Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist: We're at a tipping point for kids and technology

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:37Hello, I'm BBC presenter Amol Rajan and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention. We have never seen a people so united. Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey. Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat me like I'm not. We're more popular than populism. For this interview, I met Professor Jonathan Haidt. He's the American social psychologist whose publication in 2024 of The Anxious Generation changed the global conversation around social media and its impact on young people.

1:24You're going to hear how Jonathan Haidt links phone use with a sharp decline in children's mental health and how he also believes the widespread introduction of online technology and devices in schools was a mistake. You put a multifunction device on a kid's desk. You ask them to do a math thing. You ask them to do their homework here. What do they do? Mostly video games and short videos. That's what they do. OK, we put controls on it. They can't do that. Yeah, but then it's a cat and mouse game forever. Then they take the laptop home and parents who are trying to keep a lid on it, the kid has everything on their school computer.

1:59We're asking kids to sit in class and learn. And they have the most incredibly tempting devices ever. It was a huge mistake to put kids on devices. Look, when they're 17, 15, of course they need to use the technology. When they're 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, no. They need to learn to write, to read, to read books. The technology is devastating. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Professor Jonathan Haidt. There is a public health disaster. There is an education disaster. It all can be traced to the same cause, which is the change technology has made in our kids' childhood. Is your sense that we're at something of a global turning point when it comes to kids and technology?

2:43Oh, we are absolutely at a tipping point. It's so exciting. And I only figured it out this morning, like, exactly why. when law gets ahead of public opinion by a lot. Like if you're going to ban or criminalize something that the people desperately are using or want, you're going to have a rebellion. So that's a problem, okay? And so political leaders in your country and my country everywhere, they were reluctant to act on this because they thought they were getting ahead of public opinion. But what the public opinion surveys show very, very clearly is that all around the world, wherever there are parents with children, with phones, family life has become a constant fight.

3:21We're all sick of it. We all see what's happened to our kids. Public opinion desperately wants an under 16 ban. Parents support it. And not only parents support it, young adults support it. The people who just went through this, they also say ban it for under 16s. This was really bad for us. What I'm saying is politicians thought that they were getting way out ahead of public opinion, and therefore they were afraid to do it. They were moving slowly. But in the last couple of weeks, I think there's been a global understanding that, wait a second, the politicians are way behind the public. The public is calling out for this.

3:53And every place that's done surveys in France, America, Britain, what they always find is that there's almost no difference between the left and the right or the north and the south or the rich and the poor. We're all suffering from this. Why has it not happened? So it's only around maybe 23, 24 that we begin to realize, wait, there's something really serious happening to our kids. It's not just their mental health is declining and suicide is rising. It's that test scores are going down in many countries. So something big is going wrong. And also during this time, Meta in particular, they have a giant PR department.

4:29They are doing their job, which is to manipulate public sentiment, to make it seem as though, oh, the research is so confusing and it's on all sides. And lots of organizations think that social media can be helpful for kids. So I think Meta tried to slow things down and confuse things. They were able to block the one bill we had in the US, the Kids Online Safety Act. Meta basically blocked it with its influence on the Republican Party and Congress. By lobbying. By lobbying, yeah. So Meta is the parent company of Facebook. Facebook, Instagram, yeah. Of Instagram and indeed WhatsApp. I want, in a spirit of fairness and fullness, to put Meta's response to you.

5:04And you've had lots of that. Oh, good. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've had lots of, well, let's be fair in saying that you've had scientists and Meta come at you in various ways. And you've, a spirit of, I think, academic inquiry and humility countered them. Meta say, recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies. But this oversimplifies a serious issue. Clinicians and researchers find that mental health is a deeply complex and multifaceted issue and trends regarding teens well-being aren't clear cut or universal.

5:36Narrowing the challenges faced by teens to a single factor ignores the scientific research and the many stresses impacting young people today, like academic pressure, school safety, socioeconomic challenges and substance abuse. What's the issue you're addressing? So the issue, the central issue of the academic debate is just one of the many harmful outcomes. It is depression and anxiety, what we call internalizing disorders. And so my argument has been, wow, you look at the girls who are spending a lot of time on social media and they're two to three times more depressed or anxious than girls who have light usage or often no usage.

6:10So that's a correlation. OK. There's also an historical correlation, which is mental illness rates were at a certain level in the 90s, at least in American and British data. It's fairly flat in the 90s, the early 2000s, up to 2010, 2011. There's no sign of any real change. And all of a sudden, around 2012, in both of our countries, those numbers go shooting up very sharply for girls and a little more gradually for boys. So that's also a correlation. Something has happened. That's a historical correlation. Something has happened since 2012, 2013. That's right. Something big has happened and something has happened which is getting progressively worse.

6:41That's right. And the more people do that thing, the more it's getting worse on certain very measurable indices. One is depression, anxiety. Another is, how can I put this, lack of intelligence or stupidity. We are getting less smart. Why? Yes. So I can't prove it, but I believe what's happening, and it fits the timing perfectly, is in the US, it was around 2014, 2015, that we put Chromebooks and iPads on everyone's desk. This was a goal of education policy. It was called one-to-one devices. The rich kids all have computers. We've got to raise money, philanthropy. We've got to get a computer on every kid's desk because this will be an equity move.

7:18This will improve equity, we thought. What actually happens? You put a multifunction device on a kid's desk. You ask them to do a math thing. You ask them to do their homework here. What do they do? Mostly video games and short videos. That's what they do. Okay, we put controls on it. They can't do that. Yeah, but then it's a cat and mouse game forever. A nightmare for parents. That's right, because then they take the laptop home and parents who are trying to keep a lid on it, the kid has everything on their school computer. We're asking kids to sit in class and learn, and they have the most incredibly tempting devices ever.

7:51And a lot of them are addicted to specific apps, which they can get. UNESCO has been studying this for a while. And even in 2023, they put out a report basically saying all this digital ed tech, all these computers to help in education, they have some uses. Like, you know, remote villages in India now can have a connection. So there is some use. But when you put a device on a kid's desk, what they said was the distraction effects generally counteract any possible benefits. Look at what Sweden and Denmark have done. Sweden, they were among the first to embrace the new technology to say, oh, this is the modern way.

8:23Let's get rid of paper and pencil. Get rid of books. Let's do everything online. So they did that before even the United States. Beginning last year, the Swedes began saying, this was a huge mistake. We're going back to paper and pencil, back to books. Let's rip out the technology, especially from the earlier, the early grades, from primaries. Oh, they said that. Yeah. And Denmark, just a week or two ago, Denmark said, we're following, we're doing the same thing. It was a huge mistake to put kids on devices. Look, when they're 17, 15, of course they need to use the technology. When they're 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, no.

8:50They need to learn to write, to read, to read books. The technology is devastating. And we know that, or I should say that confirms it, because what do the people do who made the technology? Where do they send their kids? And as many people know, many of them send their kids to what's called the Waldorf School or other similar schools that promise no technology in the classroom. They know that kids can't learn if they have a multifunction device in front of them. So they want your kids to have one, but they don't let their kids have one. You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service with me, Amal Rajan, and Professor Jonathan Haidt.

9:27America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

10:01what's so interesting about jonathan hight coming past our studio is that he's recently been in davos for the world economic forum where he's been meeting global leaders like emmanuel macron and after this recording he's on his way to the heart of british government 10 downing street where he's meeting the health secretary where's treating and other very senior members of the british government. He is a person, an academic, a social psychologist who feels that his time has come. And it's very interesting that we were speaking shortly after France and Spain said that they were looking at Australia and the ban there on social media for teenagers.

10:35And indeed, as the conversation in the UK here in Britain seems to be moving slowly towards a much tougher approach to these technology companies. Let me put to you what the technology companies themselves say it's important that we reflect their point of view here and a meta spokesperson said to us we agree with jonathan height that keeping teens safe online is critical that's why we've made meaningful changes like teen accounts to limit who can contact teens what they see and their time on our apps however two recent independent large-scale studies in the uk and australia including one from oxford showed the complexity of teen mental health and that many factors beyond social media influence it.

11:17Any serious conversation should reflect all the evidence and social media's positive role for teens. Friendship, skill building and finding community. Snapchat and TikTok were also approached for comment. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Professor Jonathan Haidt. So we've talked about the evidence around depression and anxiety. We've talked about the evidence around stupidity, falling IQ scores. I want to talk about something else, which is loneliness. And if we look at loneliness now, millions and millions and millions of people in the UK say, A, that they're lonely, B, that they're lonelier than they used to be.

11:48But the really interesting thing, and I'm sure the evidence in America is consistent with this, is that loneliness used to be a phenomenon of the very old. It's increasingly a phenomenon of the young. And could it be that this thing that happened in 2012 and onwards, which led to specific consistent rises in depression and anxiety, which also has led possibly to lower test scores, could it be that technology is also driving loneliness? Absolutely. I think there's no doubt about that. And here I just want to briefly walk you through, walk listeners through. The key period is 2010 to 2015. And many listeners will remember those periods.

12:26In 2010, the iPhone had come out, but most people didn't have it. And teens, very few teens had one in 2010. They had flip phones. They had the Motorola Razr. It was kind of cool. And what could you do? You could call your friends and family. You could text them and you could play a game called Snake. And that was it. That was it. It was a communication device. And the millennial's mental health was fine. And so if you are a millennial, it means you finished puberty by 2010, 2012. You were done with puberty and you went through puberty on a brick phone or a flip phone, a basic phone. Okay, what happens if you're born, say, in the year 2000, you're Gen Z?

13:00So you hit puberty right around, say, 2012. That's the year that Facebook buys Instagram. That's two years after the front-facing camera came out. 2012 is the pivotal year when in America we flip from mostly brick phones to mostly smartphones. So by 2015, almost all teens have a smartphone with a front-facing camera and Instagram and other apps, unlimited texting, unlimited data. And now, especially for the girls, it warps their life much more quickly. And now for the girls, it's all this. It's all being a brand manager all the time. It's all constant social comparison. And that's why we see this incredibly sharp elbow for the girls.

13:36No trend at all in rates of self-harm or depression or anxiety. No trend at all. And then all of a sudden, like a hockey stick. So why do you say that it goes beyond correlation to causation? Because I should say the spirit of seriousness that Metta would say that you have these deep, deep trends in depression, anxiety, which may be explained by other factors like better understanding what depression and anxiety are, a greater willingness in society to medicalise what might be everyday problems. Why do you go beyond that to say actually that smartphones and social media is a technology which is a determinant that is driving and that is causing it?

14:08So first, we need to distinguish between two very different questions. One is the historical trends question. Why does it happen? And if it just happened in the United States, there could be all kinds of theories, something about Obama, something about changing insurance criteria. But it was when we discovered that the exact same thing is happening in Canada, the UK, Australia, Scandinavia, and now we know the decline of happiness among young is global. When it's happening everywhere at the same time, no one has come up with an alternate explanation other than the technological change that we just discussed.

14:38But what parents really care about, what legislators really care about is the product safety question. Here we have the most widely used consumer product among young people. It's universally used. It's been linked, at least correlated with all kinds of terrible things happening. And if it was any other consumer product, it would have been banned long ago. So let's look at the evidence that this widely used consumer product is causing harms. And so what we did was we gathered all the evidence and we realized it's not just experiments and correlational studies. There are different lines of evidence that are all evidence of causality.

15:13So imagine that a woman is mugged. A man comes up and he punches her and he takes her wallet and he runs off. How do we prove that he did it? Well, the woman goes to the police and she says, he did this to me. Okay. Is that proof? She could be lying, but that is evidence. What do we have with social media? Survey the kids. What do they say? Young adults have very negative use of social media. The surveys show they think it does more harm than good. About 20 to 30 percent say it harmed their own mental health. So you've got the victim, it's himself or herself is saying he did it. Now, maybe they're wrong.

15:51What do we do? We bring in witnesses. Suppose there are a bunch of bystanders who say, I, you know, I saw it. I saw him punch her. That's evidence. So who are the witnesses? The parents, the teachers, the psychotherapists, the psychiatrists, everybody working with kids, they're witnesses. What do they say? Surveys of all of them show they blame social media. It's very hard. You can't find a group that works with kids that has a positive view of social media. Okay. So now let's suppose it's a court case. The prosecutor called the victim up, called the witnesses up. And now the prosecutor says, and here I present you text messages that this guy had with his friend, where he said, I'm going to mug this girl at three o 'clock.

16:31And then later, I mugged her at three o 'clock. We have so many internal emails and reports and studies from within Meta, Snap and TikTok. We found 28 different experiments described in the material that's come out from whistleblowers and lawsuits. So a lot of it from Meta. I mean, Meta say that this has been selectively cited and that the full picture is not one of causality. But you would say go and read it for yourself is pretty abundant. Read it for yourself. And if Metta has 50 studies proving the benefits, let them publish them. Let them say if they say we cherry picked, we took everything we could find.

17:04Let them publish the evidence of benefit. I'm waiting. And I wonder if in this context, I could raise developmental psychologist Candice Hodges, professor at University of California, Irvine and Duke University. And I should say, you really engage with your critics. You're not you're not one to shy away. Candice Rogers wrote a review of your book in Nature where she said, first, this book is going to sell a lot of copies because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book's repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.

17:40Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental health crisis in young people. Well, what Candice says in that article is that the real causes are poverty, racism and inequality. Those do make you at higher risk for mental illness. Did those suddenly radically increase in 2012 in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Europe? I don't think so. So I keep saying, OK, if you have an explanation for why the historical trends stuff, why did it go up so much? You've got to come up with another explanation for what changed.

18:14And her explanation doesn't fit at all. I don't think there's anyone that really is engaged with your work that could argue that you're against technology full stop. I think you celebrate these extraordinary machines. I think you recognize the engineering power that's behind them. But the other thing is, I think there's a sort of spirit of your work, which is just to let children be children. And that most human societies have flourished on the understanding that there are some things kids should not be allowed to do up until a certain point. That's right. And it's up to parents to say that you can do that, just not yet.

18:43That's right. Technology makes things easy for us. It makes us more efficient. Children need to do hard things thousands and thousands of times. They need to do hard social things thousands and thousands of times. They need to start conversations and be rebuffed, but not wilt and run away. They need to learn how to flirt with whatever sex they're attracted to. This is hard work. And when they have a phone, they don't have to do it. They don't have to ask anyone for help or information. They don't have to approach anyone in person. They can go on dating apps when they're older. So the technology makes things easy, but you don't want to make everything easy for your child.

19:16You want your child to struggle and learn. That's how they learn. You've got a message for politicians. What's your message for children? Listen to the older teenagers. listen to Gen Z and the degree of regret, the way they say, I lost my childhood. What we're saying is two simple principles. One, use technology as a tool. Don't let technology use you. So we're not saying, you know, grow up with sticks and stones only. And the other is fill your life with real friendship, freedom and fun. Because once you go on social media, you're going to have hundreds and hundreds of friends. But if you have hundreds of friends, you have very few real friends, very few close friends.

19:50What's your message to parents and basic guidelines? Yeah. So let me give you two principles here. So the first principle, this is the one I wish I'd done, is no screens of any kind in bedrooms ever. Now, you can start that. When your kids are young, you can start that. And you can have a TV in the common room or family room or kitchen. You can have a computer. There are all kinds of reasons why they might use those. But you say no screens in the bedroom. When I was a kid, the idea that you'd have a TV in your bedroom was insane because you'd watch it all the time. You might have to make an exception when they have a lot of homework and they need to take their laptop in for two hours in the evening when they're 12, 13, whatever.

20:24But if you start with that rule, your life's going to be a lot better, a lot less conflict. So that's one. The second is let's talk about good screen time versus bad screen time. It's actually very simple. Here's what's good. Stories. Stories are good because humans are storytelling animals. Humans have always raised their kids in a sea of stories inherited from previous generations with some modification. our brains are like llms our brains are like our they are neural networks they need lots of patterns and fiction stories myths are the fastest way that we tune up along with real experience and travel things like that so your kid needs a lot of that to get smart so what do you think about doing movie night with your kids does that seem like a healthy thing or is that screen time i've erred on the side of quite enjoying it yes you're right and and partly because it's just a communal experience but also that sense that they can actually sustain attention yes you got it that's the key.

21:16Those are the two endpoints. So watching a good story, a long story, ideally an hour or longer, teaches skills of attention about characters in a moral world that have dilemmas, teaches moral development. Watching it socially improves relationships. So all that's good. Okay. The opposite is fragmenting time. The worst thing you can do is hand your kid a touchscreen device because a touchscreen device is a little Skinner box. Stimulus, dopamine, response, reward, repeat over and over again. And it mostly ends at short videos. I just want to put one thought to you about where this all goes. The argument against a social media ban for under 16s that I hear most often, sometimes from surprising places, is that if you do that, what you end up really in practice doing is sending kids to darker corners of the internet.

22:08And if you move them away from regulated big platforms of the kinds that we've talked of here, you'll end up sending them to kind of you know the old school chat rooms and dark places where cyberbullying is more prevalent and it's a problem of implementation what do you say to that argument so this assumes that the kids are desperate to be on social media and if you block them from some they're going to find others and what we see over and over again is what the kids are desperate about is not being the only one out they're desperate to not be left out so it's too soon to know exactly what's happening in australia but i can tell you this much i had a good long talk with Jeff Hancock from the Stanford Social Media Lab.

22:42He is the psychologist who's been selected to be in charge of the evaluation of what's happening in Australia. And he told me last week, just a quick update in Australia, Julie Inman Grant, their eSafety Commissioner, reported that Australia removed something like 4.7 million accounts from Australia's 2.5 million kids in that range. So the platforms have complied. That's going down. More accounts than children. Okay. So now then how do the kids adapt? Now, if you're a 14-year-old who's been kicked off, you're going to be mad and you're going to say, well, I'm going to use a VPN. And sure enough, VPN use spiked at first.

23:18But what Jeff told me is it went way up and then it went back down to where it was. because the damnable thing about social media on a smartphone is that the kids can use it literally 500 times a day. Whenever there's five seconds down, they take it out. But if every time they take it out, they have to load up the VPN and then go on, that's a little bit of friction. A little bit of friction and they find something else.