Drop Out of Life

‘It’s Causing Them to Drop Out of Life’: How Phones Warped Gen Z

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt warns social media is fueling a mental health crisis.

By MARC NOVICOFF

It’s hard to believe sometimes that smartphones and social media haven’t been around forever — but for one generation, they have. Gen Z doesn’t know a time when they weren’t ubiquitous. This cohort also happens to be the generation with the worst mental health in America. Is that a coincidence?

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has reams of data to argue it’s not. And in his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, he is launching a shot in what he hopes will become a full-scale war against social media and smartphone use by kids and teens.

“Our children are going on a conveyor belt,” Haidt tells me. “And a lot of them are getting shredded.”

Through his research, which he also highlights on his Substack, “After Babel,” Haidt found that teen mental health has dramatically worsened after iPhone usage became widespread and Instagram was created. While he blames Instagram for causing the most initial damage of the new era — particularly in fueling declining mental health for girls — he now sees a new, graver threat. “TikTok is arguably the worst consumer product ever invented,” says Haidt, who’s a strong supporter of legislation targeting TikTok in Congress.

Without action — from parents, lawmakers, schools and tech companies — the youth mental health crisis will continue unabated, he warns. And there could be some unexpected political fallout. As Haidt puts it, with a growing sense of anxiety and dislocation, people may become more open to an authoritarian leader who promises to stop the chaos.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How do we know that the rise of smartphones has caused poor mental health among young people, as opposed to just being correlated with it?

Because, in addition to the correlational evidence, which is very consistent, there are also longitudinal studies that allow us to infer causality. And most importantly, there are true experiments.

Jean Twenge and I have been collecting all the studies we can find at this Google Doc — we have a review called “Social media and mental health, a collaborative review.” What we have is 34 studies that suggest a causal effect. And there are 21 studies that show no effect, but here’s the thing, the studies that show no effect, they take measurements a day or a week apart. When we look at longitudinal studies that use a month or more, the great majority find an effect.

And that’s just one body of the empirical research. The more important body of empirical research are the true experiments: randomized control trials. We have 16 just in our review — though there are other newer ones — that found an effect and only six that didn’t.

There are another six studies that we found that used natural experiments: When high speed internet comes to one region in Spain versus another, or one region of British Columbia versus another, do we see increases in adolescent mental illness? And the answer is yes, in all six studies, and in most of them, it’s especially the girls. What we see over and over again is a similar pattern.

How and why did we as a society let the problem get so out of hand?

Because we had a very different view of these technologies in 2012. My argument is that between 2010 and 2015, adolescent life was rewired.

In 2010, almost everyone had a flip phone. They had no Instagram account because it was just invented that year. They had no high-speed data, no high-speed internet, and they had to pay for their internet usage. They had to pay for each text. So a 13- or 14-year-old kid in the year 2010 was not online all day long.

But over the next few years, Instagram becomes very popular. The front-facing camera comes out [on iPhones] in 2010. So now photographs are much more of yourself. Most people get high-speed internet, most people get an unlimited data plan. And video games get much more immersive with multiplayer online games that thrive on the high-speed internet.

For all these reasons, for adolescents in 2010, [tech] was not terribly harmful. But by 2015, it was. At least that’s the conclusion I came to from looking at the timing [of mental illness spikes] in America and internationally, and the timing of technological change.

Growing up as a member of Gen Z, I often played video games with my friends and used social media to connect with them. How do we make sure that we don’t sacrifice the more positive uses of screens and smartphones for children when we scale back?

Well, let’s distinguish between the internet, which is wonderful — and no one’s talking about keeping children away from the internet — and social media on a smartphone. The latest Gallup data shows that American teens are spending literally five hours a day just on social media. I think it’s very difficult to find evidence of benefit from heavy use.

Let’s take video games. Boys love video games. Almost all boys play video games. Do you think that boys would suffer if they were limited to playing an hour a day on weekdays and two hours a day on weekends? Would that be a harm compared to say three or four hours a day?

In the early 2010s, when kids were moving their social lives online, we thought. “Well, OK, they’re not spending time with each other in person, but isn’t this just as good? They’re posting, they’re liking each other’s posts, they’re commenting on each other’s posts, the boys are playing video games. Isn’t this just as good?” And at the time, we had no reason to think it wasn’t.

But now we know the answer is no, it is not just as good. We know this because when they transfer their social life, as the girls transferred it onto social media and the boys transferred it onto video games, that’s exactly when the epidemic of loneliness accelerated. Girls are suffering more depression and anxiety; boys are suffering more loneliness and friendlessness.

In the early 2010s, which was around a peak time for moving on to multiplayer video games, you might expect a wave of happiness and feeling that you have friends — you now have all these friends you can get together with all around the world — but it turns out that it’s like empty calories. Video games gave boys huge amounts of shallow social connection and caused them to feel lonelier. Social media gave girls huge amounts of shallow and competitive social connection and it made them feel lonelier. So I don’t think much was gained from the switch from real life to virtual. And I think there’d be minimal cost to reducing screen use in middle school by 90 percent.

How do you think the increased depression and anxiety in young people is affecting their politics, or American politics in general?

A healthy democratic society requires some degree of shared facts and some degree of trust in institutions and some degree of trust in each other. And all of that is declining for many reasons, but one of them is the rise of social media. The social construction of reality turns into a million tiny fragments on social media.

When 9/11 happened, Americans generally came to the conclusion very quickly that al Qaeda had attacked us. But if that happened tomorrow, we would not come to such a conclusion. We’re no longer able to agree on basic facts about what is happening or what happened. Now, none of this is the fault of Gen Z. This is happening to people of all ages. But if you are raised to political consciousness in a fragmented world where you can’t believe anything, where the Russians are messing with us and trying to get us to believe that we can’t believe anything, it’s going to make it tougher to become vibrant, engaged democratic citizens.

There is also the rise of depression and anxiety. The chief characteristic of Gen Z is not so much depression, it’s primarily anxiety. If anxiety is the normal state of affairs for a generation, they’re going to be much more sensitive and they’re going to find many more events threatening. And as we know from Karen Stenner’s work, when people feel threatened and when they feel that society is fragmenting, that triggers the “authoritarian dynamic,” as she calls it — it activates authoritarianism. A population that is anxious, afraid and threatened is going to be more open to a strongman, to an authoritarian leader, to someone who promises to stop the chaos and stop the threats.

And there’s a curious characteristic of the data — it is especially young people who identify as being on the left who got depressed and anxious first and fastest. About a year ago, there was a big discussion online about these data, about how liberal girls fell ill first and fastest, and Michelle Goldberg weighed in and Matt Yglesias weighed in.

Why is it that social media is causing bigger mental health problems for girls than boys even as girls outpace boys in the classroom?

They are two separate issues. I believe social media harm girls more because social media offers the lure of social connection in a way that appeals to girls, but then it literally blocks quality social connections. So it harms girls more than boys.

As for school performance, the issue there is not that girls are doing so great, it’s that boys are withdrawing from the real world. They’re just investing less time and effort in everything that matters for success in life, as Richard Reeves has pointed out in his wonderful book Of Boys and Men. They’re largely spending more and more time on video games and other digital pursuits.

The digital life is not causing depression and anxiety in boys to the extent that it is in girls, but it’s causing them to drop out of life, not cultivate skills, like flirting or courtship or working for pay. It’s causing them to drop out of life in ways that will block their flourishing for the rest of their lives.

You call for action in the book from parents, educators, Congress and Silicon Valley. Who has the most responsibility to limit kids’ access to smartphones and social media?

The parents have the primary duty and oversight; the problem is that parents are struggling to do it and they’re not able to. The situation is just as if we said the drinking age is 21, and it’s the parents’ responsibility to enforce this because you can’t expect bars and casinos and strip clubs to check IDs. That’s obviously absurd. Parents can’t do that unless they literally lock up their children and do not let them outside, and it’s the same thing here.

If your child can get to a computer that is connected to the internet, they can open as many Instagram and TikTok accounts as they want. You’ll never know. Parents are in an impossible situation.

We have this bizarre legal situation, in which there are no age barriers whatsoever on the internet, where companies can essentially do whatever they want to children — they can treat them like adults — and Congress has granted them immunity from lawsuits. Our children are going on a conveyor belt, and a lot of them are getting shredded. A lot of them are getting harmed. A lot of them are finding that their childhood is now sucked up by a couple of platforms, primarily TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. And many of them are getting sextorted. Many of them are exposed to pornography. Many of them are being approached by older men, and Congress has said in Section 230 — which has been too widely interpreted by the courts — that we can’t do a damn thing about it. This is an untenable situation. I actually think this is an outrage.

Congress made a big mistake with COPPA [the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act] in 1998, when they set the minimum age too low at 13 [for websites to allow data collection]. Congress made a huge mistake in setting it way too low and not mandating any enforcement. Congress wrote the law so that as long as Facebook doesn’t know that you’re under 13, they’re fine. So any 10-year-old can open an account anywhere, and the company has no obligation to check IDs or to kick them off when they know.

Congress helped to launch the internet by granting the industry protection from lawsuits based on the content of other people’s posts. But somehow this evolved into saying the platforms can do whatever the hell they want to kids. They can put on as many addictive features as they want, they can do things that they know are harming mental health, and they’re OK. No one can touch them. That’s our situation, and this has to change.

Tell me why you support the bill moving through Congress that forces the sale of TikTok or bans it if a sale doesn’t take place. Are you surprised to see it advancing as far as it has considering Congress’ inability to regulate social media?

Yes, I’m thrilled. I had largely given up hope on the U.S. Congress. It caused a problem and then walked away from it. And so I am thrilled that this bill has legs. I don’t favor banning companies. But I’m horrified that the most influential platform on American children by far is a company that is legally bound to do what the Chinese Communist Party wants it to do. That is literally what Chinese law says. I don’t believe for a moment any promise that data is separated or that there’s independence.

It is a completely untenable situation to have our largest geopolitical rival having not just access, but the ability to direct the activities of the platform most influential on our kids. Even if the psychological harm is similar to Instagram [Reels] and YouTube Shorts, the national security implications are unique to TikTok. And so that’s why I favor forcing the divestiture.

With your kids, what do you restrict and what do you allow?

I had a firm rule against social media in middle school. And it’s an ongoing negotiation in high school.

Among all the social media apps, which do you think is most dangerous to young people? Is it Instagram, TikTok, something else?

I think Instagram caused the most damage for the first eight years of this new era. From 2012 to 2020, when we see the huge increases [in mental illness] for girls, I think Instagram is the single platform that contributed the most to girls’ declining mental health.

However, I’m now coming to see that TikTok is much more powerful than anything else out there. TikTok is able to train behavior the way a dog trainer trains a dog with tiny little rewards for tiny action. As I’m discovering from talking to my students, short-form videos of the kind pioneered by TikTok are the most addictive, the most narcotic. They put you into kind of a mesmerized state, much like a slot machine addict. TikTok is a platform that young people themselves say they wish didn’t exist.

Given how much time it soaks up, given that it gives no benefit to the people who use it, who see it as a net negative in their lives, I think TikTok is arguably the worst consumer product ever invented.

How many hours a day do you spend using screens? And how many of those are on social media? Have you tried to cut back?

For me, because, I’m a professor and a scholar, I’m pretty much always on one of my three computers. I don’t really use my phone except for tools. Like I use my phone to make phone calls and I use it for the flashlight. I use it for mapping. I use it for Uber, but I never, ever check social media on my phone. I don’t like typing on it. I don’t like using it.

I probably spend about an hour a week on Twitter and that’s it. There were times when I was spending an hour a day, and I finally realized I don’t have that much time. I need that time for research and writing. So I’ve cut back, but there were times when I was spending an hour a day, and I could see that it affected my mental health. I could see that it made me more anxious, more focused on what people were saying about me. There were several years when I was a medium level user of Twitter. And I learned my lesson. It’s just really bad for me.

Anything else on your mind?

The other thing I would say is that, as a social psychologist, I’ve watched as our society has gone haywire since the early 2010s, and this started before Donald Trump became president. I believe it enabled Donald Trump to become president. And I’ve been studying how the transformation of our communication and information networks and personal and social networks has made it harder for democracies to function well and easier for authoritarian countries to function well.

So I’m extremely alarmed about the movement of so much of life onto social media platforms — extremely alarmed about what it’s done to American democracy in particular and to young people all around the Western world.