesn't prove causation there are consistent correlations in which heavy users of social media are two or three times more likely to be depressed and you might say oh well maybe depress people just like to use more social media and that could be true and so that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis so we have to move on and look at longitudinal studies where you track people over time and does an increase at time one cause an increase in time two that gets you closer to causality but it's not proof of causality and then the real gold standard is experiments um and there so what I've been doing since 2019 is collecting all the studies I can find on all sides I don't want to be accused of cherry-picking I want to say let's take everything because it's so confusing there's so many studies people point to this study that study let's put them all together in Google Docs invite the world to comment on them so I've been incredibly transparent doing this since 2019 with Jee twangy um so in one of our Google Docs we have 150 studies mostly correlational that's true but we have I think 25 experiments and eight quasi experiments which are a different category of experiment um and they don't all show an effect but the great majority of them do and that's the way the game is played if you have the experiments then that is evidence of causation now we can argue about the quality of the experiment and that's where we are um so those who say I have no evidence and I'm mistaking correlation for causation simply haven't read my work because from the very beginning I've been very clear I have many writings on this about how do we tease out causality so we're in a debate but I believe I've shown causality okay and to be very clear you throughout the book you keep flagging up that there is going to be an online version that you will update as more information comes out but you do you do appear to I mean I think I think you're pretty open about it you set out to prove something and reading it I was thinking there are positive experiences I mean the boy that you mentioned sitting on who goes home alone on playing video games he's chatting to his friends on the headphones that's right um the girl there might be a girl who has is struggling to make friends at school but she'll find somebody online who she can connect to and realize she's not alone and there is no representation of the positive side of social media in your book actually I do have a short section called on the benefits of social media but as you maybe you've actually read it or maybe you just know what's coming and I talk about that the pluses and minuses School uh which is you know people say well you know there's these pluses there's these minuses you know and the pluses are really the only real evidence they point to is you know kids say that it makes them feel closer to their friends that's true but does that mean it's actually good imagine this situation you take kids who are playing with each other every day they're getting together they have clubs they do this they do that and you say hey kids come each to your individual cell we've got amazing stuff for you in your individual cell you're all alone in your individual cell now here's a tin can with a string you can use it to talk to your friends and then you do that for a few years and then someone comes along and says how do you feel about your tin can oh I love it it makes me feel closer to my friends so the mere fact that they say it makes them feel closer does not mean that it's been good for them because as soon as the girls moved on to social media they began saying they were much lonlier their lives felt pointless and they were more depressed when the boys moved on to multiplayer video games which is more like around 2007 89 as as Internet speeds are picking up that's why the boys curb I believe starts earlier it's not as sharp at 2012 the boys when they move their social life much more onto multiplayer video games they become more lonely more depressed and they too say their lives are pointless there's no purpose I feel useless so sure you can say they they say they like it but I think the evidence is pretty clear if these things were good for them we'd have seen an increase in well-being in the early 2000s not a collapse okay and I mean I'm going to keep pushing on this because there you know the harder you push the better I get [Applause] [Music] most children most parents I know do don't or at least let's put most children don't have unrestricted use they might not be allowed to have their phone in their bedroom they might be limited by their parents you paint a picture of this sort of unrestricted uncontrolled hours on and there are cases like that but they are at just one end of the spectrum and I so the challenge in that the this challenge to you is on whether you're being fair whether you're being fair to the actual use so there are big demographic differences I don't have the data for the UK but I can tell you in the US if you just look at hours of time on on on their phones um for if you have two college educated parents who are married it's it's something like seven hours a day but if you and if you're if you're white or I think Asian um but if you are if you're black or Hispanic or have a single parent or are low social class it's much it's a couple hours higher um the the the phone the iPad is used it's an incredibly effective pacifier you it turns out now it's it's not it's really more like giving your kid morphine to shut them up but um uh it's true that some many kids have have have uh tight restrictions but talk to parents okay look parents in the room raise your hand if you were parent of a kid over the age between 8 and 22 raise your hand okay just you in the audience just you and who raised your hands how many of you felt like it was pretty easy to control we actually we were able to keep a lid on it we were able to raise our kids the way we wanted raise your hand High it it was easy to control 1 2 3 four five okay five all right but less than 10% less than 5% we haven't even gone up for for those of you watching uh on the on the video um it was about I'd say 5 to 7% of the of the people that raised their hand said that we're all really trying and we're failing and unless you're willing to put on Spy software and watch over your kids shoulders and monitor them oh and by this way if they go to a friend's house they can just use a browser there so at present there is almost no way for parents to raise their kids the way they want because the tech companies have put us in a trap where if we do what we think is right we're isolating our kid you know I mean Apple gives us Gooden screen time controls there there are tools out there but you know we're trying and most of us are failing okay we're going to come on to Solutions and with regard to tech companies a bit I just want to just nail something of course you talk there about going on a browser your complaint isn't with the internet no I love the internet okay and it's not with children being on the internet unless they're on adult areas it's mainly social media is the target okay yeah can I just demonstrate that with this audience I can I can show you this is a very important distinction because I often hear this oh you know without social media kids would have been so isolated during Co oh thank God they had social media all right let me thought experiment for you so imagine that it's the early 90s and a genie comes to you with three glowing floating boxes magical boxes and the genie says to you you can open 0 1 two or three of these boxes if you open it it's going to take 15 hours a week of your life here's the first box and he opens it it's the internet you will have omniscience you will be able to know everything instantly now it's going to take 15 hours a week do you want it raise your hand if you're glad we opened the box you're glad we have the internet raise your hand High okay the great majority it's not all of you but it's the great majority okay so great we've got the internet and remember the early '90s was amazing and you know we thought it was going to save democracy and mental health was fine okay now let's move up it's it's it's um uh now let's move up it uh and the second box he opens it and it's the iPhone it's this incredible digital Swiss army knife which can do all these functions you know you used to have to buy a radio and a flashlight and a map and no it's everything is in this one thing um but remember you have the internet and the iPhone so now you're up to 30 hours a week you're going to be spending on these two raise your hand if you're glad that we open that box you're glad we have smartphones raise your hand High okay now it's it's maybe around half maybe a little less than half but it's still a lot of people um okay and now the third box he opens it it's social media you already have the whole internet and you have your smartphone do you also want to have social media where you get to post stuff and comment on people's stuff and and and get sucked into spending many hours a day doing that I'm sorry I shouldn't bias the survey um but honestly I mean you know if you already have the internet and an iPhone how many of you are glad we opened the social media box the world's a better place because we have Facebook Instagram Tik Tok Snapchat Etc raise your hand high if you think it was good that we opened it 1 2 3 four so probably about a dozen so this is my point technology is amazing technology is the way we've advance Advanced for many thousands of years the internet is incredible we can't imagine life without the internet the internet has so many benefits social media is an entirely different animal engineered to hack into young people's insecurities about their position in society and keep pressing on it and pressing on it to keep them paying attention I don't think that's a good deal [Music] now the head lines have largely been about the sort of banning of social media or restrict yeah you brid you just love to ban things I'm not talking about banning like every conversation is about banning phones what do you want then I want Norms okay I want to change Norms you want to B we we'll come back to we'll come back to this but just on those specific things let me let me put Banning phones from schools during during the school day yeah that I would do one yes and restricting social media to over 16s okay but yes there is a second the second half of your book is actually about a whole other aspect which is that while children this generation are on their phones they are not doing things in re in real life and you have suggested that both that combination of phones and not doing other things in real life is deprived them of their childhood just talk about the importance of what you think they're missing sure so um the so humans have these gigantic brains So within any group of animals if there's a some that have gigantic Brains it's going to be because they're super social um and so among the primates we're the huge brain Champions because we're super duper social much more than chimpanzees we're Ultra social well we have and then humans part of our sociality is culture we developed culture and was when we developed culture um uh well we developed culture and culture requires a much longer childhood this seems to be the explanation for why we have this unique growth pattern which is human children grow quickly and then we slow down after 2 or 3 years and then we grow very slowly you know from like 5 to 10 gr very slowly all other primates they just grow and grow and grow until they can reproduce and then they reproduce why do we have this long slow period it's because our brains need to wire up they need a lot of cultural training from either older kids or older people we're guided all around the world we're guided especially at puberty we're guided uh through um through how do you make the transition from from a girl to a woman or a boy to a man so humans have this incredible developmental process that we've evolved to have and U like all mammals play is is the main way we do it especially early on we play at roles we play at roles that we'll have as adults within our gender um so play is an intrinsic part A crucial part of of life if you deprive animals including children of play they come out anxious and socially unskilled which is what most people say about gen Z on average so when you deprive young mammals of what they most need you're blocking human development and my argument is that between 2010 and 2015 we blocked human development at a level never before seen in human history um imagine for those of you who are older those of you who are you born before 1995 especially before 1981 let's talk Gen X and older think back on your childhood think back on all the things you did all the adventures now imagine removing 70% of the time hanging out with friends at least 70% just imagine that was that never you didn't have that that was gone imagine you had no well any hobbies that you had if you did something physical imagine that's gone um um imagine Thrills Adventures uh Adventures where you might have gotten hurt 80% of that's gone and in its place you have vast amounts of content you're consuming short videos 20 second video Tik Tok videos after a few hours of which you might stop and then you say what did I just do for the last 3 hours is what people say to me so what I'm saying is let's imagine almost all the good stuff from childhood take out 70% of it and now imagine growing up with just the remaining 30% and that's what we've done to genz I one of the things that you say it's that you set out in the book is that there's a particularly risky form of play that is important which I think the word you use is anti Fragile the example is a tree needs wind as it's growing in order to become stronger and this is what you suggest which I suppose is the coddling of childhood from earlier but um which you think has been what replaced by people sitting by actually not even necessarily being on their phones by their parents saying you can't walk home from school you can't climb that tree you can't go to the and that is what doing as much damage as phones or doing a considerable yeah so right so there's two parts to the story and let me just mentioned that the the the thrill part is something which is really important and really interesting so there's a a number of play researchers have pointed out that kids when they're naturally playing they will if they Master something they'll make it more dangerous if they learn to skateboard down a hill they'll then go for a really Steep Hill then they go for a jump then they'll go downstairs and they're going to fall they're going to hurt themselves why do they do this why would you choose to hurt yourself um I if you're if you learn to swing you're going to jump off the swings and you're going to go higher and higher and you might hurt yourself you're not going to kill yourself you might hurt yourself why do kids try to hurt themselves well they're not trying to hurt themselves directly they're seeking out just the right level of thrill and thrill requires fear the fear of actually getting hurt and it turns out kids need this this is how we overcome childhood fears um and there's a I have a great little story in the book about my dog while I was writing this I had got a puppy named Wilma um and I have a video and it's on you can find at anxious generation.com I just put it up Wilma was this little tiny thing she was 7 pounds when we got her and I took her to Washington Square Park near near where I live and and there was a German Shepherd in area where dogs run there was a German she big German Shepherd and I let Wilma off the leash which was probably foolish uh at that at that age because she might have run away but I but anyway um so Wilma goes like going up to the dog and then as soon as the dog makes a mo a motion she goes running away now you might think she's terrified she's going to run home no no she was afraid but she was also intrigued and she was thrilled she goes running away comes to me runs around me and runs right back to the dog and then the dog moves again so she's playing this game she's trying to adjust the level of fear it and then she runs away and she comes back for more she's dosing herself with fear and that's how you become fearless and that's what kids do when you're climbing a tree and you're a little scared you go a little higher and then you did it and now you're not as afraid of climbing trees so anyway my point is as we as we began to focus on physical safety and then emotional safety we said let's not let our kids do anything that could be dangerous nothing that could be dangerous we have to watch them or'll do something dangerous and in doing so it's as though we said how about if we don't let them have anything with vitamin C no vitamin C and then of course they get scurvy so um we have to recognize that fear that kids are seeking out the right level of fear and I just want to point out about video games yeah they look like great fun fun I watch my son play fortnite you know he's jumping out of planes he's having knife fights they're killing people they're competing it's very exciting is he ever afraid is there a moment of fear no there's no fear boys are not getting anything from video games that will help turn them into men

Channel: Intelligence Squared

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Length: 32min 0sec (1920 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2024