Jonathan Haidt on the Mental-Neatly being Crisis and Smartphones | WSJ News

– But let's just start, let's assume that like maybe10% of the people in the room don't know your thesis already. What is your thesis in your latest book? – So what we know for sure isthat mental health statistics were pretty stable from thelate '90s to about 2010, 2011, actually getting even a little better. – And you mean mentalhealth among young people. – I mean, among teenage,American teenagers.

And then all of a sudden around 2012, 2013 measures of depression, anxiety, and self-harm go skyrocketing. It's like a hockey stick,especially for girls. So what caused that? And we didn't know for a longtime, there's a lot of debate, but once you see that that happened at the same time in thesame way in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, muchof the Nordic countries,.

Much of Northern Europe. Now, the number of hypotheses about what could cause this basically, maybe somebody dropped some weird chemical on those countries in 2012,and that's what happened. Or maybe it's because we hadthe great rewiring of childhood where everyone tradedtheir flip phones in, in 2010, they had flip phones. They used those as toolsto meet up with other kids.

By 2015, they have a smartphonewith high-speed internet, social media, Instagram inparticular, front-facing camera. And now, a lot of kids are spending five to 10hours a day doing this, which blocks out everything else. So my argument is notjust about the phones, my argument is that we usedto have a play-based childhood for the last 50 million years. That's what mammals do.

They play, young mammals must play a lot. If you've ever had a puppy, you know that. But we took our children in the '90s, and said, no more of that,no more outside play. You have to be supervised all the time. So the loss of the play-based childhood set them up for kind ofa weakness in fragility. And then the arrival ofthe phone-based childhood between 2010 and 2015.

That's the story I put forth in the book. And I'm having wonderful debates with a few research psychologists who say that I don't have the evidence and they say, “My focusing on this is hiding the realcauses of the epidemic.” But they won't say what thoseare because they don't know. – Right. I mean, well that was gonnabe my next question, right?.

I mean, I think absent evenall of the scientific evidence that you cite is universalin my experience, that parents are very concerned about overuse of devices by their kids. But yeah, I mean, there are folks who say, “Oh wait, isn't this amodern day moral panic like comic books in the 1950s, like violent video games in the 1990s?” And your answer has been no,.

This time it really is different. And so how is it differentthan those previous? – So the idea that this isjust a groundless moral panic, the kids are all right, we'vebeen through this before. You know, in the 18th century was novels, we're gonna excite youngwomen's sexual passions, we must ban novels. So perfectly reasonable hypothesis, I'm glad that people wereskeptical back in 2019.

When I started this, but this is so different in so many ways. One is that previous moralpanics were spread by the media, stories about a kid who saw something or read a comic book andthen axe murdered his mother. It probably never happened, but the media runs with it. This time around, everyone hasseen it in their own children or their friends' childrenor their nieces and nephews.

Everyone knows someone who'sbeen harmed by social media. Everyone knows a girl who iscutting herself out of anxiety. So this is very different from any previous moral panic in that way. Another way is that in previousmoral, in this time around, you talk to members ofGen Z, the older ones, you talk to members of Gen Z who are 18, or especially those in their 20s, and you say, “So do you thinkthe phone-based childhood.

Is good? Do you think it's beneficial?” I can't find anyone who says yes to that. I can't find anyone. There's universal agreement, it seems among Gen Z that thishas really messed them up. And then you say, I say to my students, “Well, why don't you get off?” And they say, “We can'tbecause everyone else is on.”.

So it's a trap, whereas comic books and things like that, they weren't a trap in that way. And the young peopleweren't saying, “Please, comic book makers, stop making comic books that are so addictivewe can't put them down.” Like that didn't happen. But it's happening now. There are a lot of youth-led organizations.

That are advocating for major changes 'cause this is messing up the generation. – Right, so to sum up, I mean, this sounds like the precautionary principle, right? Like, social science is hard. It's hard to definitively demonstrate there's no Earth two wherethese phones don't exist and we can play it out that way.

But part of what you're saying is based on anecdotal evidence, based on the balance ofthe scientific evidence as you interpret it, whywould we take this risk? Or why are we taking this risk. – So I'm glad you mentionedthe precautionary principle. So there are two differentways of thinking about risk and the risk of making amistake or a false diagnosis. So the psychologists thatare debating with me,.

And it's a good normal academic debate, they're in the mindset of reviewing for a scientific journal. And when we review foran article for journal, our attitude is it'sgotta be P less than 0.05, multiple experiments, we have to be reallycertain that this is right 'cause we don't wanna publishsomething that's wrong. So it takes a lot ofproof before we'll say,.

“Okay, this is certain enoughthat we're gonna let it in.” It's like in a jury trialfor a criminal case, it has to be beyond reasonable doubt. That's fine for a jury trial, that's fine for a scientific journal. If our kids are cutting themselves and killing themselvesat much higher levels than they did before, are we gonna say let's not do anything.

Until we're certain, let's be totally certainbefore we do anything. Oh, and by the way, the thingsthat we are supposed to, that we should do, they cost nothing, there's bipartisan agreementthat we should do them. There's no risk. So my argument is, okay,I think the evidence, and actually there's a lotof experimental evidence as well of causation.

I think the evidence is pretty clear. We can debate whether it'scertain or not certain, but when you look atthe risk benefit ratio, why the hell aren't we acting? – Right. And I mean, I think of thisas kind of like the strong and the weak case forwhat you're arguing for, which is ending the so-calledphone-based childhood, right? Even if someone is not convinced.

By trends in mental health among teens, or they think that that's very, it does vary by country. There's just the simple fact that it obviously is trading off with the play-based childhood. And you know, even ifthese were just little TVs they were carrying around, we would wanna limit their time on that.

Because it's gonna trade off with everything else in their life, however it is affectingtheir mental health. – That's right. So let me just lay out, so there's a lot of ideas in the book for what parents can do. I have a whole chapter what parents can do with dozens of ideas, whatteachers, schools can do,.

What governments can do,what tech companies can do. But the key to the whole thing is understanding thecollective action problem. That the reason that we're pressured to give our kid a phone is that she says, “Mom, everyone else has one. I'm being left out. I'm being made fun of.” So we'll say, “Okay, here's a phone.”.

It's the collective pressurethat got us so deep into this, even though most of us can see that this is really bad for our kids, but it's collective actionthat will get us out. And so what I tried todo at the end of the book is propose four simple norms. I tried to make itreally clear and simple, four simple norms. If we do these things,.

We roll back the phone-based childhood. One, no smartphone before 14. You can give 'em a flipphone, you send them out, give them a phone, a flipphone so you can text them, they can text you, call if they need to, but you do not give a childthe internet in their pocket where strangers can reach them, and they can watch beheading videos. You don't give that to a child.

To have with them all the time. That's the same as for an iPad. You don't have one of those devices until you're 14, minimum. That should be the minimum national norm. That's one. Number two, no social media until 16. The internet is not social media. The internet is wonderful.

The internet is amazing,it does some bad stuff, but man, the benefits ofthe internet are vast. Nobody wants to get rid of the internet. Social media is not the internet. You take a vote on social media,let's just do it right now. How many of you, raise yourhand, here in this room if you wish to God that theinternet was never invented, you wish we could have,raise your hand high. Okay, nobody.

Okay, now what about TikTok and Instagram? Raise your hand if youwish it was never invented. Okay, and that's a lot of the room. So the kids say this themselves,18-year-olds say this, they wish that this didn'texist, but they're stuck. They're trapped on it. So how about we just delay it till 16? Just don't let children gothrough puberty on social media. That's the really vulnerable time.

Third norm, phone-free schools. Imagine for those of youwho we went to school before the internet, imaginethat the school had a new rule. You can bring in yourtelevision from home, you can bring in your walkie talkies, you can bring in your record player, put it all on your desk,we'll give you an outlet. And you can do that during class while the teacher's talking.

This is complete insanity. But that's what we've done. That's what we've done. Any school that lets kids havethe phone in their pocket, my kids went to New YorkCity Public Schools, and the rule is, you can't takeout your phone during class, which means that you haveto hide it behind a book or under your desk if youwant to text and watch video and watch porn, which the kids do.

So what we've done is completelyinsane, and guess what? Academic achievement has beengoing down, not since COVID, but since 2012, as soon as the kids all hadthe internet in their pocket, they can't resist. They have to be using it sinceeveryone else is using it. And so academic achievement, our kids are learning less, the teachers are quitting.

There was just a greatarticle in the journal about a teacher who just couldn't stand itanymore from the phones. So the third norm is phone-free schools. And the fourth norm isthe hardest, actually, because we have to overcome our own fears. The fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibilityin the real world, just like everyone had until the 1990s.

Kids must learn to be self-governing, and the way they learn thatis by being self-governing, by being out with a group of friends. They get into trouble,they get out of trouble, they get into conflict, theyget out of the conflict. There can't be an adultguarding them all the time until they go to college. So those four norms and we rolled back thephone-based childhood.

They're not that hard. – So let's- (audience applauding) – Thank you. – Let's talk about the future now. – Okay, thefuture of everything. – Yeah, the future of everything,including human beings. And so Gen Z, the oldestmembers of Gen Z are 28 now. They have already had aphone-based childhood.

They're kind of the firstgeneration to have that for the totality oftheir growing up almost. What are the implicationsof this generation who's had that experience, growing older andstarting to kind of cross all these life milestones and getting jobs and everything else? – So one hypothesis that peoplehad a number of years ago, back when I wrote “TheCoddling of the American Mind”.

Was ah, they'll grow out of it. You know, this behaviorthey're doing in college. Oh, they can't do that whenthey go to Goldman Sachs. They can't do that when they go to Google. Well, that wasn't true. The norms of universities have been brought intothe corporate world. Now that Gen Z is 28 andthe main characteristic is much greater anxietyand more fragility.

Employers I talk to, Iwork at a business school, I talk to a lot of people,people in the corporate world, people are finding it very hard to incorporate their Gen Z students, their Gen Z employees, they're lovely people, they're smart, but they've had a lot going against them. And then they came out duringCOVID for whatever reason, it's just much harder to incorporate them.

I think what we're seeingis a lot less innovation. There's a conversation betweenSam Altman and Pat Collison where they pointed out that for the first timesince the '60s or '70s, there's not a single dominant, there's not a major figurein Silicon Valley under 30. That's never been true before. What I'm seeing in my students and what we're seeing around the country.

Is that because we allhave limited attention, but because young people have given all of theirattention to their devices, five hours a day of socialmedia is the average, the average in this country. It's mostly videos, mostlyTikTok and YouTube Shorts, things like that. So five hours a day just for that, and then another five toseven hours for other things,.

They have no attentionto actually do anything. So that might be why they'renot innovating as much. Now that's, I don'thave hard data on that. – I gotta push back on the idea that like every member of Generation Z is a screen-obsessed zombie. – Not every member,I'm a social scientist, I don't mean everymember, I mean averages. – Great, okay.

So on average, but Imean, in my experience, they're also the ones leading the charge to detach from social media, to not post, to be digital minimalists. I mean, in one of yourmost recent newsletters, you said there are allthese youth organizations. So it does feel like thereis sort of a counter movement coming from members of Gen Z themselves. – Oh yes.

Well, they certainly areactivists in the online world and they're using the online world to push back against theonline world, which is fine. That's good. These are powerful tools. I'm happy they're doing that. So yes, gen Z, this isalmost uniformly the case, Gen Z does not supportthe phone-based childhood. They're opposed to it.

They see the problems with it. And now finally, in the last three or four years, we're seeing a bunch of older Gen Z, although some started in college, forming organizations to push back. I'm really encouraged,I'm trying to help them. We're all connecting up. This is becoming a global movement,.

But how successful have they been so far? It's very hard leadingthese voluntary movements because it's still a trap. I do think that the bestthing that we could do, the most important thingthat would help us here is age verification, which the companies really,really don't wanna do. And Chris and I were backstageduring the previous session, we only caught part of it,.

But so I come here tothe Wall Street Journal and I learned that the onlyethical social media company in the world is OnlyFans. That was pretty interesting. (audience laughing) Because they seem toactually take seriously that children should notbe on their platforms, whereas the view at Metaand TikTok is, oh yeah, you know, 13 is the minimum age,.

But they'll do everything theycan to get young children. Meta even had something like, how do we get three and four-year-olds? How do we get into play dates? So we desperately needhelp from government to force the companies to age gate. But beyond that, I thinkwe can do most of it with norms that we do within communities, within groups of families,and with schools.

– Can't we just convince TimCook to take over age gating? I mean, he did it with ads. – So yes, that would really help. In the book, I do propose a sort of a, so ideally there'd be like age gating, like in order to go into a casino or a bar or a strip club or a brothel, you have to show some identification and show that you're at least 18 or 21.

Depending on the case. I think social mediashould be the same as that, but that does raisepossible privacy issues. And if people have toshow a driver's license or face recognition inorder to watch PornHub, I understand a lot of peoplearen't gonna like that. So a halfway measure is to say, well, can't you at least help the parents who don't want their kids on PornHub?.

Can't you do anything for us? And the answer is, yeah,yeah, you could make phones that are marked in hardware or software as this is a child's phone or this is a kid witha particular birthday. And so then when that child try, and it would be the same on their computer and on their iPad, everything. So when that child tries to go to PornHub,.

All PornHub has to do isjust send down a signal, there's a check. Is this a hardware devicethat we can deal with? So this causes zero privacy concerns. The rest of the worldcan still go on PornHub and do whatever they want. But at least if I wannakeep my own children off of TikTok and PornHub and Instagram, and I do deliberatelyput the three together,.

Then Apple could really help us do that. – And what about kind of, I mean, we're quickly moving toward a world, this was my last panelwith the Mozilla folks, where everything you justdescribed from social media to the browser and the internet at large is getting usurped byAI as a dominant mode of interacting with our devices. I mean, we just saw thatwith the OpenAI demo.

And then the controversyabout Scarlett Johansson. What do you think is gonna be, you know, if that's been the impact of social media, what do you think is gonna be the impact of this universal access to AI? – Yeah, so AI, so I'ma social psychologist, I'm extremely alarmed about thestate of American democracy. We've lost a lot of the assumptions that the founding fathers had,.

We're in big trouble interms of the structure and stability of ourinstitutions and our democracy. I believe that AI is gonnabring in very quickly an era of extraordinaryprosperity economically and of sociological chaoswith a risk of collapse because we're alreadyin a hell of a state, and now anyone who wants to flood the zone with incredibly vivid moviesof anyone saying anything, they can do that.

– You mean like deep fakes? – Yeah, deep fakes can do that from looking at teen mental health. The problem, you know,as I say in the book, for girls, social mediais particularly toxic and a lot of them getaddicted to social media more so than the boys. For the boys, it's thatthey're withdrawing from the real world becausethe real world is hard.

School is harder for them. They don't get recess andplay and shop anymore. They have to sit intheir chair all day long. Boys are withdrawing from the real world. This is Richard Reeve's work. I think he's actually here today. Richard Reeves is today.- Yeah. – And just as they were withdrawing, the virtual world gotmore and more amazing.

So the video games getmore and more amazing, the porn more and more amazing. Well, what's coming upis that every lonely boy, the boys are so lonely, they don't spend much timewith other human beings. So the boys are solonely, the girls are too, but it's really hittingthe boys even more. Well now they're gonnahave AI girlfriends. People are already falling in love with,.

If you're flirting with someone and she's brilliant and she's witty and you can program her personality so that she's just what you want, you're gonna fall madly in love. And so this is what, if we don't, we have to accept the principle now that technologies thatwe allow adults to use are often not appropriate for children.

And so if we can't get agegating now on social media, it's game over for the boys. The boys are gonna belost in amazing AI worlds of video games, pornography, friends, and then how are theygonna turn into a man who is able to flirt with a real woman, for heterosexual couples, flirt with a real woman,court someone, fall in love, beep, get married, staymarried, have children.

So girls are becoming muchmore depressed and anxious, boys are being blockedin their development. They're not turning into men, and it's gonna be so much worse when they have lots ofAI friends and servants. How many servants do youwant your children to have? If you have a 12-year-old son, do you want him to have a maid? Do you want him have a chauffeur?.

Do you want a private tutor? Would you like your childto have 15 servants? That would be so warping. But that's what's coming. – Well, the private tutor sounds appealing if they'll help 'emlearn their mathematics. I know we're gonna, Iknow we're out of time, but I know that definitelythere's gonna be some questions. So do we have any mic runners?.

And maybe we'll have one or two questions. Please keep them very short because somebody's gonna startstaring daggers at me soon for going over. We have some questions overhere, some raised hands. – [Audience Member] Isthere any, excuse me, you mentioned TikTok andInstagram and PornHub, sorry, as three social media sites, are there any for children,.

Or I guess maybe whatare the elements of those that you think are reallybad when you think about there are certain socialmedia sites made for children? I have a nine-year-old daughterand a six-year-old daughter, and they do seem tointeract with their friends on those in a healthy way, but I don't know, maybethey're bad too and I gotta, I'm the bad parent. – So two things.

First, social media is not the internet. When the internet came out, people could find each other,they could find information. LGBTQ kids could find information, they could find each other. So the Internet's amazing. Social media is these arecompanies that have taken over our children's childhood, invited them in, created a whole world.

With no immune system, as we saw before, no safety by design. Safety is an afterthought. So I think that social media is just entirelyinappropriate for children. What is appropriate for children? Stories. Stories are great. Human beings tell stories.

We live in stories. We've always told storiesaround the campfire. So if kids are gonna watcha little bit of television, a story that's at least 20minutes long, that's great. Now, they shouldn't bewatching six hours a day, but watching a movie,watching a story is okay. TikTok is not stories. TikTok is lots of little garbagethings that are degrading and at the end of four hours,.

Yet my students say I spent four hours and I don't know what even what I saw or what I learned or what I did, it just was four hours down the drain. So I don't think there'sany way to either give kids lots of short videos andhave that be good for them or put them in contact with strangers on an unverified platform. Some of whom want to see photosof them in their underwear.

Like, why are we doing this? There's no way to make that safe.

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