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

- But let's just start, let's assume that like maybe 10% 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 is that mental health statistics were pretty stable from the late '90s to about 2010, 2011, actually getting even a little better.

- [Host] And you mean mental health 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 long time, there's a lot of debate, but once you see that that happened at the same time in the same way in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, much of 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 had the great rewiring of childhood where everyone traded their flip phones in, in 2010, they had flip phones. They used those as tools to meet up with other kids.

By 2015, they have a smartphone with high-speed internet, social media, Instagram in particular, front-facing camera. And now, a lot of kids are spending five to 10 hours a day doing this, which blocks out everything else. So my argument is not just about the phones, my argument is that we used to 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 of a weakness in fragility.

And then the arrival of the 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 real causes of the epidemic.

" But they won't say what those are because they don't know. - Right. I mean, well that was gonna be my next question, right?

I mean, I think absent even all of the scientific evidence that you cite is universal in 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 a modern 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 different than those previous? - So the idea that this is just a groundless moral panic, the kids are all right, we've been through this before. You know, in the 18th century was novels, we're gonna excite young women's sexual passions, we must ban novels.

So perfectly reasonable hypothesis, I'm glad that people were skeptical back in 2019 when I started this, but this is so different in so many ways. One is that previous moral panics were spread by the media, stories about a kid who saw something or read a comic book and then axe murdered his mother. It probably never happened, but the media runs with it.

This time around, everyone has seen it in their own children or their friends' children or their nieces and nephews. Everyone knows someone who's been harmed by social media. Everyone knows a girl who is cutting herself out of anxiety.

So this is very different from any previous moral panic in that way. Another way is that in previous moral, in this time around, you talk to members of Gen 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 think the 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 this has 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't because 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 people weren't saying, "Please, comic book makers, stop making comic books that are so addictive we 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 where these 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 of the scientific evidence as you interpret it, why would we take this risk? Or why are we taking this risk.

- So I'm glad you mentioned the precautionary principle. So there are two different ways of thinking about risk and the risk of making a mistake or a false diagnosis. So the psychologists that are 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 for an article for journal, our attitude is it's gotta be P less than 0. 05, multiple experiments, we have to be really certain that this is right 'cause we don't wanna publish something that's wrong. So it takes a lot of proof before we'll say, "Okay, this is certain enough that we're gonna let it in.

" It's like in a jury trial for 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 themselves at much higher levels than they did before, are we gonna say let's not do anything until we're certain, let's be totally certain before we do anything.

Oh, and by the way, the things that we are supposed to, that we should do, they cost nothing, there's bipartisan agreement that we should do them. There's no risk. So my argument is, okay, I think the evidence, and actually there's a lot of experimental evidence as well of causation.

I think the evidence is pretty clear. We can debate whether it's certain or not certain, but when you look at the risk benefit ratio, why the hell aren't we acting? - Right.

And I mean, I think of this as kind of like the strong and the weak case for what you're arguing for, which is ending the so-called phone-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 if these 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 affecting their 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, what teachers, schools can do, what governments can do, what tech companies can do. But the key to the whole thing is understanding the collective 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 pressure that 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 action that will get us out. And so what I tried to do at the end of the book is propose four simple norms. I tried to make it really 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 flip phone, you send them out, give them a phone, a flip phone so you can text them, they can text you, call if they need to, but you do not give a child the 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 of the 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 your hand, here in this room if you wish to God that the internet 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 you wish 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't exist, but they're stuck.

They're trapped on it. So how about we just delay it till 16? Just don't let children go through puberty on social media.

That's the really vulnerable time. Third norm, phone-free schools. Imagine for those of you who we went to school before the internet, imagine that the school had a new rule.

You can bring in your television 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 have the phone in their pocket, my kids went to New York City Public Schools, and the rule is, you can't take out your phone during class, which means that you have to hide it behind a book or under your desk if you want to text and watch video and watch porn, which the kids do.

So what we've done is completely insane, and guess what? Academic achievement has been going down, not since COVID, but since 2012, as soon as the kids all had the internet in their pocket, they can't resist. They have to be using it since everyone else is using it.

And so academic achievement, our kids are learning less, the teachers are quitting. There was just a great article in the journal about a teacher who just couldn't stand it anymore from the phones. So the third norm is phone-free schools.

And the fourth norm is the hardest, actually, because we have to overcome our own fears. The fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world, just like everyone had until the 1990s. Kids must learn to be self-governing, and the way they learn that is 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, they get out of the conflict. There can't be an adult guarding them all the time until they go to college. So those four norms and we rolled back the phone-based childhood.

They're not that hard. - So let's- (audience applauding) - Thank you. - Let's talk about the future now.

- [Jonathan] Okay, the future of everything. - Yeah, the future of everything, including human beings. And so Gen Z, the oldest members of Gen Z are 28 now.

They have already had a phone-based childhood. They're kind of the first generation to have that for the totality of their growing up almost. What are the implications of this generation who's had that experience, growing older and starting to kind of cross all these life milestones and getting jobs and everything else?

- So one hypothesis that people had a number of years ago, back when I wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind" was ah, they'll grow out of it. You know, this behavior they're doing in college. Oh, they can't do that when they 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 into the corporate world.

Now that Gen Z is 28 and the main characteristic is much greater anxiety and more fragility. Employers I talk to, I work 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 during COVID for whatever reason, it's just much harder to incorporate them.

I think what we're seeing is a lot less innovation. There's a conversation between Sam Altman and Pat Collison where they pointed out that for the first time since the '60s or '70s, there's not a single dominant, there's not a major figure in 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 all have limited attention, but because young people have given all of their attention to their devices, five hours a day of social media is the average, the average in this country. It's mostly videos, mostly TikTok and YouTube Shorts, things like that. So five hours a day just for that, and then another five to seven hours for other things, they have no attention to actually do anything.

So that might be why they're not innovating as much. Now that's, I don't have 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 every member, I mean averages. - Great, okay. So on average, but I mean, 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 your most recent newsletters, you said there are all these youth organizations. So it does feel like there is sort of a counter movement coming from members of Gen Z themselves. - Oh yes.

Well, they certainly are activists in the online world and they're using the online world to push back against the online world, which is fine. That's good. These are powerful tools.

I'm happy they're doing that. So yes, gen Z, this is almost uniformly the case, Gen Z does not support the 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 leading these voluntary movements because it's still a trap.

I do think that the best thing that we could do, the most important thing that would help us here is age verification, which the companies really, really don't wanna do. And Chris and I were backstage during the previous session, we only caught part of it, but so I come here to the Wall Street Journal and I learned that the only ethical social media company in the world is OnlyFans. That was pretty interesting.

(audience laughing) Because they seem to actually take seriously that children should not be on their platforms, whereas the view at Meta and TikTok is, oh yeah, you know, 13 is the minimum age, but they'll do everything they can 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 need help from government to force the companies to age gate. But beyond that, I think we can do most of it with norms that we do within communities, within groups of families, and with schools. - Can't we just convince Tim Cook 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 media should be the same as that, but that does raise possible privacy issues. And if people have to show a driver's license or face recognition in order to watch PornHub, I understand a lot of people aren'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 with a 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 is just send down a signal, there's a check. Is this a hardware device that we can deal with? So this causes zero privacy concerns.

The rest of the world can still go on PornHub and do whatever they want. But at least if I wanna keep my own children off of TikTok and PornHub and Instagram, and I do deliberately put 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 panel with the Mozilla folks, where everything you just described from social media to the browser and the internet at large is getting usurped by AI as a dominant mode of interacting with our devices.

I mean, we just saw that with the OpenAI demo and then the controversy about 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'm a social psychologist, I'm extremely alarmed about the state of American democracy.

We've lost a lot of the assumptions that the founding fathers had, we're in big trouble in terms of the structure and stability of our institutions and our democracy. I believe that AI is gonna bring in very quickly an era of extraordinary prosperity economically and of sociological chaos with a risk of collapse because we're already in a hell of a state, and now anyone who wants to flood the zone with incredibly vivid movies of 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 media is particularly toxic and a lot of them get addicted to social media more so than the boys. For the boys, it's that they're withdrawing from the real world because the real world is hard.

School is harder for them. They don't get recess and play and shop anymore. They have to sit in their 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. - [Host] Yeah. - And just as they were withdrawing, the virtual world got more and more amazing.

So the video games get more and more amazing, the porn more and more amazing. Well, what's coming up is that every lonely boy, the boys are so lonely, they don't spend much time with other human beings. So the boys are so lonely, the girls are too, but it's really hitting the boys even more.

Well now they're gonna have 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 that we allow adults to use are often not appropriate for children.

And so if we can't get age gating now on social media, it's game over for the boys. The boys are gonna be lost in amazing AI worlds of video games, pornography, friends, and then how are they gonna 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, stay married, have children. So girls are becoming much more depressed and anxious, boys are being blocked in their development.

They're not turning into men, and it's gonna be so much worse when they have lots of AI friends and servants. How many servants do you want 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 child to have 15 servants?

That would be so warping. But that's what's coming. - Well, the private tutor sounds appealing if they'll help 'em learn their mathematics.

I know we're gonna, I know we're out of time, but I know that definitely there'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 start staring daggers at me soon for going over. We have some questions over here, some raised hands. - [Audience Member] Is there any, excuse me, you mentioned TikTok and Instagram and PornHub, sorry, as three social media sites, are there any for children, or I guess maybe what are the elements of those that you think are really bad when you think about there are certain social media sites made for children?

I have a nine-year-old daughter and a six-year-old daughter, and they do seem to interact with their friends on those in a healthy way, but I don't know, maybe they'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 are companies 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 entirely inappropriate for children.

What is appropriate for children? Stories. Stories are great.

Human beings tell stories. We live in stories. We've always told stories around the campfire.

So if kids are gonna watch a little bit of television, a story that's at least 20 minutes long, that's great. Now, they shouldn't be watching six hours a day, but watching a movie, watching a story is okay. TikTok is not stories.

TikTok is lots of little garbage things 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's any way to either give kids lots of short videos and have that be good for them or put them in contact with strangers on an unverified platform. Some of whom want to see photos of them in their underwear.

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