Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media

Lex Fridman Podcast #291 – Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Jonathan Height, social psychologist at NYU and critic of the negative effects of social media on the human mind and human civilization. He gives a respectful but hard hitting response to my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, and together him and I try to figure out how we can do better, how we can lessen the amount of depression and division in the world. He has brilliantly discussed these topics in his writing, including in his book *The Codling of the American Mind* and in his recent long article in the Atlantic titled *Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid*. When Teddy Roosevelt said in his famous speech that it is not the critic who counts, he has not yet read the brilliant writing of Jonathan Height. I disagree with John on some of the details of his analysis and ideas, but both his criticism and our disagreement is essential if we are to build better and better technologies that connect us. Social media has both the power to destroy our society and to help it flourish. It's up to us to figure out how we take the letter path. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Uncruise for adventure, Notion for startups, Blinkist for non fiction, Magic for snacks and Eight Sleep for sweet sweet naps. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle. I hate those. I try to make these ad reads interesting, but if you skip them, please to check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Uncruise Adventures, small ships, cruises, sailing to Alaska, Mexico, Costa Rica, Hawaii, and so on. 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Eight Sleep currently ships within the United States of A, Canada and the United Kingdom. Enjoy your sleep. Enjoy your nap, friends. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here is Jonathan Height. So you have been thinking about the human mind for quite a long time. You wrote the happiness hypothesis, the righteous mind, the codling of the American mind, and today you are thinking you are writing a lot about social media and about democracy. So perhaps if it's okay, let's go through the thread that connects all of that work. How do we get from the very beginning to today with the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media? So I am a social psychologist, which means I study how we think about other people and how people affect our thinking. And in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I picked the topic of moral psychology and I studied how morality varied across countries. I studied in Brazil and India. And in the nineties, I began. This was like I got my PhD in nineteen ninety two, and in that decade was really when the American culture war kind of really began to blow up. And I began to notice that left and right in this country were becoming like separate countries. And you could use the tools of cultural psychology to study this split, this moral battle between left and right. So I started doing that, and I began growing alarmed in the in the early two thousands about how bad polarization was getting, and I began studying the causes of polarization. You know bringing moral psychology to bear on our political problems. And I was originally going to write a book to basically help the Democrats stop screwing up because I could see that some of my research showed people on the right understand people on the left. They know what they think. You can't grow up in America without knowing what progressives think. But here I grew up generally on the left and I had no idea what conservatives thought until I went and sought it out and started reading conservative things like National Review. So originally I wanted to actually help the Democrats to understand moral psychology so they could stop losing to George W. Bush, and I got a contract to write the righteous mind. And once I started writing it, I committed to understanding conservatives by reading the best writings not the worst, and I discovered you know what you don't understand anything until you look from multiple perspectives, and I discovered there are a lot of great social science ideas in the conservative intellectual tradition. And so and I also began to see you know what America is actually in real trouble and this is like two thousand eight two thousand nine things are really we're coming apart here. So I began to really focus my research on helping left and right understand each other and helping our democratic institutions to work better. Okay, so all this is before I had any interest in social media. You know I was on Twitter I guess like two thousand nine and you know not much didn't think about it much, and then so I am going along as a social psychologist studying this, and then everything seems to kind of blow up in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen at universities, and that's when Greg Lukianov came to me in May of twenty fourteen and said John weird stuff is happening, students are freaking out about a speaker coming to campus that they don't have to go see and they're saying it's dangerous it's violence like what is going on, and so anyway Greg's ideas about how we were teaching students to think in distorted ways that led us to write the codling of the American mind, which wasn't primarily about social media either it was about you know this sort of a rise of depression anxiety, but after that things got so much worse everywhere and that's when I began to think like well something systemically has changed something has changed about the fabric of the social universe and so ever since then I've been focused on social media. So we're going to try to sneak up to the problems and the solutions at hand from different directions. I have a lot of questions whether it's fundamentally the nature social media that's the problem, it's the decisions of various human beings that lead the social media companies that's the problem, is there still some component that's highlighted in the codling of the American mind, that's the individual psychology at play or the the way parenting and education works, to make sort of emphasize anti fragility of the human mind, as it interacts with the social media platforms and yeah the humans through the social so all that beautiful mess that should take us an hour to to to cover or maybe a couple of years yes but so let's start if it's okay, you said you wanted to challenge some of the things that Mark Zuckerberg has said in a conversation with me, what are some of the ideas he expressed that you disagree with. Okay, there are two major areas that I study. One is what is happening with teen mental health. It fell off a cliff in twenty thirteen. It was very sudden, and then the other is what is happening to our democratic and epistemic institutions. That means knowledge generating like universities journalism. So so my main areas of research where I am collecting the empirical research and trying to make sense of it is what's happened to teen mental health and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor, and then the other area is what's happening to democracies not just America and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor to the dysfunction. So I am sure we'll get to that because that's what the Atlantic article is about, but if we focus first on what's happened to teen mental health. So before I read the quotes from Mark, I'd like to just give the overview, and it is this: there is a lot of data tracking adolescents, there are self reports of how depressed, anxious, lonely. There is data on hospital admissions for self harm, there is data on suicide, and all of these things they bounce around somewhat, but they're relatively level in the early two thousands, and then all of a sudden around you know around twenty ten to twenty thirteen depending on which statistic you are looking at, all of a sudden they begin to shoot upwards, more so for girls in some cases, but on the whole it's like up for both sexes, it's just that boys have lower levels of anxiety and depression so the curve is not quite as dramatic, but what we see is not small increase it's not like oh ten percent twenty percent, no the increases are between fifty and one hundred fifty percent, depending on which group you are looking at, you know suicide for pre teen girls thank thankfully it's not very common, but it's two to three times more common now or by twenty fifteen it had doubled between twenty ten and twenty fifteen it doubled, so something is going radically wrong in the world of American preteens, and what we so as I've been studying it I found first of all it's not just America it's identical in Canada and the UK, Australia New Zealand are very similar they're just after a little delay so whatever we're looking for here but but yet it's not it's not as clear in the Germanic countries it's in continental Europe it's a little different and we can get into that when we talk about childhood, but something's happening in many countries that and it started right around twenty twelve twenty thirteen it wasn't gradual, it hit girls hardest and it hit pre teen girls the hardest, so what could it be, nobody has come up with another explanation, nobody it wasn't the financial crisis that wouldn't have hit pre teen girls the hardest, there is no other explanation the complexity here and the data is of course as everyone knows correlation doesn't prove causation, the fact that television viewing was going up in the fifties and six or in the sixties and seventies doesn't mean that that was the cause of the crime, so what I've done and this is work with Gene Twangy, who wrote the book I Gen is because I was challenged you know when I when Greg and I put out the book the codling of the American mind, some researchers challenged us and said oh you don't know what you are talking about, you know the correlations between social media use and mental health they exist but they're tiny it's it's you know like correlation coefficient of point oh three or you know a beta of point oh five, you know tiny little things and one famous article said it's no bigger than the correlation of mental of bad mental health and eating potatoes, which exists but it's like it's so tiny it's zero essentially, and that that claim that social media is no more harmful than eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses it was a very catchy claim and it's caught on and I keep hearing that, but let me unpack why that's not true and then we'll get to what Mark said because what Mark basically said here I'll actually read it and by the way just a pause real quick is, you you implied but let's just make it explicit that the best explanation we have now is you are proposing is that a very particular aspect of social media is the cause, which is not just social media but the the like button and the retweet a certain mechanism of virality that that was invented or perhaps some aspect of social media is the cause good idea let's be clear, connecting people is good I mean overall the more you connect people the better, giving people the telephone was an amazing step forward giving them free telephone you know free long distance is even better video is I mean so connecting people is good I am not a ludite, and social media at least the idea of users posting things like that happens on LinkedIn and it's great it can serve all kinds of needs, what I am talking about here is not the internet it's not technology it's not smartphones and it's not even all social media, it's a particular business model in which people are incentivized to create content and that content is what brings other people on and the people on there are the product which is sold to advertisers, it's that particular business model which Facebook pioneered, which seems to be incredibly harmful for teenagers especially for young girls ten to fourteen years old is where they're most vulnerable, and it seems to be particularly harmful for democratic institutions because it leads to all kinds of anger conflict and the destruction of any shared narrative, so that's what we're talking about we're talking about Facebook Twitter I don't have any data on TikTok I suspect it's going to end up being having a lot really bad effects because the teens are on it so much and to be really clear since we're doing the nuance now in this section lots of good stuff happens, you know a lot there is a lot of funny things on on Twitter I use Twitter because it's an amazing way to put out news to put out when I write something you know you know you and not you know use it to to promote things we we learn things quickly, well there could be now this is harder to measure and we'll probably or I'll try to mention it because so much of our conversation will be about rigorous criticism I'll try to sometimes mention, what are the possible positive effects of social media in different ways so for example in the way I've been using Twitter, not the promotion or any of that kind of stuff it makes me feel less lonely, to connect with people to make me smile a little bit of humor here and there it and that at scale is a very interesting effect being connected across the globe especially during times of COVID and so on it's very difficult to measure that so we kind of have to consider that and be honest that there is a trade off, we have to be honest about the positive and the negative and sometimes we're not sufficiently positive or in a rigorous scientific way about the we're not rigorous in a scientific way about the negative and that's what we're trying to do, here and so that brings us to, the Mark Zuckerberg email okay but wait let me just pick up on the issue of trade-offs because people might think like well like how much of this do we need if we have too much it's bad no that's a one dimensional conceptualization, this is a multi dimensional issue and a lot of people seem to think like oh what would we have done without social media during COVID like we would have been sitting there alone in our homes, yeah if all we had was you know texting telephone Zoom Skype multiplayer video games WhatsApp, all sorts of ways of communicating with each other oh and there is blogs and the rest of the internet, yeah we would have been fine did we really need the hyper viral platforms of Facebook and Twitter now those did help certain things get out faster and that did help science Twitter sometimes but it also led to huge explosions of misinformation and the polarization of our politics to such an extent that a third of the country you know didn't believe what the medical establishment was saying and we'll get into this the medical establishment sometimes was playing. Political games that made them less credible. So on net, it's not clear to me if you've got the internet smartphones blogs all of the you know all of that stuff. It's not clear to me that adding in this particular business model of Facebook Twitter TikTok that that that that really adds a lot more. One interesting one we'll also talk about is YouTube. I think it's easier to talk about Twitter and Facebook. YouTube is another complex beast that's very hard to because YouTube is many things. It's a content platform, but it also has a recommendation system. That's let's let's focus our discussion on perhaps Twitter and Facebook. But you do in in this large document that you are putting together on social media called social media and political dysfunction collaborative review with the Chris Bale that includes I believe papers on YouTube as well. It does, but yeah again just to finish up with the nuance. Yeah, YouTube is really complicated because I can't imagine life without YouTube. It's incredibly useful. It does a lot of good things. It also obviously helps to radicalize terrorist groups and murderers. So I you know I think about YouTube the way I think about the internet in general, and I don't know enough to really comment on YouTube. So I have been focused and it's also interesting. One thing we know is teen social life changed radically between about 2010 and 2012. Before 2010, they weren't mostly on every day because they didn't have smartphones yet. By 2012 to 14, that's the area in which they almost all get smartphones and they become daily users of the girl. So the girls go to Instagram and Tumblr they go to the visual ones. The boys go to YouTube and video games. Those don't seem to be as harmful to mental health or even harmful at all. It's really Tumblr Instagram particularly that seem to really have done in girls mental health. So now okay so let's look at the quote from from Mark Zuckerberg. So at at 64 minutes and 31 seconds on the video I coded this this is the this is the very helpful YouTube transcript. YouTube is an amazing program. You ask him about Francis Hagen you give him a chance to respond. And here is the key thing. So he talks about what Francis Hagen said. He said no but that's mischaracterized. Actually on most measures the kids are doing better when they're on Instagram just on one out of the 18. And then he says I think an accurate characterization would have been that kids using Instagram or not kids but teens is generally positive for their mental health. That's his claim. That you to that Instagram is overall taken as a whole. Instagram is positive for their mental health. That's what he says. Okay now is it really is it really? So first just the simple okay now here what I'd like to do is turn my attention to another document that we'll make available. So I was invited to give testimony before a Senate subcommittee two weeks ago where they were considering the platform accountability act. Should we force the platforms to actually tell us what our kids are doing like we have no idea other than self report. We have no idea you know they're the only ones who know like the kid does this and then over the next hours the kid's depressed or happy. We can't know that but but Facebook knows it. So should they be compelled to to reveal the data we need that. So you raise just to give people a little bit of context. And this document is brilliantly structured with questions studies that indicate that the answer to a question is yes indicate that the answer to a question is no and then mixed results and questions include things like the social media make people more angry or effectively polarized. That's the one that we're going to get to. That's the one for democracy. Yes that's for democracy. So yeah I've got three different Google docs here because I found this is an amazing way and thank God for Google docs is an amazing way to organize the research literature and it's a collaborative review meaning that so on this one Gene Twangy and I put up the first draft and then we say please you know comment add studies tell us what we missed and it evolves in real time in any direction the yes or the no. Oh yeah we we specifically encourage because look the center of my research is that our gut feelings drive our reasoning. That's that was my dissertation that was my early research and so if Gene Twangy and I are committed to but we're going to obviously preferentially believe that these platforms are bad for kids because we said so in our books. So we have confirmation bias and I'm a devotee of John Stuart Mill the only cure for confirmation bias is other people who have a different confirmation bias. So these documents evolve because critics then say no you miss this or they say you don't know what you're talking about. It's like great say so tell us. So I put together this document and I'm going to I'm going to put links to everything on my website if users if so sorry if listeners viewers go to JonathanHeit dot com slash social media. It's a new page I just created I'll put everything together in one place there and we put those in the show notes. Like links to this document and and other things like that that's right exactly. So yeah so the thing I want to call attention now is this document this document here with the title teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause. So Ben Sass and Chris Coons are on the Judiciary Committee they had a subcommittee hearing on Nate Priscili's bill platform accountability transparency act. So they asked me to testify on what do we know what's going on with teen mental health and so what I did was I put together everything I know with plenty of graphs to make these points that first what do we know about the crisis well that the crisis is specific to mood disorders not everything else. It's it's not just self report it's also behavioral data because suicide and self harm go skyrocketing after 2010. The increases are very large and the crisis is gendered and it's hit many countries so I go through the data on that so we have a pretty clear characterization and nobody disputed me on this on this part. So can we just pause real quick just so for people who are not aware so self report just how you kind of collect data on this kind of thing. You have a self report is survey you ask people how yeah how anxious are you these days. Yeah how many hours a week do you use social media. That kind of stuff and and you do it's maybe you can collect large amounts of data that way because you can ask a large number of people that kind of question and but then there's I forget the term you use but more so non self report data behavioral behavioral data that's right where you actually have self harm and suicide numbers exactly. So there are a lot of graphs like this so this is from the national survey on drug use and health so the so the federal government and also Pew and Gallup there are a lot of of organizations that have been collecting survey data for decades. So this is a gold mine and what you see on these graphs over and over again is relatively straight lines up until around 2010 or 2012. And on the x axis we have time years going from 2004 to 2020 on the y axis is the percent of U S teens who had a major depression in the last year. That's right so when this data started coming out around so Gene Twangy's book Igen 2017 a lot of people say oh she you know she doesn't know what she's talking about this is just self report like Gen Z they're just really comfortable talking about this this is a good thing this isn't a real epidemic and literally the day before my book with Greg was published the day before there was a psychiatrist in New York Times who had an op-ed saying relax cell phones smartphones are not ruining your kid's brain and he said it's just self report it's just that they're they're giving higher rates there's more diagnosis but underlying there's no change no because these these it's theoretically possible but all we have to do is look at the hospitalization data for self harm and suicide and we see the exact same trends we see also a very sudden big rise around between 2009 and 2012 you have an elbow and then it goes up up up so that is not self report those are actual kids admitted to hospitals for cutting themselves. So we have a catastrophe and this was all true before COVID COVID made things worse but we have to realize you know COVID's going away kids are back in school back in school but we're not going to go back to where we were because this problem is not caused by COVID. What is it caused by? Well just again to just go through the point then I'll stop I just feel like I I just want to get out the data to show that Mark is wrong. So first point correlation studies consistently show a link they almost all do but it's not big it equivalent to a correlation coefficient around point one typically. That's the first point the second point is that this the correlation is actually much larger than for eating potatoes. So that famous line wasn't about social media use that was about digital media use that included watching Netflix doing homework on everything and so what they did is they they looked at all screen use and then they said this is correlated with self reports of depression anxiety like you know point oh three it's tiny and but they said that clearly in the paper but the media has reported as social media is point oh three or tiny and that's just not true. What I found digging into it you don't know this until you look at the there's more than a hundred studies in the Google doc once you dig in what you see is okay you see a tiny correlation what happens if we zoom in on just social media it always gets bigger often a lot bigger two or three times bigger. What happens if we zoom in on girls and social media it always gets bigger often a lot bigger and so what I think we can conclude in fact what one of the authors of the potato studies herself concludes Amy Orbin says I think I have a quote from here she reviewed a lot of studies and she herself said that quote the associations between social media use and well being therefore range from about r equals point one five to r equals point one zero. So that's the range we're talking about and that's for boys and girls together and a lot of research including hers and mine show that girls it's higher so for girls we're talking about correlations around point one five to point two I believe Gene Twangy and I found it's about point two or point two two. Now this might sound like an arcane social science debate but people have to understand public health correlations are almost never above point two so the correlation of childhood exposure to lead and adult IQ very serious problem that's point oh nine like the world's messy and our measurements are messy and so if you find a consistent correlation of point one five like you would never let your kid do that thing that actually is dangerous and it can explain when you multiply over tens of millions of kids spending you know years of their lives. You actually can explain the mental health epidemic just from social media use. Well and then there's questions by the way this is really good to learn because I quit potatoes and it had no impact and it's a Russian that was a big sacrifice. Yeah quite literal actually because I'm mostly eating keto these days but that's that's that's funny that they're actually literally called the potato studies okay but given this and there's a lot of fascinating data here there's also discussion of how to how to fix it. What are the aspects that if fixed would start to reverse some of these trends. So if we just linger on the sort of the Mark Zuckerberg statements so first of all do you think Mark is aware of some of these studies so if we if you put yourself in the shoes of Mark Zuckerberg and the executives at Facebook and Twitter how can you try to understand the studies like the Google docs you put together. To try to make decisions that fix things is is is there a stable science now that you can start to investigate and and also maybe if you can comment on the depth of data that's available because ultimately this is something you argue that the data should be more transparent should be provided but currently if it's not. All you have is maybe some leaks of internal data that's right that's right and we could talk about the potential you have to be very sort of objective about the potential bias in those kinds of leaks you want to it would be nice to have a non leak data like like yeah it'd be nice to be able to actually have academic researchers able to access in deindividuated deidentified form the actual data on what kids are doing and how their mood changes and and you know when people commit suicide what was happening before and it'd be great to know that we have no idea. So what how do we begin to fix social media would you say okay so here's the most important thing to understand in the social sciences you know we say is social media harmful to kids that's a broad question you can't answer that directly you have to have much more specific questions you have to operationalize it and have a theory of how it's harming kids and so almost all of the research is done on what's called the dose response model that is everybody including the most of the researchers are thinking about this like let's treat it this like sugar you know because the data usually shows a little bit of social media use isn't correlated with harm but a lot is so you know I think about like sugar and if kids have a lot of sugar then it's bad so how much is okay. But social media is not like sugar at all it's not a dose response thing it's a complete rewiring of childhood. So we evolved as a species in which kids play in mixed age groups they learn the skills of adulthood they're always playing and working and learning and doing errands that's normal childhood that's how you develop your brain that's how you become a mature adult until the 1990s in the 1990s we dropped all that we said it's too dangerous if we let you outside you'll be kidnapped so we completely we began rewiring childhood in the 90s before social media and that's a big part of the story. I'm a big fan of Lenore Skenezy who wrote the book Free Range Kids. If there are any parents listening to this please buy Lenore's book Free Range Kids and then go to Letgrow dot org it's a non profit that Lenore and I started with Peter Gray and and Daniel Shookman. To help change the laws and the norms around letting kids out to play they need free play so that's the the big picture they need free play and we started stopping that in the 90s that we reduced it and then Gen Z kids born in 1996 they're the first people in history to get on social media before puberty millennials didn't get it until they were in college but Gen Z they get it because you can lie you just lie about your age. So they really begin to get on around 2009 2010 and boom two years later they're depressed it's not because they ate too much sugar necessarily it's because even normal social interactions that kids had in the early 2000s largely well they they decline because now everything's through the phone. And that's what I'm trying to get across that it's not just a dose response thing it's imagine imagine one middle school where everyone has an Instagram account and it's constant drama everyone's constantly checking and posting and worrying and imagine going through puberty that way versus imagine there was a policy no phones in school you have to check them in a locker no one can have an Instagram account all the parents are on board. Parents only let their kids have Instagram because the kid says everyone else has it and that's we're stuck in a social dilemma we're stuck in a trap so what's the solution keep kids off until they're done with puberty there's a new study actually by Amy Orbin and Andy Shabilsky showing that the damage is greatest for girls between 11 and 13 so there is no way to make it safe for preteens or even 13 14 year olds we've got a kids should simply not be allowed on these business models where you are the product they should not be allowed on until you're 16 we need to raise the age and enforce it that's the biggest thing so I think that's a really powerful solution but it's a it makes me wonder if there's other solutions like controlling the virality of bullying. Sort of if there's a way that's more productive to childhood to use social media so of course one thing is putting your phone down but first of all from the perspective of social media companies it it might be difficult to convince them to do so and also for me as an adult who grew up without social media. It social media is a source of joy so I wonder if it's possible to design the mechanisms both the challenge the ad driven model but actually just technically the recommender system and how viral how virality works on these platforms if it's possible to design a platform that leads to growth anti fragility but does not lead to depression, self harm and suicide that like finding that balance and making that as the objective function not not engagement. Or or something else I don't think that can be done for kids so I am very reluctant to tell adults what to do I have a lot of libertarian friends and I would lose their friendship if I started saying oh it's bad for adults and we should stop adults from using it. But by the same token I'm very reluctant to have Facebook and Instagram tell my kids what to do without me even knowing or without me having any ability to control it as a parent it's very hard to stop your kid I have stopped my kids from getting on Instagram and that's caused some difficulties but but they also have thanked me because they see that it's stupid they see that what the kids are actually on it but they post they see that the culture of it is is stupid as they say so. I don't think there's a way to make it healthy for kids I think there's one thing which is healthy for kids which is free play we already robbed them of most of it in the 90s the more time they spend on their devices the less they have free play video games is a kind of play I'm not saying that these things are all bad but you know 12 hours of video game play means you don't get any physical play so ultimately physical play is the way to to develop physical anti fragility and especially social skills kids need huge amounts of conflict with no adult to meet to supervise or mediate and that's what we robbed them of so anyway that we should move on because I you know I get really into the evidence here because I think the story is actually quite clear now there was a lot of ambiguity there are conflicting studies but when you look at it all together. The correlational studies are pretty clear and the effect sizes are coming in around point one to point one five whether you call that a correlation coefficient or a beta it's all in the standardized beta it's all in that sort of sort of range there's also experimental evidence we collect true experiments with random assignment and they mostly show an effect and there's eyewitness testimony you know the kids themselves you talk to girls and you poll them do you think overall Instagram is good for your mental health or bad for you're not going to find a group saying oh it's wonderful oh yeah yeah Mark you're right it's mostly good no the girls themselves say this is the major reason and I've got studies in the Google doc where there have been surveys what do you think is causing