#jon haidt

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Jon Haidt: As I said, if you sacralize your political ideology's heroes, you cannot think straight, and this is where we are in the sciences.

It's obvious that if you're a social conservative, Evangelical, young Earther creationist, you probably shouldn't be going into a PhD program in biology or geology, okay. It's just going to be really hard for you to deal with reality if you deny evolution and the age of the Earth, okay. You shouldn't go into American history if you say America is the greatest country on Earth and it simply cannot have committed war crimes. We just don't do that. I mean that's-- that should be a disqualification.

But what about on the left? Suppose you had students coming in who deny that IQ matters. Not anymore, but for decades it's just very uncomfortable, because there are race differences in IQ, the general view is IQ is a bad test, it doesn't measure, it doesn't matter, we can't allow that IQ matters. Because IQ is heritable, we can't allow that heritability matters. Environment has to be everything. The left has always believed that environment can overcome everything else so, can you do social science if you deny heritability, you think everything is environment when it isn't?

The left is full of sex difference deniers. Hormones are fine for other animals, hormones affect behavior in other animals, but how sexist of you to suggest that male and female differences could in any way be due to the fact that they exposed to different hormones prenatally? That just is ruled out of bounds. Now it's not that the left denies evolution. That's fine for other animals. But evolutionary psychology? Well, that's almost sexist and racist. No, evolution didn't shape human beings.

And last, the biggest area in my field is the study of stereotypes and prejudice. And we're trying-- it's an important social problem but we try to solve it while not allowing anybody to even mention the largest cause of stereotypes and prejudice. There is a small research literature showing that the reason why people hold stereotypes is because they're accurate. Most stereotypes do correspond to some measurable, observable fact about the environment. Now, there are often misinterpretations, the stereotype often lingers long after the reality changes, so I'm not saying the stereotypes are perfectly accurate. But I'm saying a big part of the story is that people are really good at detecting differences between groups. We're intuitive Baysians. We pick up frequencies. You can't stop the brain from doing this. So, suppose you had a whole group of people coming into social psychology who were the equivalent of young Earth creationists, who say, "I'm going to study stereotyping and prejudice, but I'm going to just rule in advance that there are no differences between groups. And now I'm going to study what's left." That's where we are.

So, my point is that all groups value the truth, okay. Every ideological group believes it values the truth. All groups hold something sacred. And if you hold something sacred then, as I've said, no trade-offs, no nuance. That means that your sacred values are going to conflict with the truth. And when that happens, all groups are the same. They throw truth under the bus and they go with their sacred values. And that's where we are.

So, I hope I've shown you that political homogeneity, now that we no longer have conservatives in some academic Fields, it's a problem. It's bad for our science, we need to clean up our act. We talk a lot about the value of diversity; intellectual diversity is the most important kind of diversity there could be.

--

Full lecture: 2013 Boyarsky Lecture by Jonathan Haidt, PhD

==

What he's describing is faith. Beliefs based on faith. If you think everything is "a social construct" - such as that it's fine for monkeys to choose sex-typical toys and engage in sex-typical activities, but "I aIn'T nO mOnKeY!!1!" - even if you're an atheist, you're dealing in faith.

[is-this-really--life]

from On The Degrading Effects of Online Life by Jon Haidt and Freya India

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

What we’ve learned about Gen Z’s mental health crisis

Nine posts from 2023 that tell the story so far

We launched the After Babel Substack eleven months ago, on Feb 1, 2023. We’ll have a post next February reflecting on our first year and looking ahead to our second. In this post, we highlight a few of our 31 posts that readers seemed to enjoy most, and that we believe are the most essential readings for those following this Substack. 

The central question animating the After Babel Substack is this: Why does it feel like everything has been going haywire since the early 2010s, and what role does digital technology play in causing this social and epistemic chaos? We explore the chaos in two primary domains: adolescent mental health (which has been our focus this year, as we worked on The Anxious Generation), and liberal democracy (which will become increasingly important in late 2024, as we begin to work on the second part of the Babel project, a book tentatively titled Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share). 

The main line of our work so far can be summarized like this: We have shown that there is an adolescent mental health crisis and it was caused primarily by the rapid rewiring of childhood in the early 2010s, from play-based to phone-based. It hit many countries at the same time and it is hitting boys as well as girls, although with substantial gender differences.

Here is that main line in five posts, with a figure from each post:

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic. Here’s the Evidence. By Jon Haidt

This post frames the research debate and then summarizes the empirical evidence showing that heavy social media usage is a major cause, not just a correlate, of adolescent mental illness and suffering. (I also wrote a response to skeptics who critiqued this post.)

Figure 1. Percent of UK adolescents with “clinically relevant depressive symptoms” by hours per weekday of social media use. Haidt and Twenge created this graph from the data given in Table 2 of Kelly, Zilanawala, Booker, & Sacker (2019).

Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of them Work. By Jean Twenge 

Jean Twenge, who was among the first to diagnose the problem in 2017, raises 13 alternative theories that we often hear and shows why they don’t fit the facts. They certainly can’t explain why the crisis hit so many countries in the years around 2013. Figure 2 shows Twenge’s response to alternative #4, that it was caused by the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. It wasn’t:

Figure 2. Technology adoption, teen depression, and national unemployment, 2006-2019. Sources: National Survey of Drug Use and Health, Monitoring the Future, Pew Research Center, Bureau of Labor Statistics. See also Figure 6.39 in Generations.

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere. By Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt

This is Zach’s first post in a series exploring the crucial question: Did the adolescent mental health crisis just arise in the U.S., which would guide us to investigate causes within American society? Or did it happen in many other countries at the same time, which would point us to causes with transnational reach, such as digital technology? The answer so far: It hit big in countries that are wealthy and individualistic, such as all five Anglosphere nations. Part 2 shows the same trends in the five Nordic nations. A subsequent post shows that the international problems go beyond depression and anxiety—Gen Z girls’ suicide rates are up across the Anglosphere. (Zach is currently working on a post showing that the worsening trends are widespread across Western Europe).

Figure 3. Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in all five Anglosphere countries, especially for girls. For data on all sources, and larger versions of the graphs, see Rausch and Haidt (2023).

Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest. By Jon Haidt

This post picks up the analysis offered in The Coddling of the American Mind, whose subtitle is “How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.” The post shows how three very bad ideas were nurtured on Tumblr, around 2013, and then escaped into progressive online communities (and ultimately into progressive real-world communities such as university campuses), leading to a sharp rise in signs of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness that was most pronounced in young women on the left. Just as Greg Lukianoff had predicted, these ideas amounted to performing “reverse CBT” on those who embraced them.

Figure 4. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study, e.g., “Sometimes I think I am no good at all,” and “I feel that my life is not very useful.” The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree). 

Why I am Increasingly Worried About Boys, Too. By Jon Haidt

If you only look at published studies on social media and mental health, you’ll conclude that this is mostly a girl problem. Girls use social media more than boys and are more affected by it. But as Zach assembled all the research we could find about boys’ mental health, we found that boys are suffering just as much as girls, though in different ways. Boys’ sense of meaning and purpose collapsed as they retreated from the ever less appealing real world into an ever more immersive and addictive virtual world of video games, porn, social media, and online forums.

Figure 5. Percent of U.S. 12th graders who agreed with the statement: “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” Source: Monitoring the Future 1977-2021, 2-Year Buckets, Weighted).

[scientificphilosopher]

Will Schoder shows how Mr. Rogers effectively uses ethos, pathos, and logos to persuade his interlocutors. Pulling from ancient wisdom and modern psychology, this video essay looks at thinkers such as Aristotle, Daniel Kahneman, and Jon Haidt. A key insight from modern psychology is that people are not nearly as rational or responsive to reasons as we like to think we are. Accordingly, if we hope to persuade people in arguments, we must learn to speak to people’s emotions just as much as we need to speak to people’s intellect. 

[theemotionmachine]

In times of great political divide, this book provides a very important perspective if we ever want any chance at achieving peace or cooperation. 

No matter how you feel about current political events, this is an absolute must read - I’ve been recommending it to people constantly.

Check it out:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion 

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Changes in UK children’s daily time use, based on Mullan (2019). From After Babel.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Marshall McLuhan on Why Content Moderation is a Red Herring

Those senate hearings were conducted within the “numb stance of the technological idiot”

Many things disturbed me while watching those recent U.S. Senate hearings on whether social media platforms are promoting or at least allowing sexual solicitation of minors, child porn, drug sales, bullying, and content promoting eating disorders and suicide. We saw parents holding up photographs of their dead children, some driven to suicide by mass shaming, or the fear of it when children are sextorted (that is, tricked into sending photographs of themselves fully or partially naked by criminals who then demand money, repeatedly, to not post the photographs online). 

“How can you do this to our children?” the senators asked, in a variety of ways. The response from the social media executives was usually some version of “But Senator, we spend X billion dollars each year to create industry-leading tools to find and remove such content.” That phrase, “industry-leading,” was used six times during the hearing; five times by Mark Zuckerberg, and once by Shou Chew from TikTok.

But as I watched the hearing, I kept thinking about how content moderation is to some extent a red herring, a distraction from larger issues. Yes, it must be done and done better, but even if these platforms could someday remove 95% of harmful content, the platforms will still be harmful to kids. The discussion of online harms can’t just be about making an adolescent’s time on Instagram safer, not even 95% safer, because so many of the harms I describe in The Anxious Generation are not caused by bad content. They are caused by a change in the nature of childhood when kids begin to spend many hours each day scrolling, posting, and commenting. Even if Instagram could remove 100% of harmful content and leave only photos of happy girls and young women enjoying their beautiful lives, the effect on adolescent girls would still be devastating from the chronic social comparison, loss of sleep, addiction, perfectionism, and decline of time spent with their real friends in the real world. [...]

And then I came across a quote from the great media theorist Marshall McLuhan which brilliantly captured exactly why it is a red-herring to focus on content. In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan tried to explain the profound transformation of society brought about by electric communication technologies, from the telegraph and telephone through radio and TV. Electric technologies gave us a very different world from the print-based world that began when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s. McLuhan tried to explain to his readers the ways that these technologies changed people’s habits, minds, selves, and societies, but all people seemed able to think about was the explicit or implicit messages conveyed in television programs and advertisements. Does that advertisement contain a subliminal message about sex? Can’t we just regulate the content of advertisements and shows better? No, said McLuhan, you’re missing the point, because the medium is the message.

When television swept to dominance, everything (including the news and the coverage of elections) became a form of entertainment, to be consumed passively, and this changed American society and democracy in ways that are hard to articulate but surely disruptive. Here is how McLuhan put it:  

The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. 

Yes! This is the difficulty I have when I try to explain how the rapid transition from flip phones to smartphones with social media (and thousands of apps) changed childhood in harmful ways in the early 2010s. I repeatedly encounter some version of the criticism that social media is not intrinsically harmful to children because “it all depends on how kids are using it.” Many of these critics believe that we should not enforce even the current low and unenforced age limit of 13. Rather, we should help our 10-year-olds to manage Instagram, TikTok, and Snap in a better way, reading and posting healthier stuff. No! I mean, ok, that would be better than the current situation, but our kids would still have phone-based childhoods, the mental health crisis would continue to rage, and they’d still have difficulties making the transition to adulthood. The medium is the problem.

The leaders of those tech companies did all they could to keep the discussion within the “numb stance of the technological idiot.”  You can even see McLuhan’s point in Mark Zuckerberg’s famous quasi-apology to the parents of those dead kids: 

I'm sorry. Everything that you all gone through, it's terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.

In other words: We’re already the best in the business at content moderation, so I can’t promise you that we’ll do better in the future, but we’ll continue doing what we’re doing to remove harmful content from the 5 hours that your children now spend each day on social media. 

Let me be clear: there is no way to make social media safe for children by just making the content less toxic. It’s the phone-based childhood that is harming them, regardless of what they watch. Kids need to be freed from the grip of smartphones and social media, especially through early puberty. 

[agardenofdaydreams]

What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.

Jon Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind