Kids and Phones: Moral Panic or Time to Panic? with Jonathan Haidt
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash bots. It's on! It's on!

Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, I'm talking to Jonathan Haidt. It seems like everyone is talking with Jonathan Haidt or about him. He's a social psychologist and author who teaches at NYU's Stern School of Business, the very same highly regarded business school where a certain friend of mine teaches.

He's also not afraid to court controversy. Haidt is an outspoken opponent of cancel culture and DEI. I don't agree with him on a lot of things. And recently, he's been warning that social media is causing kids to think they're trans via social contagion. We'll get to some of that later. But today, we're going to focus on his latest book, The Anxious Generation. It describes how smartphones and social media have led to a mental health crisis among teens, especially among teenage girls.

The topic is near and dear to my heart. I've been writing and talking about how social media platforms transform enragement into engagement and profit for years for all of us. And as a mother of four kids, I care deeply about parenting and young people.

Not surprisingly, Haidt's book has kicked off a furious debate between those that think social media is rewiring our kids' brains and making them sadder and more anxious, and those that think that Haidt is creating a moral panic, and one that's based on unsettled science. While you might think I'd be on Haidt's side immediately, actually, I'm somewhere in the middle, and I'm worried that these kind of reductive ideas about social media might lead to poor regulation. Since we don't have any at all right now, that's very important.

Our question today is from Aaron Brown, a statistician and Bloomberg Opinions columnist who has raised concerns about the research cited by Haidt in his writing. I'll talk with Jonathan about all this and more after a quick break. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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Hey, Jonathan. I'm so glad you're here. Well, thanks, Cara. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. So you're a social psychologist who's written four books for mostly lay audiences, I say. The first one is about happiness. Then you wrote about the roots of morality. The third one was about cancel culture. This one, The Anxious Generation, is about how social media is ruining Gen Z's mental health. Explain your own progression politically because you've changed, I'd say, significantly, you and many others. Yeah, sure. Sure.

So I was just stereotypical East Coast liberal all the way up through the early or late 2000s. I went to an Ivy League school. I'm Jewish. I grew up in a suburb of New York City. I thought Republicans were stupid and evil. I hated Ronald Reagan. I mean, I'm totally stereotypical. All the way up through graduate school, I worked on a few Democratic campaigns. I ran a gun control group in college. So again, nothing interesting, nothing out of the ordinary in me.

But I happened to study moral psychology. That was the topic I picked in graduate school. And I looked at how morality varied across cultures in India, the U.S., across social class. And I started noticing that actually left and right are like different countries. I mean, left and right, they're like coming apart. They don't have the same facts. And this is in the 90s. I began to notice this. And when George W. Bush won two elections in a row that I thought he should have lost...

I was so frustrated with the Democrats and their bad messaging, their inability to speak about American morality, that I switched my research over to help actually advise Democrats about how to stop losing elections. I'm ashamed of that now because that's a violation of my fiduciary duty as a researcher, I believe, but that's what we do in the social sciences. We're all on the blue team and we often work for the blue team, which I will get into, I think is a kind of a corruption of the social sciences.

So in the course of writing memos and trying to use moral foundations theory to help Democrats connect with the fact that most people are patriotic, they want to be part of a group they're proud of, they believe in tradition. In the process of writing that, I committed to understanding conservatives and libertarians in their own terms.

I'd never done that before. That's very hard to do, to get out of your bubble. But because I was committed to doing it for research, I did it. And in the process, I discovered, oh my God, they actually have really good ideas, left, right, and libertarian. You have to listen to all three.

So in the process, I kind of stepped out. I stopped focusing on helping one team, and I started saying, our country is in terrible shape, and we actually have to learn how to draw from each other's ideas, how to work together. In the process, I often got criticized from the left, and so that is a very common thing that a lot of people in the space that I'm in were or are progressives, but that you keep getting criticized by the left, it does push you over. Though in my case,

I would say it just pushed me away so that I'm on no team. I'm committed to understanding things. That's how you consider yourself. Yeah. I mean, people are free to disagree, but I think we're in big trouble. I'm trying to study it. Okay. I just wanted to get that clear because sometimes I read you, I have no idea, but probably that's a good thing. At the same time, sometimes I read stuff and think that's nonsense. Yeah.

John. But nonetheless, we'll get to that. Please tell me. Yes, I shall. Don't you worry. I'm known as shy and retiring. In your book, you argue that we overprotect kids in the real world and underprotect them online, something I...

The first part, I think, is overblown, but certainly the second part. I think that the arguments about helicopter parenting are over. I mean, I have four kids. You have two, is that correct? I have two, that's right. Boy and a girl. In the teens? Son, 17. Daughter, 14. So, yeah. And I have an 18, 21, four, and two-year-old. So I have kind of a lot of insight into very different kinds of development. In any case, but it's just my insight, and it's not writ large for anyone else. But expand on

Spend on the idea of we overprotect our kids in the real world and underprotect them online. And then give us a brief history of American parenting that explains how we got here.

Because I think you're directionally correct, but not – you'd think I'd agree with you more, and I don't. Yeah, I would. I'm surprised. But I don't disagree with you completely. Go ahead. Okay, good. So let me try to push you over a little bit. So humans have had a play-based childhood since long before there were humans. Play is part of being a mammal. We have a puppy at home. She wants to play all day long. They need to do that to wire up their brains.

And that's what kids did until the 90s. And, you know, you and I grew up during a crime wave and there were drunk drivers all around. I mean, there were real dangers. But kids went out. They were sent out. In New York City, they were playing all over the place.

And then for a variety of sociological reasons, one of the main ones is we begin to lose trust in each other. We lose trust that other adults will help our kids. We start being afraid that other adults will sexually molest our children. Right. Also, we have shrinking— So it begins with television and other imagery, not necessarily online, but go ahead. Oh, no, that's certainly true. But, of course, early television didn't do that. No, certainly. But in the 90s is when things really changed. And I think cable TV, the Internet has no role in that.

But, you know, cable TV. That was my point, yeah. Yeah, that's right. No, but, you know, cable TV is extremely powerful. And that comes in the 80s. That changes a lot of things about our politics and our society. More fear-based, more fear-stoking channels. So that's part of it. But the same thing happens actually in Canada and the UK where they don't have nearly as much crime as we do.

So, there's a kind of a sociological change taking place, especially in the Anglo countries, where we get more focused on parenting as being like a carpenter trying to create our children the way we want in order to get into college and be successful. So, for a variety of reasons, we lose the idea of kids are out playing and they come home when the streetlights come on. And we adopt the idea of you're my project, I'm going to plan your day, lots of activities in the afternoons.

Oh, and by the way, don't ever talk to strangers. Stranger danger. And that's really important. Once you start telling kids, you know what? Other strangers, physical people are really bad or dangerous. Don't talk to them. But then at the same time, soon after that, you get on...

You know, chat groups or whatever it was in the 90s. And our kids are talking to strangers all over the world. And some of them have evil designs and some of them are sextortionists. So, you know, I think there's no doubt that we have greatly narrowed children's world in the physical world and filled it with fear, even as it was getting safer.

while at the same time letting them on the online world with zero age gating, almost no restrictions or restraints. Okay. So according to the anxious generation, social media causes four main harms. Social deprivation, as you just discussed, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, addiction. Let's go through these because obviously we just talked about social deprivation, the lack of play, right? Sleep deprivation, addiction.

But it keeps people up because they're watching it all the time. Attention fragmentation. Many years ago, someone from Microsoft said, pointed this out to me, is the attention deficit problem that we all have gotten. And addiction, which is rather clear for anyone who uses it. This is also something that in general has happened to our society overall, which you put at the feet of social media. Mm-hmm.

Explain that. So two things. First, this is not just the list of the four main harms. This is what I call the four foundational harms. These are so basic and they affect boys and girls equally. And then I have a whole chapter of the additional harms to girls and a whole chapter of the additional harms to boys. I'm going to get to that. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah. Now,

I don't put the whole thing on social media. When I started the book, I thought maybe it's all social media. But what became clear is it's what I called in the book the phone-based childhood as opposed to the play-based childhood.

So when we look for what percentage of variance is explained by hours on social media, social media is just one of the many things going on. And social media harms many different kids in many different ways. There are many different causal pathways. A key idea here is while you point out that, yes, it's happening to all of us, but we all went through puberty back before this stuff started. And puberty is an incredibly delicate dance where your brain is rewiring from the juvenile form to the adult form.

The brain has reached 90% of its full size by age six. From then on in, it's not about growth. It's about pruning and tuning and connecting. And that pruning and tuning and connecting is happening as kids are learning. And it really speeds up at puberty. So, you know, early puberty is the most delicate, sensitive part of childhood development. It's the easiest to screw up by stuffing kids full of weird, bad stuff, threatening stuff.

And so I think that that's why I think the data is clearest for social media and harm is clearest for 11 to 13 year old girls. And this is not just me talking. This is one of my main, one of the main psychologists that I debate with. You know, she herself found this. So the idea that middle school is now dominated, I mean, kids aren't out playing. Even if they're outside, they're sitting down on their phones. So, you know, we can talk about how bad it is for adults, but adults had, they had a healthy puberty.

If you're born after 1995, you went through puberty on social media, especially if you're a girl. And that just doesn't work. So one of the things I was thinking about, and I agree, everyone sees it, watching phones. I grew up with the kids. I took them away from them, et cetera, et cetera. But there was a Blue Skies post, which my wife pointed out to me, which someone wrote with a reference to the book. It's every parent's nightmare. You check your child's bulletproof backpack and find a smartphone. That's funny. Yeah.

But it gets us something very real. It is, isn't it? In the same time period you're talking about, as social media has become prevalent, mass shootings and school shooting drills have exploded. Our climate change prognosis has gotten rather bleak. We've had a pandemic, which I think is not – I'm excited to see the studies out of the pandemic over the many years to come.

deaths of despair among adults are way up, obviously political polarization that has nothing to do with, it has a little to do with social media, but has to do with a lot of other things. So what makes you, you know, talk about, you say you don't want to just blame social media. It's not any of those things, but why is it the phone that you need to focus in on? Not any of these other things in combination they might reasonably find very upsetting. Sure. So two-part answer. Let's first talk about what I mean by the phones. Why are the phones so important?

So the millennials had phones, and they're fine. The millennials had flip phones. No, I mean, their mental health is fine. I'm teasing. Okay, okay. But, you know, your teasing is the normal intergenerational stuff. Every generation makes fun of the one after. And, you know, us, the millennials, that's just normal stuff. The key event, the key time period is 2010 to 2015. In 2010, less than 20% of teens had a smartphone. They still had flip phones.

You know, the iPhone comes out in 2007, but very few teens have one until more like 2011, 2012 is when they were all really rushing onto smartphones. But it's not just that they trade in one phone for another. It's that this new phone has now push notifications, which weren't part of the original, the app store, which wasn't part of the original. So now they are reachable by millions of companies. We've given our kids a gateway through which millions of companies can interrupt them as long as they download an app.

They give a company the right to interrupt them, so now the number of notifications skyrockets. They get high-speed internet, which in 2010 most kids didn't have. So in 2010, you used your phone to connect with other kids. You could text them, you could call them. That's it, pretty much. I mean, there was some video game, I suppose, but that's it. So kids still looked each other in the eye. They still went out to get ice cream. They still did things in 2010.

But by 2015, they now have the ability to be online all the time. So this is a complete transformation of childhood. No, Facebook was founded earlier than that, by the way. Yeah, and it wasn't very harmful. Snapchat was 2011. Certainly, texting has been around from the beginning. Apps have been around since 2007. But you felt like it grew faster.

in terms of power and the usage of it. You have to look at the way a kid goes from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. How do they spend that time? I know where I have kids. Okay, fine, fine. But like my students at NYU, the very first thing they do is check their notifications. They don't get a drink of water or go to the bathroom. The last thing they do before they shut their eyes is check their notifications. And in between, it's a lot of what they do. And this is very, very different from how life was before.

But I want you to address the other harms that have also been crashing around. Oh, those are so easy. Oh, my God. Those are so easy. Okay. All right. So pandemic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If all we had was data from the United States, then all of those things could be plausible explanations other than COVID. Because this was almost all baked in before COVID. 2022 data wasn't available when I

published the book, but I've got it in some Substack posts. What you can see is that, yeah, things got a little worse. Those huge trend lines going up and up and up since 2012, they went up a little faster during COVID. And some of them have come down a tiny bit, but basically they just returned to the trend line. So COVID was a blip.

It was terrible for many individual kids, but we don't see much evidence of it in the data. That is, when you track mental health data since the 90s, what you see is a hockey stick with the bend at 2012, and it goes up and up and up. You can see a little perturbance in 2020, 2021, but it wasn't. It

Kids didn't get depressed because of COVID. They got depressed because they were isolated and alone connecting on social media primarily. And mass shootings, climate change. Irrelevant. Totally irrelevant. And the reason we know this, the reason we know this is that while it sounds compelling because the Newtown shooting was 2012, that does fit the timing perfectly.

But why did things go up at the same time in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia? Like, why? Like, there's no way. And this is, again, one of the main critiques I get is, oh, Haidt is wrong to blame it on the phones. It's obviously poverty, racism, the 2008 global financial crisis. You compare mental health to any economic variable you want.

You're not going to find an explanation there. So the fact that it's global and wherever, not global, it's in the developed countries primarily. And the fact that it hits girls more than boys and it hits the youngest, the 10 to 14-year-old girls harder, it's hard to explain that with any other theory.

Do you have one? Well, raising my kids, I think these things, they're able to find out about it more with social media and phones and the quickness and the speed with which they found it. There's a number of things. But hold on a second. You said find out about it as though there was information about there and they can find it. Right. Google helped them do that. That is correct. This is different. This is different.

This is different. Yes, yes. So if preteen girls are the most affected, especially on the left, is it because they've learned more news or is it because they're surrounded by other girls? One imagines it's having grown up with magazines, fashion. I'm a lesbian, so it didn't affect me. But I think straight girls, certainly my friends were. I think it's as if you took a magazine and exploded it.

in a way into their brains that's much different things and allowed them then to compare themselves to each other. Well, but you're still thinking of this as information. Right, right. Whereas I'm a social psychologist. I'm looking at this as you are surrounded by girls demonstrating certain emotions. You're going to catch those emotions. Okay, so you write girls that are particularly vulnerable to the harms caused by social media. I would agree with this. Talk about the different impacts on girls and boys here. So if we're focusing on anxiety, depression, and what are called internalizing disorders—

Then it's mostly a girl's story. Now, the boys are more depressed and anxious, but they have much lower levels to begin with than girls, especially at puberty. And so at first I thought the book was going to be primarily about girls. Which you had written about before quite a bit. That's right. That's right.

And there is a clear connection to social media for girls. The correlations and the experiments, whenever you break up boys and girls in any of these studies, the effects are almost always larger for girls. So the link from social media to girls is just much clearer, stronger, more consistent. And there are many ways that social media harms girls. If we look at the nature of aggression, boys' aggression is traditionally physical or ultimately backed up by the threat of violence.

And when they all move online, that kind of drops away. Whereas girls' aggression has traditionally been relational. You damage other girls' reputations or their relationships. And seventh grade is the worst year for bullying. That's the worst year in many girls' lives. And

And then we give them phones and social media so that we can greatly magnify all the terrible things about seventh grade forever and ever, seven days a week. So magnification is what I was talking about, was the magnification of existing social norms around women and girls. Yes, I would agree that that's happening. But I think a lot of what's happening is kind of new, is kind of dynamics that we have not experienced before. So it's not just...

You know, it's not just that, you know, when you and I were growing up, the girls had to see these models, these beautiful airbrush models, and now they see thousands and thousands. It's not just quantity. It's that now it's their friends, and it's their friends using a filter so that if you just, you know, if the mind is a kind of a Bayesian system that extracts patterns...

You look online, you know, you look at your feed, and on average, people are more attractive than you, even if you're average. So there's just all kinds of dynamics made possible by social media that are not comparable to what you and I grew up with. Such as not being at a party or not seeing what's happening. Yeah, that's right. Seeing where everyone is at all times and having your parents know where you are and texting back and forth with your parents. It's very hard to become independent if you're texting every day with your parents. Interesting. I would...

On that front, that is certainly true, is people being more aware of people. It's sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. I think it's a little more mixed than you're saying. But let's get to that criticism first before we get to the solutions that you also have talked about. It's good to debate this because I think it's very important to get it right. One of my great fears—

around a lot of stuff around social media and tech companies is that we go a little too far and then we don't get the right balance that we need to have here. So one criticism you get repeatedly is the accusation you're confusing, as you know, correlation with causation. I don't want to give everyone a lesson in sociology, but that just because an increase in mental illness among teens coincides with the period that social media became ubiquitous doesn't mean it was caused by

I want you to say why you think that's incorrect. And I want you to say why you think they might have a point, too, if you don't mind. Okay, sure. So there's a group of researchers. We can call them the skeptics. There are about five or six main ones. And then there's me and Gene Twenge on the other side. Let's call us the alarm ringers. Now, they think that we are alarmists and this is just another moral panic and there's no evidence of harm that they say. Right.

And it certainly is true. Look, I'm a social scientist. The whole game in the social sciences is how do you figure out what causes what in a messy world? And that's why we have all kinds of different methods.

to attribute any causality, because it was just correlational. And I said, you know, parents, don't freak out about this, you know, because we really didn't know. It's just correlational, mostly correlational then. But then what we do is we say, well, okay, let's look to experiments. And I've been collecting the experiments. And if listeners go to anxiousgeneration.com slash reviews, I have dozens of Google documents where I've been collecting the experiments on all kinds of topics.

Because otherwise, we're all just citing experiments at each other. It's very confusing. So I wanted to put them all in one place. And guess what? There are now a lot of experiments too. So now the debate has shifted from, oh, it's all correlational.

to, okay, fine, you've got experiments, but they're not very good experiments. Correct. I just want to make sure, your assessment of your critics, they're not saying there's no evidence of harm. No, they literally say there's no evidence. Some of them do, some of them don't. You're right, you're right. They are saying some of your research is not rigorous. That's certainly true, and that's fair in some cases. Well, I'm not doing original research on this. I'm collecting and interpreting other people's research. I get it. The research you're using is not as rigorous, and I would... Oh, some of the... No, that's true. A lot of the experiments...

A lot of the experiments are, you know... Shit is how I would put them technically, scientifically. That's a fine word. I try not to curse on air, but they were done by somebody with the students in their class. They're criticizing your analysis of the research, but go ahead. Okay. But some other problems with the critics' view is they're focusing on one operationalization. That is, they say, we're going to look at the number of hours you spend

on social media, and then we're going to look at your self-ratings or some other rating of your mental health, and that's it. That's the universe of causality we're looking at. And that would pick up if there's just a pure effect of spending a lot of hours. That would pick up that very imperfectly because you have imperfect measurement. And that's one causal pathway. But there are 10 or 15 other causal pathways. And so their main argument is that they don't say there's no correlation. They grant there's a correlation. They don't say there's no evidence. They just say, we don't believe the evidence.

Their main argument is, well, you know, even if you're right that there's a little relationship, it's too small to explain this gigantic increase. To which I say, yeah, if you want to narrow your lens, we've got this gigantic complex topography of causation. There's so many different channels by which different kids get hurt. You know, we saw those in the Senate hearings.

I mean, some kids it's sextortion, some kids it's anorexia. I mean, there's so many different causal pathways. And so to think that we can capture all the variants by asking, how many hours a day do you spend on social media? From, you know, zero, one to two, three to five. I mean, that is such a crude question.

So for them to say, oh, you know, the evidence of causal, even if it's there, it's tiny, it's not a big effect. Yeah, because it's one of many causal pathways. So it's very frustrating to me because they have kind of locked on to a corner of the debate that is, you know, I'm trying to say this has transformed childhood.

And I have a whole book. I wrote a whole book on all the different ways to transform childhood. And they're trying to quantify it as, you know, hours on social media. Okay. So in the spirit of that, I was looking at all your critics, the different ones, and some of them I agree with you in this way. Some of them I do listen to.

So for each episode, we asked an expert to send us a question. And this one's from Aaron Brown, because I think those are the smartest discussions that are happening. Yeah, my colleague at NYU. He's a statistician and Bloomberg opinion columnist who teaches statistics at NYU and at UC San Diego. You and Aaron have engaged in a spirit of back and forth, which I'm enjoying on Substack and Reason magazine. And we'll let you continue here. Let's listen to his question. Okay. Hello, Dr. Haidt. I enjoyed your book as well as your previous work.

I found it convincing that social media has radically changed the social life of teenagers since 2010, and also that at the same time there has been alarming erosion in teenage mental health. However, when I looked at the studies you cite, both online and in the book, I was appalled at the number of junk studies with bad data, with sloppy analysis, toy experiments, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal,

Many of the good studies either didn't have data for the relevant period or data on the relevant variables. My question is, is there any single one strong study that you would cite that you think provides convincing evidence of a causal, purely negative relation between social media and teen mental health?

I think that's a fair question. Right now, again, we're still early in the game from a social media point of view. Go ahead. Because I think he's right, that about it. Because some of them I was like, uh-uh, to some of these studies. But go ahead. Okay, sure. And by way, let me just point out that Aaron is a libertarian who's generally skeptical of social science, unless when he points out that you respond to critics, the high volume research, to that the quality of research is suspect. So that's the point he's making. Go ahead. Right.

Okay. Well, so first of all, I mean, the critique that a lot of the studies are bad is perfectly legit. And we need critics who have a very high bar. Aaron is very critical. He went through my list of 300 studies and he said none of them, he said none of them are good enough. Now, you know, really? 300 studies, none of them are good enough? So, you know,

You can always find something to criticize. For example, I think he said in some studies, you know, the subjects might have guessed what the hypothesis is and therefore tried to plead. Like, come on, this is, you know, there are all kinds of issues in social science studies and he seems to be asking for the perfect study. But all right. I mean, it's a fair question to say what are some of the stronger ones.

I think the one by Hunt Alcott, Luca Bragieri, Sarah Eichmeier, and Matthew Genskow is titled The Welfare Effects of Social Media. I think that was a very well-done study. It had a large sample size. They randomly assigned them to either deactivate their Facebook accounts for a month or not. And they found that deactivation significantly improved subjective well-being. And 80% of the treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them. So I'm sure he can find some flaws in this study, but if he's going to say, I'm

I'm not going to believe anything until you give me the perfect study. You know, we have a raging mental health crisis. There is no other theory on the table. Nobody has even proposed a theory for why it's happening in so many countries. That study didn't look at teen girls and people who are depressed, though, correct? Okay. Yeah, that's true. I think it was either college students or young adults. Correct. Right. And let me just point out the strongest way to prove a causal link between social media and depression in teenage girls would be to cite research that studies have.

Depressed teenage girls who use social media. That's right. But you're not. But the thing is, there are surveys of teenagers. So we do have survey data, which means we have correlational data from the UK and the US. But what he's asking for is experiments. It's really, really hard to do experiments on minors. You know, that's why so many of them are college students, because we can't do experiments on high school students. Very hard.

So, yes, I wish we had a study of depressed 15, 13-year-old girls. Because that would be a proof, right? I mean, the 16 studies...

You say show causal links. Only one studies teenage girls. That's right. But if Aaron and the critics were right that there's nothing going on here, the null hypothesis is true, there's no evidence of causation, then what we would find is just a lot of random noise, and some of it would show harms, some would show benefits. But that's not what we find. We find is that the large majority show harms, and...

We would also find that sometimes it's boys who suffer more, sometimes it's girls, but we don't find that. There's usually a sex difference, and if there's a sex difference, it's always girls who suffer more. But you can do social experiments on minors. It's just very hard. Right, correct. A true experiment where you randomly assign. So, for example, can you imagine a study in a middle school where we randomly assign half of the kids to go onto a social media platform and half not? Yeah.

That's just much harder to do than with college students. You'd have to get parental approval. I mean, it's just never done. So I wish there was that study too, but there isn't. But I want to get to, does that weaken your argument? Don't you want to be talking to depressed teenage girls on this rather than make the leap? Well, I wouldn't say it weakens my argument. I would say...

There's so many different kinds of evidence lining up here. The experimental evidence, most of the experiments are not very strong. That's fine. He's right about that. Most of them are not very strong. But there are still a bunch that are pretty strong, at least by the standards of the social sciences. Now, you can be so skeptical that you say, you know what? It's just all crap. I'm just not going to believe it. All right, fine. But then what do I do? Do we just say, let's not do anything? There's no other explanation, but let's not do anything. Better sorry than safe. I get your point. But the strong ones are mostly adults using...

Facebook, what would you like to see then? Because if there's no real studies that are actually to the point you're making. Okay. Because so here's the thing. The biggest – everybody's treating this with a dose-response model. Everybody's acting like the number of hours you consume – Explain that for regular people. Go ahead. Okay. So, you know, is alcohol good or bad for you? Is aspirin good or bad for you? Well, you know, let's look at how much people consume. And people who drink a lot, they're doing worse. Right.

When a large dose is correlated with more bad effects, we say it's harmful. This thing is harmful, at least in large quantities. And that's been the approach to social media. But it doesn't work for social media because if you take your daughter off, you say, okay, you know, you're in seventh grade. Everyone else has Instagram. You've been on it for two years, but we're taking you off. Is she going to be happier?

No, she's now isolated. She's not going to be happier, even if it was Instagram that is causing her whole cohort to be so depressed and anxious. Sure.

So what I'm really trying to say here is we have to look at this as a group-level phenomena. And the experiment I've been calling for, the experiment I want to see, is we take entire schools. And I've been talking to governors about this. Like, can we find a school district, find 20 middle schools, 10 of them go phone-free, 10 don't. Then that's the most important experiment because now for the first time – it's never been done – for the first time, we would see what happens to the whole group –

when they are no longer using their phones for seven hours a day. Welcome to lawsuits, Jonathan. Welcome to lawsuits in terms of free school. You know that. No, no, no. I would love to see that, but you're not going to. No, but because schools are going phone-free, but they're doing it just, which, you know, some schools choose to go phone-free. And what I'm trying to say is let's get random assignment. Let's get a group of middle schools and then flip a coin on which ones go phone-free this year

And then if it seems to be working, then the other half will go phone-free next year. Presumably factor in other factors that might happen in that area. But anyway, the vast majority of people who read your book don't have social science training, let alone time to analyze the studies you've listed and judge the accuracy of their claims or your critics. Your second book, The Righteous Mind, shows our morality is usually shaped by our emotions, not by rational inquiry.

If I'm inclined to agree with you, I'll believe these studies prove causation. And if I don't, I probably won't, which is really typical these days. What's the best way out of that bind when it is highly emotional? Because I think most people, I think one thing you have going for you and the reason why your book is a bestseller is because most people have a feeling about this, a pretty strong feeling. Like I have a strong, I understand. I did take away my kids' phones. I did limit their use.

But not that much, not as much as one might imagine. But talk about that. Feelings aren't facts, right? So how do you – That's right. You're aided by that. They are not aided by that. That's right. So my own original research is on moral foundations theory and the social intuitionist model.

And one of the three main principles of moral psychology is intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. So if there's, you know, whatever the new scandal is about Joe Biden or Donald Trump, if you start with a pro-Biden or pro-Trump view, it's sort of like the work table is tilted in one way. And whatever you do, it's all going to slide that way. And that, I think, is operating here. And that's why it seems to me that I'm facing, you know, other than the normal scientific debate that you and I were just talking about.

I'm facing very little opposition, nothing like anything I've ever done before in my life. It's not like trying to convince people on gun control or something like that, because almost everybody has seen it, if not in their own children, they've seen it in someone else's children nearby. A traditional moral panic is anything.

There's a story about some kids who read comic books and they got into satanic worship and then they cut off. Yeah, right. You know, nobody actually saw this with their own eyes, but the media took a story and trumped it up. So that's the case in most past moral panics. This one is not like that. This one.

Almost everyone has seen it. And, you know, most journalists on the left, on the right, they're all, you know, they're all writing very positive things about the book. And they usually start the interview either before the interview or during the interview. They usually say, you know, I have a teenage daughter and what you're describing in the book fits her to a T. This is exactly what happened to her. So people are seeing this. This is not some distant media-fueled moral panic. Sure.

Back when I first started covering digital, there was a moral panic over violence in video games and dirty lyrics and songs, thanks, Tipper Gore. But the studies showed the causational relationship between video games and violence was low. There's some who insist there's a problem with violent video games now, by the way. After the El Paso shooting, former minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who is not very smart, I'm sorry to say, he said it dehumanizes individuals. It's not supported, including in a 2011 Supreme Court case that ruled the studies did not find a connection.

I agree with all that. And in fact, there's a correlation between the popularity of games and declines in violence because you're getting it out there. But that's correlation and causation. Yes, right. But despite proof, I didn't actually let my kids play those because I thought I don't want them to shoot women. I was like, let's just not start by. I just didn't like it. I just didn't like it in general as a parent. That's just my opinion. And so that's what I decided to do with my boys. But talk about is there a link here?

between video games and this from your perspective? So the first thing is there are some things that are easy to think about. There's some that are hard. The easy thing to think about is kids are shown X and then they do X. And that doesn't seem to happen very much. And so as I understand it, the research does not show that if you let your kids play first-person shooter games, they're not going to go out and shoot people. They're not more likely to be violent.

There are some hints in the data, but it seems to me when you focus on the content, you don't find much. And that's why I don't talk about content moderation on social media. I'm not that interested in the content. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. I understand that, but explain to video games because video games certainly was one where everybody was losing their minds over it.

That's right. Because they were focusing on the wrong thing. They were focusing on the violence. Now, I do believe that the really graphic violence where they show blood and all that, I mean, I don't have evidence. I don't know the evidence on this. But, you know, I suspect that there is some kind of a desensitization there. But the idea of playing an abstract game where you're moving through a space and you're shooting at targets that look like people, I loved those games when I was a kid. You know, I don't think that that's what's harmful. The story for boys in video games is more complicated. Right.

The story for girls in social media was so clear in the data from the time I started working on this. It took a longer time to figure out the story for boys. And here I'm drawing on work I did with Zach Rausch, my research assistant originally, now my research partner in all of this. And

And what we figured out drawing on the wonderful book by Richard Reeves of boys and men is that boys have been withdrawing from the real world since the 70s and 80s. That is, they're falling behind girls. They're putting less effort into school. They're more likely to get kicked out. They're getting lower grades. They're not going on to college as much. Boys are just withdrawing from effort in education, in the workplace, in dating and marriage and parenthood.

So this is terribly sad, and this is horrible for the country. It's horrible for straight women who want men to marry.

And what Zach and I propose in the book is that as the virtual world has gotten better and better, you know, when I was a kid, in the computer lab, they had a Star Trek game. It was printed out on paper. Like, the paper was like, it was terrible. And that was in the late 70s. So as the virtual world has gotten more and more enticing, and, you know, my son plays Fortnite. I mean, you know, the games are incredible.

And porn.

And that was a really hard thing. But boys really, really tried. But now if you can get your sexual satisfactions satisfied incredibly well by the most amazing pornography, and soon the goggles will be there, it'll be all in three dimensions. And if you, boys also have a desire for sports, for coalitional competition, sports, warfare. And you can get that all satisfied on video games. My point is that boys are simply not doing the hard things that they need to do to grow into men.

What do you think about that? So we haven't seen nothing yet. That's really pretty much what you're saying in terms of video games. But we've seen a lot, and it's going to get a lot worse. Okay. So let's talk about the final question, and then I want to get to solutions. In your book, you argue that increased gender dysphoria diagnosis might be caused by sociogenic transmission via social media. In other words, social contagion via social media is causing kids to mistakenly identify as trans.

Beyond anecdotally, I'm sorry, there's no proof of this happening. In fact, the trans contagion is a big trope of people who are anti-trans and a new big cultural scapegoat. Sounds like a twist as a gay person that feels homophobic. For example, in the 1920s, when the novel The Well of Loneliness was put on trial, it

and censored for fears it would lead to lesbian contagion, which I'm sorry to give you that information. It doesn't exist, lesbian contagion. What data leads you to believe that social media is causing trans contagion other than I like to call myself they-them because the statistics on actual shifts are quite low?

quite, quite, quite low. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, look, you know, in the book, I acknowledge gender dysphoria is real. It shows up in many societies over time. It mostly affects natal boys. So I would never question that. The issue is whether the large growth is just more kids coming out or whether to some extent kids are influencing each other. Now, that's

Social contagion. Well, hold on. Social contagion is extremely common. I mean, kids are influencing each other's emotions. If one kid is anxious, another kid is anxious. So since there is evidence that we influence each other on depression, on anxiety, we influence each other on everything. And so when you hook up a lot of teenagers and the girls are more hooked up than the boys, they're more open to each other's emotions. So all I'm saying is that

The rise of diagnoses, the rapid rise in natal girls, much more than boys, is at least consistent with there being some part of it being influence of others. That's what I'm saying. I'm not saying it's a sham. I'm not saying— No, I get it. But actual results in the real world are quite—

There's a Komodo analysis which is due on health insurance claims for about 330 million U.S. patients over five years from 2017 to 21. 121,882 kids were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in five years. 0.6 got top therapy. It just didn't have an effect. It might, just the way they might decide to use a certain makeup over some analysis. There's no real impact in that regard. So I'm curious why you...

Put that in because it opens you up to being part of that. I know. I know. I had to really think a lot about that, about whether I should even touch it. But I thought that what I did in the book was pretty nuanced. And since one of the main effects of social media is that girls influence each other far more than they did before 2010. Right.

And so I thought it was important to just include that. And then just last week, the CAS report came out in the UK. CAS is also – but go ahead. I've read it all. So go ahead. So again, this is not my expertise. This is not my area. It's a very complicated field.

But at least the CAST report is consistent with the idea that when kids felt that they were trapped in a different body when they were young, you know, that is very possibly and probably real. But when it was something that they discovered or just began to feel recently, then there's no medical evidence suggesting that they would benefit from those treatments. That's at least what the report found.

And so that's all. I mean, I think that is at least consistent with the idea that some portion, I don't know how much, some portion was social influence. Would you agree with that? Or do you think the social influence had nothing to do? I don't think it has nothing. You know, I'm not going to say nothing. I think this review lines up the data in the U.S. It's...

And that's the way it's being interpreted. An NIH study from 2023 showed that 150,000 transgender adolescents, only 209 had gender-affirming mastectomies. I think it's where the result happens is the most important. In the seven-year period, the average age was 16. That's 0.1% of trans kids. That's 000%

0.0009% of all teenagers, but it's being discussed as if it's happening every day. That's what I'm talking about. It creates this sensation that's not true. But are there any studies that show actual social contagion? So I would never—look, this is blowing up as a cultural issue. And of course the right is going to use it for its purposes. So no, I don't disagree. I don't disagree with that.

Okay. I just would be careful with that because I don't think it leads to anything. I'm trying to be careful, Cara. I didn't want to talk about it, but you made me talk about it. I made you because I want to study if that's going to be. And I think they're using it in the most cynical and truly heinous way I've ever seen anybody use things. And they did it with gay people, too. Just because you hear about trans and want to call yourself they, them, doesn't mean you're changing your whole life. We'll be back in a minute.

All right, let's move on. Let's assume that your diagnosis in the anxious generation is directionally correct. Walk me through the four big solutions. One, no phones in schools. Two, raising and enforcing the minimum age to use social media. Three, no social media before 16 years old. And of course, more.

Right. So I list dozens and dozens of things that we can do. Yes, you do.

And so the four are no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world. And these are important because if you're the only one who's not giving your seventh grader a smartphone and everyone else has one, your kid's at a disadvantage. But if a third or a half of the parents have done that, well, then it's actually very easy for your kid to just have a flip phone or a phone watch.

So, these are four things that we can do without any government regulation that we can start doing tomorrow, especially if your kids are in elementary and middle school.

Collective action doesn't require legislation. You're talking about parents keeping kids off social media until they're 16. That means every parent has to do it, but they are coordinating, right? But that's the thing, that now they are. So that's the trick, is it's hard to do on your own. That's the nature of a collective action problem, that the first movers bear a high cost. But as the number of people doing it increases, then it's easier for everyone. It quickly turns positive.

Can you think of another thing that's happened where it's actually occurred? Because it seems very optimistic and you're going against some of the richest, most powerful companies on earth, extremely popular and addictive products that are also necessary in many ways. It's okay. Like I've talked to a lot of creators who are kids. This is really fun and interesting for them. So it's not easy. Is there any example where it's been easy for

I can see high schools not allowing it. That makes sense. That could happen relatively easily. That is happening, yeah. Age-gating is a legislative thing of social media companies. I know they say they age-gate, but they don't. No, no, they don't. But true age-gating has to be legislative, so harder. Is there any example where this collective action has happened?

Because you're saying it's amazingly doable. We could do it in a year or two. So, for example, look, so there's a group called Wait Until Eighth where in second grade or so you sign a pledge that you won't give your kid a smartphone until eighth grade. That's been going for a number of years. Now, the only problem with it is that eighth grade is in middle school. And so I think we need to really clear this out of middle school. We need to really focus on elementary and middle school and let kids get through early puberty. So it should be Wait Until Ninth.

But the point is, you know, she worked out how to solve the collective action problem. Well, now that this year we're at a tipping point, so many people are talking about it. The UK tipped over in February. In February, UK parents were rising up en masse to say enough is enough. So once you reach a critical mass, you know, you see this with

With the fall of dictatorships, everyone's quiet, everyone's afraid. But then once some people start speaking up, everyone speaks up. And that's what's happening. And it began before my book was published. It began in February in the UK. So I think we are seeing many more parents. A lot of parents, I get a lot of emails saying, I'm buying a copy of the book for all my kids.

kids, friends, parents, or I'm buying a copy of the book for every family in the school in some cases. Because if everyone's on the same page, or if even half the people on the same page, you can do things that are hard to do if you're on your own. And it is happening. But can you list any other deeply ingrained social norms in this country that are also necessary and addictive that change quickly without any legislation? Without legislation...

I would say there has never been anything that trapped us in a collective action problem to the degree that this does. And that's why it was able to change. Nothing has ever changed childhood this quickly. I mean, childhood was transformed between 2010 and 2015. And so I don't think I can point to a previous example where childhood was unchanged that quickly.

But this one, I think, will be like that. Phone-free schools, a year or two from now, many, many more schools are going to be phone-free, which means you lock the phones up all day. In the UK, I think the tip-over was the age-appropriate design code law in the UK, which is now—

So, yeah. So it can happen very quickly and it is happening very quickly. But you don't take the idea of the age-appropriate design code law, AADC, as a duty to care requirement for social media companies. In Europe in general, they have more of a responsibility than they do here. They design into their platforms what's in the best interest of minors.

They have an age assurance component, which is not the same age verification. But we have COSA here, which has been controversial, largely because Senator Marsha Blackburn won't stop talking about transgender, protecting from transgender people, which is heinous. But nonetheless, there's elements of people who think there should be legislation. You don't think legislation is—you are a backer of COSA, but at the same time—

If kids are going to be spending 10 hours a day online, I want it to be less toxic. But my four main recommendations are more about creating conditions under which kids will just not be on as much.

And so, if I, so, you know, look, age gating for me is the big, that's my one big ask of the government. The government created this problem with COPPA in 1998, saying the minimum age at which a child can sign a contract and give away their data and be treated as an adult is 13. Oh, and no enforcement whatsoever. As long as the company doesn't know that you're underage, they're okay. And then Congress compounded the problem by saying, oh, and in addition, they're

The companies can do whatever the hell they want to your child, and you can't sue them. You can't sue them for what the companies show you. That's Section 230. So if Congress basically said there will be no age gating, the companies get off scot-free, they don't have to enforce minimum ages, and they can't be sued. Well, these are massive market failures created by congressional legislation.

And so, yeah, I kind of think that Congress should fix the mistake that it made. I'm not calling for some radical new thing. I'm not calling, you know, in the UK, they're calling for banning sales of smartphones to under-16s. I don't think that's the right way to go. Certainly not in America. In Europe, they do things differently. But over here, given that there are no age limits on porn, on anything...

So, you know, that has to change eventually. Like, we can't go on this way. And so that's my big ask is, so much like, you know, the Florida bill, the Utah bill, there are a whole bunch that say, in this state, you know, you can't open an account unless you are 16 or sometimes 18, but you can do it with parental permission. Let's let parents, parents are trying to control this and they can't.

So let me ask you the last question with these companies, because we haven't talked about them at all. And I think they like us arguing with, I think they like the argument you and your critics are having, because it muddies the waters completely. You study morality. Should we pass moral judgment on Mark Zuckerberg, or any of them, I'm using him as an example, for making billions off of exploiting the vulnerability of human psychology, as you quote Sean Parker saying about Facebook in your book? He said the same to me, Sean Parker. That's right.

I've equated them to arms dealers, tobacco CEOs. I've put them, you know, pornographers, unethical. Do social media executives belong on that list? Will working in social media eventually become shameful in that regard? And what is their responsibility at this point?

So, you know, I think the answer is yes, and for this reason. So, you know, I teach in a business school. I teach the professional responsibility course. I teach about efficient markets and market failures and the constant temptation to exploit market failures, such as if your product imposes costs on others and that improves your profitability, you know, that's a way to profit, but it's unethical. You're hurting other people.

And so, you know, in general, I'm not going to say, oh, companies are making money and that's bad. But to the extent that these are the most important companies in the world, they're certainly the most important companies in children's lives. They've been given carte blanche by Congress to do whatever the hell they want, can't be sued, don't have to age gate.

They've had numerous whistleblowers, and by they, especially Meta. Meta seems to be the one that has had the most ethical problems. They have the most data. Well, that's true. Wouldn't we like to get their data? That's the data we want, actually. That's right. They're the only ones who really know what's going on. So I think Meta, and I think TikTok is also the other one that's doing a huge amount of harm.

So given that we have massive market failures, given that they know what the problems are, they know what effects they're having. When they did internal studies, they found that the girls said Instagram was the main cause of rising anxiety. Yeah.

They blame Instagram more than other platforms. And Arturo Bejar was the most recent whistleblower. He reported that his daughter was being approached by strange men with sexual advances, like on a regular basis. This is just a regular thing that was happening to her at the age of 14. He said, there's no easy way for her to report it. All we have to do is give them a button by which they can report because it wasn't harassment. It was just like, you know, a man trying to get to know her.

It was creepy. There's no way to report it. And so because, as Arturo says, they never did, you know, that was several years ago, and they don't do anything. And so I think they have an enormous moral responsibility, given that they are now basically in charge of our children.

The decisions they make dominate the lives of our children. So, yeah, I think they have a duty of care and they're not living up to it. And, yeah, they've been told easy ways to improve and they're not living up to it. So, yes, I think putting a few of them, I can't speak about all of them, but I think those that have been told ways to do it and haven't changed, I think they absolutely belong on the list with arms dealers, with tobacco company executives. Yes, absolutely. And then...

And the last question, parenting doesn't come with a manual, but there's some truisms on certain things, including play. I completely agree with you on that and care and kindness. But one of the biggest problems I find with this whole issue is the parents themselves are addicted. The parents themselves are sucked into this, especially people 30 to 60, I would say, particularly. How do you solve a problem where your own self is addicted?

has a problem. I think about that a lot. I don't know if we, we can't live without this stuff from a job point of view. It's addictive. It's necessary. It, you know, it crawls down our brain stem as Tristan Harris talks about. So how do you solve that problem? If you're, it's sort of like a parent who smoked a lot of weed as a kid and telling their kids don't smoke weed. By the way, I didn't smoke weed, so I can do that easily. I did, but didn't inhale. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, first, as for the kids, kids aren't actually that interested in what you're doing. They're not copying you. Once they're teenagers, they're much more interested in what other teens are doing. Oh, and that was true before 2010. It's 10 times more true now because now they don't look at you very much. They're spending most of the time looking at their phones. So if I could get age-gating—

As an adult.

And they've been on it their whole lives. And they give most of their attention, goes to their phone. And, you know, I work with them to talk about, you know, what kind of life do you want? Do you want a life where you have seen, you know, 100,000, a million YouTube videos and you've responded to all these things and you have only half an hour a day of attention to do things that you want?

Or do you want to regain control of your attention and take charge of your life and take charge of your appraisals? And the results are nearly miraculous. The students, once they cut down their notifications radically, once they move the social media apps off of their phone, they can still use it on their computer. Many of them choose to do it that way. But once you turn your phone back into a Swiss Army knife,

You know, that's what it was originally. It was a tool you pulled up when you wanted something. Utility. It was utility. That's right. And once the app store comes on, once social media comes on, once push notifications come on, now for many people, it's become our master and it's interrupting us all the time. And so I draw a lot on Cal Newport. Cal Newport has these wonderful books, you know, deep work, slow productivity. So I have them read deep work and they love it and they discover, oh, wow, when I cut my notifications from 500 down to 100 a day,

I actually can think for 10 minutes in a row. I actually can sit down and do my homework, and I don't constantly go to my phone. So, you know, even if there may be some permanent effects on some kids from early puberty, the brain is pretty plastic, and human psychology is amazing. So we can overcome this, but it takes work and experience.

It's in part because the 30 of them do it together and they're supporting each other, they're telling their stories. So when you have social support, you're all doing it together. So once again, collective action problems. We adults are messed up, as you said. We're distracted. We don't have our attention.

But if we work in groups, if we work in communities, I think we can get it back. All right. I'll leave on that. I have to say my kids took social media off their things because they felt bad. My son was like, I feel bad. I'm taking it off. And I think he still uses it, but it's still, it's a very different experience for sure. In any case, thank you so much for being so patient and answering those questions. I really appreciate it, Jonathan. Always a pleasure to talk with you, Cara. And you push back more than almost anyone else. Well, I have to, you know.

On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Kate Gallagher, and Mary Mathis. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. And I'd like to give an extra special thank you to Naeem Araza, our longtime executive producer, who's done an amazing job working with me for four years here and at the New York Times. And I'd like to give an extra special thank you to our

We can't say what she's up to next. That's up to her, but it's very cool and we're excited for her. Cheers, Naima. We're excited for our dinner when we all are in New York together.

If you're already following the show, you get a phone-free vacation in Hawaii, which I would like very much. If not, you'll be stuck doom-scrolling forever, even in your dreams. Or nightmares, however it may be. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.