My conversation with Jon Haidt

His book lays out the evidence that social media and smartphones have caused the teen mental health crisis

“Nobody wants to read through an entire transcript of you talking to someone” Victoria said to me this week when I told her my plan to share a text version of today’s radio interview. “You have to give them some key outtakes or something.”

Perhaps she is right but just in case you’re one of those people who prefer reading something than listening to it (no shame in that, I’m one of them) here is my RNZ Afternoons interview with Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation traces plummeting teen mental health stats to the arrival of social media on smart phones in the early 2010s.

“If there's correlational evidence, there's longitudinal evidence, there's experimental evidence, there's eyewitness testimony. Most parents have seen it. Most teachers have seen it. So it just takes a level of skepticism that is beyond belief for me to say, despite all of this, I'm not completely convinced.” - Jonathan Haidt

There are some plausible objections to his theory - that something else has caused these problems; that there’s no increase in depression, just an increase in diagnosis; that he’s confusing correlation with causation; that his observations fit the American experience but not New Zealand; that he’s just an old man yelling at clouds - and I tried to put as many of these as possible to him in our half hour conversation, recorded below.

If you’d prefer to podcast this interview you can do it here.

Happy reading! Note, it’s possible this one will be too long for your email browser so you may wish to view online or via the Substack app.

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Jesse

Sometimes I get feedback that we talk too many American experts and the stuff they're saying doesn't apply here in New Zealand. And I'm delighted to say that you have looked specifically at New Zealand teenagers and looked at the effect that smartphones might be having on their mental health. And what have you found?

Jonathan

So, my research began in the United States when we noticed that rates of depression, anxiety and self harm were skyrocketing beginning around 2012, 2013. There was no sign of trouble before then. The rates were very level for more than a decade. And all of a sudden, they start shooting up around 2012, 2013. And at the time, I knew that this was happening in the UK, too. I began studying the US and the UK. But in 2020, I hired a young man named Zach Rausch as a research assistant. And I said, Zach, we need to know, is this happening all around the world? Go find whatever data you can. Let's see what's going on. And Zach did. He began with the anglosphere, because all the English speaking countries, they generally have some good data. We can understand it.

And so what Zach did, I'd encourage your listeners to go to my Substack afterbabel.com. It's free, there's no paywall. And we have a post called the teen mental illness epidemic is international, part one, the anglosphere. And we run through, you'll see shocking graphs that are pretty much the same in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. So let me scroll down to the New Zealand graph and I'll tell you exactly what we found here.

We are New Zealand. So we have one graph here for the percent with anxiety diagnosis. And what we see, we always plot our changes from about 2010, if we have data in 2010. What we see is that your young women, your young men had a 131% increase in anxiety diagnoses since 2011. This is from 2011 to 2020. And your young women had a 259% increase.

It's more than a tripling of rates of anxiety diagnoses. Now, that might be over diagnosis, it might be that people are just changing the criteria. But when we look at hospital admissions, this is much better. Actually, here in New Zealand, we have hospital discharge data. So when people are let out of a hospital, what were they in for? And when we graph the percent who are in for self harm, intentional self harm, what we see is that males aged 15 to 19 had 115% increase from 2010 to 2019. And your young women had 138% increase in hospitalizations for intentional self harm. So this is happening all over the anglosphere. It's also happening across northern Europe. It's a very international problem.

Jesse

Why has that number gone up?

Jonathan

So that's what the debate is about. And there's really only one theory on the table. Once we know it's international, we know it's not anything. In America, people say, oh, it's because of Donald Trump. Like, no, it started before. Oh, it's because of racism, it's because of poverty. Well, really, why did girls in New Zealand and Australia start cutting themselves in 2013? So the only plausible explanation is that we saw what I'm calling the great rewiring of childhood between 2010 and 2015. So in 2010, the great majority of our teenagers in all of our countries had flip phones and there was no front facing camera, and they could use Facebook on their parents computer, but they couldn't use it on their flip phone. And so they still, they used their phones as tools to get together.

They would text each other and meet up someplace in person. So they had what was still recognizably a human childhood in 2010. But by 2015, all of that is gone. By 2015, they've all traded in their. Most of trading their flip phones for smartphones. Instagram becomes very popular in 2012. They have that. The front facing camera is added in 2010, high speed Internet, unlimited texting. So by 2015, many teens are spending most of their waking hours looking at their phones. And the phone is … it’s not a tool to connect, it's a master or a distraction that they do instead of getting together with their friends. And we now have what I call the phone based childhood, which is not recognizably a human childhood.

Jesse

You haven't mentioned climate change, Jonathan, that got pretty real ten or twelve years ago. Might that be the cause of the mental health crisis?

Jonathan

No, no, definitely not. Because had it been, it went global, really, in 2017, 2018, or whenever Greta Thunberg became popular. And we also have to explain why is it, especially among young women, especially the younger teen girls. So if everything was fine until 2017, 2018, and then it started going up, I would say, oh, wow, actually, yeah, that does look like a Greta effect. But that's not at all what happened. There have been three big waves of environmental concern. One in the seventies, one in the nineties, and then another that began, you might say, in the late 2010s or in the late two thousands, early 2010s. But in the past, when young people are faced with a threat to society or to the planet, they don't get depressed, they get mobilized. And when they're mobilized, they're actually more invigorated.

They have more of a sense of meaning in life. So nothing about that makes sense. Nothing about climate change fits with the idea that young women in particular got really depressed and anxious and started cutting themselves because of climate change in 2013.

Jesse

Yeah, people will have noticed that the girls' stats were worse than the boys. Why is that, according to your theory?

Jonathan

So we'll talk about the boys’ story in a moment, I hope. Cause they're not doing well either. But if we just look at anxiety and depression and self harm, those are things that are more typical of young women. They always have been. And after 2012, they rise a lot more in young women than they do in young men. And the reason, I believe, is that social media has a very particular relationship with adolescent girls weak points and risk factors. So puberty is the most difficult time of life, especially for girls. Your body is changing. You're developing your identity, you're comparing yourself to others. And throughout history, girls have compared themselves to others, but maybe five or ten others, or maybe they saw magazines. When I was a kid, there were magazines with models, but they were adult women, far away.

What happens between 2010 and 2015 is that all girls, at least all who are on Instagram, are now seeing hundreds or thousands of images a day, including of girls they know. And those girls have carefully composed the photo. They've used filters, so most girls feel they're below average. And that's a recipe for depression and despair. There's also the nature of aggression and bullying. Boys' aggression is ultimately backed up by force and the threat of beating one another up. It's physical. And so when they go online, it doesn't really get worse. But girls are just as aggressive. Just that their aggression is what's called relational aggression. Girls damage each other's reputations and relationships. And, boy, does social media make that easy. They can do it on weekends, they can do it anonymously. They can create a gang.

There was one Instagram group at one high school in America. It was called “Everyone but Mary”. And everyone in the school other than Mary got together to talk about how terrible Mary is. I guarantee you Mary was thinking about suicide. When you are canceled, when everyone is turning on you, the shame is unlike anything people can imagine. So for all these reasons, girls' lives were turned upside down and inside out by the arrival of social media. It did not connect them. It put them basically on eggshells for all of puberty.

Jesse

You make good sense, Jonathan. And then tomorrow, we'll pick up a newspaper and it'll say, “new study shows no evidence that screen use causes depression”. We'll think, oh, well, maybe he's got it wrong, or maybe there's just disagreements among the experts. And what do you make of those studies? You can't deny that there's headlines from time to time that say, hey, we've had a look at this, and we can't find anything.

Jonathan

Oh, that's right. There are headlines. But whenever you look at the actual studies, you find a few things. So, first, most of the research is correlational, and the correlations are there. And so we actually all agree on how big the correlations are. And we generally agree that heavy users are actually for girls are two or three times more likely to be depressed than light users. But the big debate is not about correlation. The big debate is about causation. Do we have experiments to show that when you use random assignment, you tell people to get off social media, does it make them happier? And I've collected about 25 experiments. I do all my work in the open on public Google documents. You can find anxiousgeneration.com. Reviews. I collect all the experiments.

So we've got 25 experiments so far, I think it is, and about 16 of them do find an effect. So it's true that there are some that don't, but most of them do. And now we can debate. We can debate how good those studies are. But it's not just the experimental evidence that I'm drawing on. It's also the eyewitness testimony of the kids themselves. In any previous moral panic, like over comic books, the kids weren't saying, yeah, the comic books are ruining us. Take them away. But talk to Gen Z. It's very hard to find someone in Gen Z who defends the phones and social media who says that they're good for them. Gen Z themselves say the reason we're so messed up is because of our phones and social media. I mean, they say it.

So if there's correlational evidence, there's longitudinal evidence, there's experimental evidence, there's eyewitness testimony. Most parents have seen it. Most teachers have seen it. So it just takes a level of skepticism that is beyond belief for me to say, despite all of this, I'm not completely convinced. Here's a study that didn't find it. What do you make of that? Well, yeah, some studies don't find an effect, but most do.

Jesse

Yeah. And yet on that other side, on the side of the people saying, I don't see it, is a journal called Nature magazine that people will be familiar with. They reviewed your book and they asserted that you've mistaken correlation with causation. They say there's no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children's brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.

Jonathan

Yeah, so first, Nature didn't write that. Nature doesn't write things. They invited someone to review the book and the person they picked, one of the six skeptics. There are about six researchers who've been publishing continuously since the 2010 saying there's no evidence they're not harmful. Social media is not harmful. Let the kids on. At age 11,12, we don't even need to enforce the age limit of 13. So this was written by Candice Odgers, who's a professor at UC Irvine in California, or, no, it was one of the UC schools in California. And she just made some assertions that are flat out false. She said, I have no evidence. And she said, I have confused correlation or causation. Now, I don't think she actually read my book because I have a whole long section where I go through that.

I have these gigantic Google Docs where I lay out all of the studies. I very carefully dissect the evidence for correlation versus causation. My entire time on this, since 2019, I've been very careful. And she just flatly asserted that I don't know the difference or that I'm confusing them. She also asserted things like, there's no evidence that it's causing drastic changes in the brains of children. Well, yeah, of course it's not causing drastic changes. We don't expect to see a hole in the cortex. But she couldn't deny that it's causing changes. If your kid is spending 6 hours a day on social media or on video games, of course that's going to have an effect on your brain. That's why she had to put the hedge-word in “drastic”.

So that essay, it was, oh, the other big weird thing about it was, she said, by focusing on social media and phones, I'm distracting from the real cause of the crisis, which she asserted is racism and poverty. Now, I don't know that racism and poverty suddenly accelerated so much in America during President Obama's second term, 2012 2013, but I doubt that's going to explain why your girls started cutting themselves or girls in New Zealand or Canada or the UK. That was a very strange review of my book. It was full of falsehoods, and it offered an alternative theory that makes no sense.

Jesse

Have you generally been pleased with the response this time? We've had you on this show before, and you've always been a great guest, but this is the first time I had to fight, you know, Time magazine and CBS and Bill Maher to try and get you a slot on our show.

Jonathan

Yes, the response has been amazing. The reason is because in the past, you know, I've tried, I've been involved in a lot of things where I had to try to convince people of things. Like I ran a gun control group in college. You know, I'm trying to convince people to be less partisan and more forgiving. That's really hard work. But then I come along saying, you know, it looks like smartphones and social media and raising kids on phones is actually not good for the kids. And guess what? Everyone sees it. So wherever I go, you know, I'm talking to a journalist, they say, yeah, I see my own kids. So I am pushing on open doors here. Oh, the solutions. I hope we'll talk about the solutions that I proposed. They're so easy to do if we act together. So there's been extraordinary enthusiasm.

People are like, yes, let's start today. I've never seen anything like it.

Jesse

Yeah, well, we'll get to solutions and I'm sure people will be very interested. I'm talking to Jonathan Haidt. His new book is called the Anxious how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. And I just wanted to stop briefly at act two because act one is the rise of the smartphone, and then act two is the decline of the play based childhood. And how significant is that? And what do you mean by that?

Jonathan

Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up because everyone's focused on the phones. That's the big thing that we're all upset by. But the story that I tell in the book, actually, you got the right two acts, but just in the reverse order. So the story that I tell in the book is that it's a tragedy in two acts, and act one is the decline of the play based childhood. So all of us in all of our countries, pretty much, were out playing by the time were eight. We were running around. You'd come back at dinner time, there was no supervision. And that's how kids learn to be self supervising. That's how they learn to manage risk. That's how they learn to cooperate, to compete. So free play, unsupervised free play is a biological necessity.

All mammal young creatures need to play to wire up their brains. Well, in the United States and also in Canada and the UK, beginning in the nineties, we all start freaking out about child abduction and child sexual abuse, so we stop letting our kids out. Now, as far as I can tell, I was in New Zealand. I had a wonderful time in New Zealand in 2019. And you have the great distinction in your country of being the only anglosphere country that seems to still allow children to climb trees everywhere else. It's forbidden, you know? You know, just, we're so afraid. So New Zealanders, I think, are the, you know, you do the best job of actually letting children out, even in this day and age, actually. But you tell me, actually, is that still going on after COVID? Do you still see eight year olds out playing on the street, or is that a thing of the past?

Jesse

Yeah, it's a great question. I don't feel like i could speak for the rest of the country. My kids still climb trees and still love it.

Jonathan

Okay, so what do we do? So wait, so all that is really important. And now, at least in the other English speaking countries, we crack down on childhood. We don't let kids toughen, we don't let them develop their antifragile nature. And then, but their mental health didn't actually decline before 2010. It's then when the smartphone and social media come sweeping, and that's when we see the collapse of mental health. Now, I think both acts are essential, but actually, in New Zealand, as in Scandinavia, you do actually still let your kids out. So I think when you move to a life online, it's bad, even if you had a free range childhood with a lot of free play. Oh, in fact, I was just on the phone with a journalist in Finland, and I said, you let your kids out, right?

And she said, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, we let them out from a very young age, but they walk out the door and they're just staring at their phone while they're walking. So I think when your kid adopts a phone based life, that is going to push out most of everything else. It's going to push. They're not going to be on it for two or 3 hours a day. The average in the US is about eight or 9 hours a day. And half of our kids say they're online almost constantly. They're always checking in, even if they appear to be talking to you. So the phone based life appears to mess kids up even if you still let them climb trees.

Jesse

Our new government, elected end of last year, was elected on a pledge to remove cell phones from schools in New Zealand …

Jonathan

Oh, thank God. Yes.

Jesse
Yeah. But I know you have thoughts on the right way to do that. There are certain ways of banning phones in schools that have little effect.

Jonathan

Yes. And so I hope your listeners here, if you have children in school, I hope you'll listen to this very carefully. If your school says it's banning phones, don't believe them until you find out what they're doing. Because what most schools say in America and in Britain, there was just a report from policy exchange on this. They say, oh, yeah, we ban school. We ban phones. Yeah. We say you're not allowed to take out your phone during class. Really? So you've got a whole generation of kids that are as addicted to their phones as heroin addicts are to their needles. And you're saying, just keep it in your pocket. Just don't shoot up during class. Wait until in between classes to shoot up. And of course, a lot of kids can't do that.

Jonathan

So the kids are texting during class, they're watching porn during class. So a ban on using the phone in class is not a ban. Our goal here is phone free schools. Our goal here is when the kid comes to school, they put their phone in a special phone lock or a small locker. They have the key or they put it into a yonder pouch, which is a lockable magnetic pouch. They keep it with them, but they can't get to it until the end of the day. Only those two methods give all kids six or 7 hours a day where they can actually be present. They can actually talk to the person next to them at lunch or in the hallway between classes. When schools go phone free in the US, the response is always the same. It's amazing.

People say they hear laughter in the hallways again because otherwise you just get zombies checking their phones between classes. So I'm so glad that New Zealand is mandating this, but you have to check on the implementation. Only phone lockers or yonder pouches count as phone free.

Jesse

What about in school bags? Okay?

Jonathan

No, no, that's better than nothing. The school bag is better than nothing. But what the policy exchange report found is that when you use a school bag policy, you have a lot more enforcement violations, you have a lot more phone confiscation. So the teachers have to play phone police the kids. You know, one teacher at school said, boy, kids go to the bathroom a lot more often now than they used to. The kids are going to find if it's in their backpack, they will find a way to use it. And as long as anyone is texting or posting, then they all have to check because they don't want to be left out.

Jonathan

So, you know, backpack policy, if it's rigidly enforced, I have heard some schools have had good luck with it, but you have to be so rigid and strict, and it's just much harder. So I really urge phone lockers or lockable pouches.

Jesse

Solutions. Other than phone free schools, what should we do?

Jonathan

So there are four simple norms that we can do even if we don't get legislative support. They all have to do with breaking us out of the collective action problem. Why does every kid feel they need a smartphone when they're ten years old? Well, because all the other ten year olds have it, so we have to. It's very hard to be the one parent who says, no, you're not getting a phone, you're not getting Instagram, even though everyone else has it. That's very painful for the kid. So here are the four norms. Norm. Number one, no smartphone before, well, high school in the United States. I'm not sure where your break is. We have to get it out of middle school. Early puberty is the most important part time to guard.

So age 11, 12, 13, we have to really keep it away from kids until they're a little further along in puberty. So, in the US, no smartphone before high school. Or let's say age 14, no social media until 16. Social media is not fit for minors. It's full of videos of murder and beheadings, hardcore sex, and horrible animal cruelty. It's just not appropriate for children. So even though I think it should be 18, but as a norm that we can possibly all meet, I think 16 is a reasonable compromise. So no social media, no TikTok or Instagram, no accounts. You can't open an account until you're 16. And then the third is phone free schools, which we've discussed. And then the fourth is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

Jonathan

So that means giving kids a more of a free range childhood, giving them more errands, more tasks. Gen Z kids born after 1996, they feel really useless. They respond strongly to statements like, I feel that my life has no purpose. There were very low levels of agreement with that before 2010, but after 2012, those go way up. Our kids are not rooted in the real world anymore. They want to feel useful, they want to have responsibility, they want to have excitement, they want to be outside, they want to be with their friends. Let's let them do that.

Jesse

I just want to specifically mention Snapchat, because I understand they ran an ad during the Super bowl saying, hey, use us we're the safe social media, and I know a lot of my children's friends at school use that. What's your view on that particular social media?

Jonathan

Yeah. Oh, that's very sneaky marketing of them. Snapchat is absolutely social media. A lot of bad stuff happens on it. So, like all of these platforms, when they begin, they are usually pretty nice, but then what happens is, because they're all built with no real immune system, they allow anonymous strangers to interact with your child. All of them. So even though Snapchat, I thought, I used to think, was okay, and I was open to my children getting it when they turned 13 or so, from things I've learned recently, I think Snapchat is also bad. Now, it doesn't hurt most kids. So I want to make it clear most kids have a reasonable. Some kids enjoy it, but it's basically just texting, plus photographs. Oh, plus a bunch of other programs that let you interact with total strangers. Oh, and the photos are disappearing.

Why is that? What's kind of ideal for drug deals and sex. Sex photos. So a lot of pedophilia, a lot of sexual predators, they start on Instagram. That's where they've moved to. They're not on playground. They're not at playgrounds watching your kid, they're on Instagram. But then they often move to Snapchat because it's so good for communicating with kids that they're grooming. So a lot, even though most kids don't get harmed by Snapchat, a lot of them get harmed very severely. Sextortion rings, all sorts of terrible things happen. So I'm now very anti Snapchat. It's not as bad as Instagram or TikTok. Those are the two worst. But I think Snapchat, I don't think Snapchat's appropriate for minors either. Certainly not for under 16.

Jesse

Do you understand the pressure parents feel from their kids when their child is the only one or the only one of a couple who don't have smartphones at the age of eleven or twelve? And do you understand that they eventually do cave and say, all right, but look, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna monitor your use. So we're gonna have the best of both worlds. You get a smartphone, and I'm gonna make sure that you're using it properly.

Jonathan

Not only do I understand it, I have lived it. When each of my children entered middle school, which is about age eleven, in the United States, they each said, everyone is on Instagram. Can I have an Instagram account. I said, no. And that did cut them off somewhat. Although my daughter in 7th grade then said, dad, I'm glad you did that, because the Instagram girls are so stupid, she could see that it makes them stupid and shallow and materialistic. So, yes, I have seen it, and it is the centerpiece of my book. The whole point of my book is that we're in a giant set of collective action traps, which are just what you said, which is if anyone tries to escape, they're putting a cost on their child. Their child is now cut off.

And so that's why I wrote the whole fourth part of the book, is, how do we escape from a collective action trap? Collectively, we do it together. So, ideally, well, so the government mandating phone free schools is a great example that gets the school, that gets everyone out of the collective action trap of having your phone in school. And what I'm advocating is if governments won't raise the age for social media to 16, which is what I think they should do, if they won't do that, and the UK might do it, the UK is actually pushing ahead on age verification. But in the meantime, parents can just communicate with the parents of their kids friends.

All of us are on a text thread with the parents of our kids friends because, oh, I'll pick them up from the birthday party, or let's all have them eat at your house. So we're all communicating with the parents of our kids friends anyway. So I'm just saying, just coordinate with them. Say, hey, I heard this American psychologist who says that we should wait until 14 to give our kids smartphones. We're thinking of doing that in our family. Are you? Gameplay. And I guarantee you most of them will be. You know, if you have kids who are seven, eight, nine, every parent of kids in that age is worried about this. They're thinking about it. Most of them want to wait, but they feel they can't because no one else is waiting. Well, if we all wait, then it's easy. If even half of us wait, it's easy.

Jesse

And for all those parents who say, yeah, I'm keen, there'll be others who say, look, life wouldn't work if my child didn't have a smartphone. You know, what if their rehearsal is canceled? What if they get lost? What if, what if.

Jonathan

Well, and a flip phone wouldn't work? Like, why aren't they able to communicate with a child with a flip phone or a phone? What, I don't understand.

Jesse

Finally, I just want to ask you. Jonathan, how many times have you been sent the meme of Grampa Simpson with the caption old man yells at cloud? Cause that sort of characterises a lot of the pushback you've received.

Jonathan

Yeah, that's about the strongest argument they have, is that, yes, it's true, I did just turn 60 and I have gray hair. So that is that. Yeah, that's the main argument that I get. And that's easy to respond to because I just say, yeah, I am 60. But you know what? If you have another explanation for why kids all around the world are becoming depressed and anxious and self harming and suicidal, let's have you take a crack at this.

Jesse

Great to chat to you. Thanks so much. Congratulations on the book.

Jonathan

Oh, thanks. Thanks so much. Pleasure talking with you. And I hope to come back to New Zealand sometime next year. I love the country and I'd love to see kids climbing trees.