In Jonathan Haidt’s telling, the lives of adolescents irrevocably changed in 2010 with the introduction of the iPhone 4 and its front-facing camera. Suddenly, young users were inundated with exquisitely composed, edited, and curated images of acquaintances and celebrities bearing no resemblance to what they saw in the mirror, with the predictable erosion of their self-esteem and psychological health.
Haidt’s The Anxious Generation documents the post-iPhone 4 explosion of anxiety and depression disorders among adolescents – a 150 percent increase among both boys and girls; since the pre-2010 prevalence of both disorders was higher among girls, they suffered far more in absolute numbers.
New communications media have always met with resistance: Plato criticized the use of writing for serious analysis, which he thought should reside only within the psyche, while the introductions of the printing press, radio, television, and internet were all disdained for their supposed cheapening of culture and discourse. Surely criticism of social media is similarly misguided. Haidt retorts that, at least as far as we can tell, no epidemics of mental illness or violence accompanied the advents of writing, the printing press, radio, television, and internet.
Haidt’s social science peers also noted that many of the studies he cites involved self-reported mental health and were thus of dubious reliability. Haidt answers that suicide and suicide attempts, surely reliable measures of psychological distress, have shown the same 150 percent increase since 2010. (Suicide attempts are more frequent among girls; actual suicide is more frequent in boys.) Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, has borne the full brunt of the onslaught, which millennials, brought up on flip phones, largely escaped.
Other critics point out that of course young people are depressed – consider, for example, the effects of the 9/11 attacks and global financial crisis. Again, no: the prevalence of mental illness did not spike after either of these events. More importantly, national crises tend to increase, not decrease, social coherence: As put by Haidt, “People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.”
The importance of free play
Haidt’s central thesis is that, like many young mammals, adolescent human beings engage in hours of daily “free play” that promotes healthy emotional, intellectual, and social development. Males, famously, do not fully develop the neuronal connections to their behavior-moderating frontal lobes until their mid-twenties. In short, he posits that because the human brain takes about two decades to fully mature, free play evolved to aid in this critical process.
The most critical period, it seems, is adolescence: For example, the Japanese children of executives sent to the United States between ages nine and 14 were the most likely to feel “culturally American.” After 2010, camera-equipped smart phones effected a shift from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” in which the young spent upwards of several hours per day staring at their phones, while time spent with friends fell by 70 percent. Haidt calls this substitution of screen time for play “The Great Rewiring” of young brains that is directly responsible for the dramatic increase in adolescent mental health disorders.
An intriguing hypothesis, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary data, which is in many cases lacking. As Haidt himself admits, correlation is not causation. One well-designed study involving over 11,000 participants demonstrated no differences in fMRI data between heavy and light device users, while another study across 72 countries demonstrated that, if anything, heavy Facebook users reported slightly greater psychological well-being than light users. (This paper aggregated 13–34-year-olds, an admittedly wide age range).
A widely quoted review in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, concluded, “Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. [The aggregate data] suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.”
Moreover, if Haidt’s free-play hypothesis holds water, then interventions aimed at increasing it should improve school performance and child well-being, which his own literature review shows scant evidence for. Neither does the broader academic literature support the free-play hypothesis; one exhaustive review concluded that “existing evidence does not support strong causal claims about the unique importance of pretend play for development.” Full stop.
Haidt maintains that mobile devices affect girls more than boys for multiple reasons, prime among which are that girls are more sensitive to imperfections in body image, and the fact that they also value social connection more than physical prowess, the opposite of the case with boys.
According to Haidt, boys suffer more subtle damage from their phones, not the least of which is an addiction to pornography.
Blaming cell phones
All the book’s narratives lead back to the cell phone, whether warranted or not. The author, for example, cites Richard Reeves’ magisterial Of Boys and Men, which documents the precipitous recent fall off in academic and vocational performance among young males, as supportive of the corrosive effects of a phone-based childhood. Readers of Reeve’s book, though, will search in vain for an indictment of mobile devices or social media addiction; rather, he ascribes plunging male fortunes to later male neurological maturity, a disadvantage unmasked over the past several decades by the gradual relaxation of traditionally misogynous educational and job environments.
The Anxious Generation flashes other warning signs; it contains nary a mention of the large U.S. and international survey databases that underlie serious social science research, such as the World Values Survey (WVS), Eurobarometer, and General Social Survey (GSS). Haidt does quote data from another well-respected source, the Pew Research Center, but only for point-in-time, not longitudinal, data.
The same omission mars another well-regarded and best-selling Haidt title, The Righteous Mind, about the differences in moral perception between the political right and left. This earlier book also offers a clue to Haidt’s dislike of social media, namely, his admiration for tightly bound traditional societies built on personal trust and mutual individual support, most notably that of Manhattan’s diamond district.
Had he consulted the WVS, he’d have found that nations dominated by the traditional societal values he so admires exhibit lower trust of those outside family and tribal boundaries – that is, a short “radius of trust” characteristic of tribal societies. These databases clearly show that an emphasis on traditional societal values – such as respect for authority, tribal loyalty, and male dominance – characterizes less wealthy nations with low overall levels of health and psychological well-being.
He’s also a big fan of Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” – the thrill of crowd enthusiasm that suffuses sports stadiums and political rallies. Alas, this is the same thrill that characterizes the mob behavior of the Nuremburg rallies and in the lynchings of African Americans. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Haidt is a bit of a romanticist who yearns for the good old days when men were men, people respected the flag, and children were free to roam the neighborhood free of adult supervision.
Finally, Haidt’s prose is overwrought. Consider his simile for social media’s exploitation of adolescent attention: “It was as if the U.S. government suddenly opened up the entire state of Alaska for drilling, and oil companies competed fiercely to stake out the best territories and start sinking wells.”
Another example of Haidt’s weakness for narrative-based policy discourse is his assertion that today’s parents are overprotective in the physical world, but under-protective in the online world. He states, for example, that a child is now at greater risk from online sexual predators than from those lurking in the local neighborhood. His evidence? Descriptive New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles about online predators.
Haidt may be right about this, but he presents no hard data on the relative prevalence of online versus local neighborhood predation. (Never mind that only 10 percent of childhood sexual abuse involves strangers, whether online or local, the other 90 percent perpetrated by household members and close neighbors.)
Worthy recommendations nonetheless
Despite its flaws, you should still read The Anxious Generation, if for no other reason than that it lays out in lapidary fashion the case for tighter regulation of social media, for restricting children’s screen time, and for delaying their first smart phone purchase. Little data or analytical rigor is required to understand that the disruption caused by multiple cell phones in the classroom that emit notification alarms every few minutes should be prohibited.
The book’s last few chapters, which provide a roadmap of common-sense recommendations for parenting in the social-media era, are worth the purchase price alone. To cite only a few: phone-free schools; plenty of unsupervised play; freedom to roam the neighborhood beginning around age eight; no smartphones before age 14, and even then only with robust parental controls; and no social media before age 16.
As a bonus, the book provides a superb introduction to the fascinating social science and evolutionary psychology pioneered by the likes of Joseph Henrich, Peter Boyd, and Robert Richerson. (A list to which I’d add Robin Dunbar [The Evolution of Religion] and Ralph Wrangham [Catching Fire].)
In summary, The Anxious Generation is marred by major analytical flaws and incessant polemicizing, and after closing its covers the reader will need to stay attuned to the ongoing peer-reviewed research on the effects of social media on children and adolescents. (To his credit, Haidt suggests a randomized controlled trial of liberal school-based play schedules combined with strict phone prohibitions.)
Even so, The Anxious Generation is still worth a close, and admittedly enjoyable, read. After all, it’s still early days in the evolving controversy over social media’s harms. Consider that the overwhelming majority of social media executives shield their own children from their companies’ products – they are telling the rest of us that Haidt is likely right.
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, the co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and a writer with several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from the CFA Institute.
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In Jonathan Haidt’s telling, the lives of adolescents irrevocably changed in 2010 with the introduction of the iPhone 4 and its front-facing camera. Suddenly, young users were inundated with exquisitely composed, edited, and curated images of acquaintances and celebrities bearing no resemblance to what they saw in the mirror, with the predictable erosion of their self-esteem and psychological health.
