Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #291

The following is a conversation with Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at NYU and critic of the negative effects of social media on the human mind and human civilization. He gives a respectful but hard hitting response to my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and together him and I try to figure out how we can do better, how we can lessen the amount of depression and division in the world. He has brilliantly discussed these topics in his writing, including, including in his book the Coddling of the American Mind and in his recent long article in the Atlantic titled why the past 10 years of American Life have Been Uniquely Stupid. When Teddy Roosevelt said in his famous speech that it is not the critic who counts, he has not yet read the brilliant writing of Jonathan Haidt. I disagree with John on some of the details of his analysis and ideas, but both his criticism and our disagreement is essential if we are to build better and better technologies that connect us. Social media has both the power to destroy our society and to help it flourish. It's up to us to figure out.

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This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jonathan Haidt.

So you've been thinking about the human mind for quite a long time. You wrote the happiness hypothesis, the righteous mind, the coddling of the American mind. And today you're thinking you're writing a lot about social media and about democracy. So perhaps if it's okay, let's go through the thread that connects all of that work. How do we get from the very beginning to today with the good, the bad and the ugly of social.

So I'm a social psychologist, which means I study how we think about other people and how people affect our thinking. And in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I picked the topic of moral psychology and I studied how morality varied across countries. I studied in Brazil and India. And in the 90s I began. This was like, I got my PhD in 1992 and in that decade was really when the American culture war kind of really began to blow up. And I began to notice that left and right in this country were becoming like separate countries. And you could use the tools of cultural psychology to study this, split, this moral battle between left and right. So I started doing that and I began growing alarmed in the, in the early 2000s about how bad polarization was getting. And I began studying the causes of polarization, you know, bringing moral psychology to bear on our political problems. And I was originally going to write a book to basically help the Democrats stop Screwing up, because I could see that some of my research showed people on the right understand people on the left. They know what they think. You can't grow up in America without knowing what progressives think. But here I grew up generally on the left, and I had no idea what conservatives thought until I went and sought it out and started reading conservative things like National Review. So originally, I wanted to actually help the Democrats to understand moral psychology so they could stop losing to George W. Bush. And I got a contract to write the Righteous Mind. And once I started writing it, I committed to understanding conservatives by reading the best writings, not the worst. And I discovered, you know what? You don't understand anything until you look from multiple perspectives. And I discovered there are a lot of great social science ideas in the conservative intellectual tradition. And so. And I also began to see, you know what? America's actually in real trouble. And this is like 2008, 2009. Things are really. We're coming apart here. So I began to really focus my research on helping left and right understand each other and helping our democratic institutions to work better. Okay, so all this is before I had any interest in social media. You know, I was on Twitter, I guess, like 2009, and, you know, not much. Didn't think about it much. And then, so I'm going along as a social psychologist studying this, and then everything seems to kind of blow up in 2014, 2015 at universities. And that's when Greg Lukianoff came to me in May of 2014 and said, John, weird stuff is happening. Students are freaking out about a speaker coming to campus that they don't have to go see. And they're saying, it's dangerous. It's violence. Like, what is going on? And so anyway, Greg's ideas about how we were teaching students to think in distorted ways that led us to write the coddling of the American mind, which wasn't primarily about social media either. It was about, you know, this sort of a rise of depression, anxiety. But after that, things got so much worse everywhere. And that's when I began to think, like, well, something systemically has changed. Something has changed about the fabric of the social universe. And so ever since then, I've been focused on social media.

So we're going to try to sneak up to the problems and the solutions at hand from different directions. I have a lot of questions whether it's fundamentally the nature of social media that's the problem. It's the decisions of various human beings that lead the social media companies that's the problem, is There still some component that's highlighted in the coddling of the American mind. That's the individual psychology at play or the the way parenting and education works to make sort of emphasize anti fragility of the human mind as it interacts with the social media platforms and the other humans through the social. So all that beautiful mess, that should.

Take us an hour or two to.

Cover or maybe a couple of years. Yes, but. So let's start if it's o. You said you wanted to challenge some of the things that Mark Zuckerberg has said in a conversation with me. What are some of the ideas he expressed that you disagree with?

Okay. There are two major areas that I study. One is what is happening with teen mental health. It fell off a cliff in 2013, it was very sudden. And then the other is what is happening to our democratic and epistemic institutions. That means knowledge generating like the universities, journalism. So my main areas of research where I'm collecting the empirical research and trying to make sense of it is what's happened teen mental health and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor. And then the other areas, what's happening to democracies, not just America and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor to the dysfunction. So I'm sure we'll get to that because that's what the Atlantic article is about. But if we focus first on what's happened to teen mental health. So before I read the quotes from Mark, I I'd like to just give the overview and it is this. There's a lot of data tracking adolescents. There's self reports of how depressed, anxious, lonely. There's data on hospital admissions for self harm, there's data on suicide and all of these things, they bounce around somewhat, but they're relatively level in the early 2000s. And then all of a sudden around, you know, around 2000, 2010 to 2013, depending on which statistic you're looking at, all of a sudden they begin to shoot upwards. More so for girls in some cases. But on the whole it's like up for both sexes. It's just that boys have lower levels of anxiety and depression. So the curve is not quite as dramatic. But what we see is not small increases, not like oh, 10%, 20%. No, the increases are between 50 and 150% depending on which group you're looking at. You know, suicide for preteen girls. Thank you. Thankfully, it's not very common, but it's two to three times more common now or by 2015. It had doubled between 2010 and 2015, it doubled. So something is going radically wrong in the world of American preteens and what we. So as I've been studying it, I found, first of all, it's not just America, it's identical in Canada and the uk Australia, New Zealand are very similar. They're just after a little delay. So whatever we're looking for here, but yet it's not as clear in the Germanic countries. In continental Europe, it's a little different. And we can get into that when we talk about childhood. But something's happening in many countries that. And it started right around 2012, 2013. It wasn't gradual. It hit girls hardest and it hit pre teen girls the hardest. So what could it be? Nobody has come up with another explanation. Nobody. It wasn't the financial crisis that wouldn't have hit preteen girls the hardest. There is no other explanation. The complexity here in the data is, of course, as everyone knows, correlation doesn't prove causation. The fact that television viewing was going up in the 50s and the 60s and 70s doesn't mean that that was the cause of the crime. So what I've done, and this is work with Gene Twenge, who wrote the book Igen, is because I was challenged, you know, when I, when Greg and I put out the book the Coddling the American Mind, some researchers challenged us and said, oh, you don't know what you're talking about. You know, the correlations between social media use and, and mental health, they exist, but they're tiny. It's, it's, you know, like correlation coefficient of 0.03 or, you know, a beta of 0.05, you know, tiny little things. And one famous article said it's no bigger than the correlation of mental, of bad mental health and eating potatoes, which exists, but it's like, it's so tiny, it's zero, essentially. And that, that claim that social media is no more harmful than eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses, it was a very catchy claim and it's caught on. And I keep hearing that. But let me unpack why that's not true. And then we'll get to what Mark said. Because what Mark basically said here, I'll actually read it, by the way, just.

To pause real quick, is you implied, but just make it explicit that the best explanation we have now, as you're proposing, is that a very particular aspect of social media is the cause, which is not just social media, but the like button and the retweet, a certain mechanism of virality, that that was invented or perhaps some aspect of social media is the cause.

That's a good idea. Let's be clear. Connecting people is good. I mean, overall, the more you connect people, the better. Giving people the telephone was an amazing step forward. Giving them free telephone, you know, free long distance is even better. Video was. I mean, so connecting people is good. I'm not a Luddite. And social media, at least the idea of users posting things like that happens on LinkedIn and it's great. It can serve all kinds of needs. What I'm talking about here is not the Internet, it's not technology, it's not smartphones, and it's not even all social media. It's a particular business model in which people are incentivized to create content. And that content is what brings other people on. And the people on there are the product which is sold to advertisers. It's that particular business model which Facebook pioneered, which seems to be incredibly harmful for teenagers, especially for young girls. 10 to 14 years old is where they're most vulnerable and, and it seems to be particularly harmful for democratic institutions because it leads to all kinds of anger, conflict, and the destruction of any shared narrative. So that's what we're talking about. We're talking about Facebook, Twitter. I don't have any data on TikTok. I suspect it's going to end up being having a lot of really bad effects because the teens are on it so much. And to be really clear, since we're doing the nuance now in this section, lots of good stuff happens. You know, a lot of. There's a lot of funny things on, on Twitter. I use Twitter because it's an amazing way to put out news, to put out when I write something, you know, you know, you and I, you know, use it to, to promote things. We, we learn things quickly.

Well, there's. Could be. Now this is harder to measure and we'll probably. I'll try to mention it because so much of our conversation will be about rigorous criticism. I'll try to sometimes mention what are the possible positive effects of social media in different ways. So for example, in the way I've been using Twitter, not the promotion or any of that kind of stuff, it makes me feel less lonely to connect with people, to make me smile. A little bit of humor here and there. And that at scale is a very interesting effect. Being connected across the globe, especially during times of COVID and so on, it's very difficult to measure that. So we kind of have to consider that and be honest that there is a trade off. We have to be honest about the positive and the negative. And sometimes we're not sufficiently positive or in a rigorous scientific way about the. We're not rigorous in a scientific way about the negative. And that's what we're trying to do here. And so that brings us to the Mark Zuckerberg email.

Okay, but wait, let me just pick up on the issue of trade offs because people might think like, well, like how much of this do we need? If we have too much, it's bad. No, that's a one dimensional conceptualization. This is a multi dimensional issue. And a lot of people seem to think like, oh, what would we have done without social media during COVID Like, we would have been sitting there alone in our homes. Yeah. If all we had was, you know, texting, telephone, zoom, Skype, multiplayer video games, WhatsApp, all sorts of ways of communicating with each other. Oh, and there's blogs and the rest of the Internet. Yeah, yeah, we would have been fine. Did we really need the hyperviral platforms of Facebook and Twitter? Now those did help certain things get out faster and that did help science Twitter sometimes, but it also led to huge explosions of misinformation and the polarization of our politics to such an extent that a third of the country, you know, didn't believe what the medical establishment was saying. And we'll get into this. The medical establishment sometimes was playing political games that made them less credible.

Yeah.

So on net, it's not clear to me if you've got the Internet, smartphones, blogs, all of the, you know, all of that stuff not clear to me that adding in this particular business model of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok that, that, that, that really adds a lot more.

And one interesting one we'll also Talk about is YouTube. I think it's easier to talk about Twitter and Facebook. YouTube is another complex beast that's very hard to. YouTube is many things. It's a content platform, but also has a recommendation system that's. Let's, let's focus our discussion on perhaps Twitter and Facebook. But you do in this, in this large document that you're on social media called Social Media and political dysfunction. Collaborative review with Chris Bale that includes, I believe, papers on YouTube as well.

It does, but yeah, again, just to finish up with the nuance. Yeah. YouTube is really complicated because I can't imagine life without YouTube. It's incredibly useful. It does a lot of good things. It also obviously helps to radicalize terrorist groups and murderers. So I You know, I think about YouTube the way I think about the Internet in general. And I don't know enough to really comment on YouTube. So I have been focused. And it's also interesting. One thing we know is teen social life change radically between about 2010 and 2012. Before 2010, they weren't mostly on every day because they didn't have smartphones. Yet by 2012-14, that's the area in which they almost all get smartphones and they become daily users of the girl. What? So the girls go to Instagram and Tumblr. They go to the visual ones, the boys go to YouTube in video games. Those don't seem to be as harmful to mental health or even harmful at all. It's really Tumblr, Instagram particularly that seem to really have done in girls mental health. So now, okay, so let's look at the quote from, from Mark Zuckerberg. So at, at 64 minutes and 31 seconds on the video, I time coded this.

This is the excellent.

This is the very helpful YouTube transcript. YouTube's an amazing program. You ask him about Francis Haugen, you give him a chance. And here's the key thing. So he talks about what Francis Haugen said. He said no, but that's mischaracterized, actually on most measures the kids are doing better when they're on Instagram. It's just on one out of the 18. And then he says, I think an accurate characterization would have been that kids using Instagram or not kids, but teens, is generally positive for their mental health. That's his claim that YouTube, that Instagram is overall taken as a whole, Instagram is positive for their mental health. That's what he says. Okay, now is it really? Is it really? So first, just the simple, okay, now here what I'd like to do is turn my attention to another document that we'll make available. So I was invited to give testimony before a Senate subcommittee two weeks ago where they were considering the Platform Accountability Act. Should we force the platforms to actually tell us what our kids are doing? Like, we have no idea. Other than self report. We have no idea. You know, they're the only ones who know. Like the kid does this and then over the next hours the kids depressed or happy? We can't know that. But, but Facebook knows it. So should they be compelled to, to reveal the data? We need that.

So you raised, just to give people a little bit of context in this document is brilliantly structured with questions. Studies that indicate that the answer to a question is yes, indicate that the answer to a question is no. And then mixed results and questions. Things like does social media make people more angry or effectively polarized?

That's the one that we're going to get to. That's the one for democracy.

Yes, that's democracy.

So yeah, I've got three different Google Docs here because I found this is an amazing way. And thank God for Google Docs. It's an amazing way to organize the research literature. And it's a collaborative review, meaning that. So on this one, Gene Twenge and I put up the first draft and we say please comment, add studies, tell us what we missed and it evolves in real time in any direction.

The yes or the no.

Yeah, we specifically encourage. Because look, the center of my research is that our gut feelings drive our reasoning. That was my dissertation, that was my early research. And so if Gene Twenge and I are committed to. But we're going to obviously preferentially believe that these platforms are bad for kids because we said so in our books. So we have confirmation bias. And I'm a devotee of John Stuart Mill. The only cure for confirmation bias is other people who have a different confirmation bias. So these documents evolve because critics then say no, you missed this. Or they say you don't know what you're talking about. It's like great, say so tell us. So I put together this document and I'm gonna, I'm gonna put links to everything on my website. If users, if. Sorry, if listeners, viewers go to jonathanheight.com social media. It's a new page I just created. I'll put everything together in one place there and we'll put those in the.

Show notes like links to this document and other things like it. That's right, exactly.

So yeah, so the thing I want to call attention to now is this document, this document here with the title Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause. So Ben Sasse and Chris Coons are on the judiciary committee. They had a subcommittee hearing on Nate Priscilli's bill Platform Accountability, Transparency Act. So they asked me to testify on what do we know what's going on with teen mental health. And so what I did was I put together everything I know with plenty of graphs to make these points that first, what do we know about the crisis? Well, that the crisis is specific to mood disorders, not everything else. It's, it's not just self report, it's also behavioral data because suicide and self harm go skyrocketing after 2010 the increases are very large and the crisis is gendered and it's hit many countries. So I go through the data on that. So we have a pretty clear characterization and nobody's disputed me on this, on this part.

So can we just pause real quick just so for people who are not aware. So self report just how you kind of collect data on this kind of thing?

Sure.

You have a SEL survey, you ask people how.

Yeah. How anxious are you these days?

Yeah.

How many hours a week do you.

Social media, that kind of stuff. And you do. It's. Maybe you can collect large amounts of data that way because you can ask a large number of people that kind of question and. But then there's. I forget the term you use but more so non self report data.

Behavioral data.

Behavioral data. That's right. Where you actually have self harm and suicide numbers.

Exactly. So there are a lot of graphs like this. So this is from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. So the federal government and also Pew and Gallup, there are a lot of organizations that have been collecting survey data for decades. So this is a gold mine. And what you see on these graphs over and over again is relatively straight lines up until around 2010 or 2012.

And on the x axis we have time years going from 2004 to 2020. And the Y axis is the percent of US teens who had a major depression in the last year.

That's right. So when this data started coming out around so Jean Tweng's book iGen 2017 a lot of people say oh, she doesn't know what she's talking about. This is just self report like Gen Z. They're just really comfortable talking about this. This is a good thing. This isn't a real epidemic. And literally the day before my book with Greg was published, the day before there was a psychiatrist in New York Times who had an op ed saying relax, cell phones, smartphones are not ruining your kid's brain. And he said it's just self report. It's just that they're giving higher rates. There's more diagnosis but underlying there's no change. No. Because it's theoretically possible. But all we have to do is look at the hospitalization data for self harm and suicide and we see the exact same trends. We see also a very sudden big rise around between 2009 and 2012. You have an elbow and then it goes up, up, up. So that is not self report. Those are actual kids admitted to hospitals for cutting themselves themselves. So we have a catastrophe. And this was all true. Before COVID Covid made things worse. But we have to realize, you know, Covid's going away, kids are back in school or back in school, but we're not going to go back to where we were because this problem is not caused by Covid. What is it caused by? Well, just, again, to just go through the point, then I'll stop. I just feel like I just really don't want to get out the data to show that Marx is wrong. So first point, correlational studies consistently show a link. They almost all do, but it's not big. Equivalent to a correlation coefficient around 0.1. Typically that's the first point. The second point is that the correlation is actually much larger than for eating potatoes. So that famous line wasn't about social media use, that was about digital media use that included watching Netflix, doing homework on everything. And so what they did is they, they looked at all screen use and then they said this is correlated with self reports of depression anxiety at like, you know, 0.03. It's tiny. And. But they said that clearly in the paper, but the media has reported as social media is 0.03 or tiny. And that's just not true. What I found digging into it, you don't know this until you look at the. There's more than 100 studies in the Google Doc. Once you dig in, what you see is okay, you see a tiny correlation. What happens if we zoom in on just social media? It always gets bigger, often a lot bigger. Two or three times bigger. What happens if we zoom in on girls and social media? It always gets bigger, often a lot bigger. And so what I think we can conclude in fact what one of the authors of the potato studies herself concludes, Amy Orban says, I think I have a quote from here. She reviewed a lot of studies and she herself said that quote. The associations between social media use and wellbeing therefore range from about r equals 0.15 to r equals 0.10. So that's the range we're talking about and that's for boys and girls together. And a lot of research, including hers and mine, show that girls it's higher. So for girls, we're talking about correlations around 0.15 to 0.2. I believe Jean Twenge and I found it's about 0.2 or 0.22. Now this might sound like an arcane social science debate, but people have to understand public health correlations are Almost never above 0.2. So the correlation of childhood exposure to lead and adult IQ, very serious problem. That's.09. Like the world's messy and our measurements are messy. And so if you find a consistent correlation of 0.15, like you would never let your kid do that thing. That actually is dangerous. And it can explain when you multiply it over tens of millions of kids spending years of their lives, you actually can explain the mental health epidemic just from social media use.

Well, and then there's questions, by the way, this is really good to learn because I quit potatoes and it had no effect on me. And as a Russian, that was a big sacrifice. They had quite literal actually, because I'm mostly eating keto these days. But that's, that's, that's funny that they're actually literally called the potato studies. Okay. But given this, and there's a lot of fascinating data here, there's also a discussion of how to, how to fix it. What are the aspects that if fixed would start to reverse some of these trends? So if we just linger on the Mark Zuckerberg statements. So first of all, do you think Mark is aware of some of these studies? So if you put yourself in the shoes of Mark Zuckerberg and the executives at Facebook and Twitter, how can you try to understand the studies like the Google Docs you put together to try to make decisions that fix things? Is there a stable science now that you can start to investigate? And also maybe if you can comment on the depth of data that's available because ultimately this is something you argue that the data should be more transparent, should be provided. But currently if it's not, all you have is maybe some leaks of internal data.

That's right. That's right.

And we could talk about the potential. You have to be very sort of objective about the potential bias and those kinds of leaks. You want to. It would be nice to have a non leak data like yeah, it'd be.

Nice to be able to actually have academic researchers able to access in deindividuated, de identified form the actual data on what kids are doing and how their mood changes and when people commit suicide, what was happening before. And it'd be great to know that we have no idea.

So how do we begin to fix social media? Would you say?

Okay, so here's the most important thing to understand in the social sciences. You know, we say, is social media harmful to kids? That's a broad question. You can't answer that directly. You have to have much more specific questions. You have to operationalize it and have a theory of how it's harming kids and so almost all of the research is done on what's called the dose response model. That is, everybody, including most researchers, are thinking about this like, let's think treated this like sugar, you know, because the data usually shows a little bit of social media use isn't correlated with harm, but a lot is. So, you know, think of it like sugar. And if kids have a lot of sugar, then it's bad, so how much is okay? But social media is not like sugar at all. It's not a dose response thing. It's a complete rewiring of childhood. So we evolved as a species in which kids play in mixed age groups. They learn the skills of adulthood. They're always playing and working and learning and doing errands. That's normal childhood. That's how you develop your brain. That's how you become a mature adult. Until the 1990s. In the 1990s, we dropped all that. We said, it's too dangerous. If we let you outside, you'll be kidnapped. So we completely. We began rewiring childhood in the 90s before social media. And that's a big part of the story. I'm a big fan of Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free Range Kids. If there are any parents listening to this, please buy Lenore's book, Free Range Kids, and then go to letgrow.org, it's a nonprofit that Lenore and I started with Peter Gray and Daniel Shookman to help change the laws and the norms around letting kids out to play. They need free play. So that's the. The big picture. They need free play. And we started stopping that in the 90s, that we reduced it. And then Gen Z kids, born in 1996, they're the first people in history to get on social media before puberty. Millennials didn't get it until they were in college, but Gen Z, they get it because you can lie. You just lie by your age. So they really began to get on around 2009, 2010, and boom, two years later, they're depressed. It's not because they ate too much sugar necessarily. It's because even normal social interactions that kids had in the early 2000s, largely, well, they decline because now everything's through the phone. And that's what I'm trying to get across, that it's not just a dose response thing. It's imagine one middle school where everyone has an Instagram account and it's constant drama. Everyone's constantly checking and posting and worrying. And imagine going through puberty that way versus Imagine there was a policy, no phones in school. You have to check them in a locker. No one can have an Instagram account. All the parents are on board. Parents only let their kids have Instagram because the kid says everyone else has it. And that's. We're stuck in a social dilemma. We're stuck in a trap. So what's the solution? Keep kids off until they're done with puberty. There's a new study actually by Amy Orban and Andy Shibilski showing that the damage is greatest for girls between 11 and 13. So there is no way to make it safe for preteens or even 13, 14 year olds. We've gotta. Kids should simply not be allowed on these business models where you're the product they should not be allowed on until you're 16. We need to raise the age and enforce it. That's the biggest thing.

So I think that's a really powerful solution. But it's. It makes me wonder if there's other solutions like controlling the virality of bullying, sort of. If there's a way that's more productive to childhood to use social media. So of course one thing is putting your phone down. But first of all, from the perspective of social media companies, it might be difficult to convince them to do so. And also for me as an adult who grew up without social media, it's social media. Social media is a source of joy. So I wonder if it's possible to design the mechanisms, both the challenge, the ad driven model, but actually just technically the recommender system and how virality works on these platforms. If it's possible to design a platform that leads to growth, antifragility but does not lead to depression. Yeah. Self harm and suicide. That like finding that balance and making that as the objective function, not. Not engagement.

Yeah. Or I don't think, I don't think that can be done for kids. So I am very reluctant to tell adults what to do. I have a lot of libertarian friends and I would lose their friendship if I started saying, oh, it's bad for adults and we should stop adults from using it.

Yeah.

But by the same token, I'm very reluctant to have Facebook and Instagram tell my kids what to do without me even knowing or without me having any ability to control it. As a parent, it's very hard to stop your kid. I have stopped my kids from getting on Instagram and that's caused some difficulties. But, but they also have thanked me because they see that it's stupid. They see that what the kids are heavily on it, but they post, they see that the culture of it is, is stupid as they say. So I don't think there's a way to make it healthy for kids. I think there's one thing which is healthy for kids which is free play. We already robbed them of most of it in the 90s. The more time they spend on their devices, the less they have free play. Video games is a kind of play. I'm not saying that these things are all bad, but you know, 12 hours of video game play means you don't get any physical play.

So anyway, ultimately physical play is the way to, to develop physical anti fragility.

And especially social skills. Kids need huge amounts of conflict with no adult to meet, to supervise or mediate and that's what we rob them up. So anyway, that we should move on because I get really into the evidence here because I think the story is actually quite clear now. There was a lot of ambiguity. There are conflicting studies, but when you look at it all together, the correlational studies are pretty clear and the effect sizes are coming in around 0.1 to 0.15. Whether you call that a correlation coefficient or a beta, it's all in the standardized beta. It's all in that sort of range. There's also experimental evidence. We collect true experiments with random assignment and they mostly show an effect and there's eyewitness testimony. You know, the kids themselves. You talk to girls and you poll them. Do you think overall Instagram is good for your mental health or bad for. You're not going to find a group saying oh, it's wonderful. Oh yeah, yeah, Mark, you're right, it's mostly good. No, the girls themselves say this is the major reason. And I've got studies in the Google Doc where there have been surveys. What do you think is causing the. Is causing depression, anxiety and the number one thing they say is social media. So there's multiple strands of evidence.

Do you think the recommendation is, as a parent, that teens should not use Instagram? Twitter? Yes, that's ultimately, maybe in the long term there's a. More.

There's no way to make it safe there. It's unsafe at any speed.

Well, look, I mean it might be very difficult to make it safe and in the short term, while we don't know how to make it safe. Put down the phone.

Well, no, hold on a second. Play with other kids via a platform like Roblox or multiplayer video games. That's great. I have no beef with that. You focus on bullying before. That's one of five or seven different avenues of harm. The main one I think which does in the girls is not being bullied. It's living a life where you're thinking all the time about posting. Because once a girl starts posting. So it's bad enough that they're scrolling through and this is everyone comments on this, you're scrolling through and everyone's life looks better than yours because it's fake. And all that you see are the ones the algorithm picked that were the night anyway. So the scrolling I think is bad for the girls. But I'm beginning to see, I can't prove this, but I'm beginning to see from talking to girls, from seeing how it's used is once you start posting, that takes over your mind and now you're basically, you're no longer present because even if you're only spending five or six hours a day on Instagram, you're always thinking about it. And when you're in class you're thinking about how are people responding to the post that I made between period, you know, between classes. I mean I do it, you know, I try to stay off Twitter for a while, but now, you know, I've got this big article, I'm, I'm tweeting about it and I can't help it. Like I check, you know, 20 times a day, I'll check, like, what are people saying? What are people saying? This is terrible. And I'm a, you know, 58 year old man. Imagine being a 12 year old girl going through puberty. You're self conscious about how you look. And I see some young women, I see some professional young women, women in their 20s and 30s who are putting up sexy photos of themselves like, and this is so sad, so sad. Don't be doing this.

Yeah. See the thing where I disagree a little bit is I agree with you in the short term, but in the long term I feel it's the responsibility of social media, not in some kind of ethical way, not just in an ethical way, but it'll actually be good for the product or for the company to maximize the long term happiness and well being of the person. So not just engagement, so consider, but.

The person is not the customer. So the thing is not to make them happy, it's to keep them on.

That's the way it is currently that driven.

If we can get a business model, as you're saying, I'd be all for it.

And I think that's the way to make much more money.

So like a subscription model, where the money comes from paying it's not. That would work, wouldn't it? That would help.

So subscription definitely would help, but I'm not sure it's so much. I mean, a lot of people say it's about the source of money, but I just think it's about the fundamental mission of the product. If you want people to really love a thing, I think that thing should maximize your long term well being.

It should, in theory. In morality land, it should.

I don't think it's just morality land. I think in business land too. But that's maybe a discussion for another day. We're, we're studying the reality of the way things currently are. And they are as they are, as the studies are highlighting. So let us go then in from the land of mental health for young people to the land of democracy. By the way, in these big umbrella areas, is there a connection, is there a correlation between the mental health of a human mind and the division of our political discourse?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So our brains are structured to be really good at approach and avoid. So we have circuits. The front left circuit is an oversimplification, but there's some truth to it. There's what's called the behavioral activation system, front left cortex. It's all about approach, opportunity, you know, kid in a candy store. And then the front right cortex has circuits specialized for withdrawal, fear, threat, and of course, students. You know, I'm a college professor and most of us think about our college days like, you know, yeah, we were anxious at times, but, but it was fun. And it was like, I can take all these courses, I can do all these clubs, all these people. Now imagine if in 2013, all of a sudden students are coming in with their front right cortex hyperactivated. Everything's a threat, everything is dangerous. There's not enough to go around. So the front right cortex puts us into what's called defend mode as opposed to discover mode. Now let's move up to adults. Imagine a large, diverse, secular, liberal democracy in which people are most of the time in discover mode. And you know, we have a problem, let's think how to solve it. And this is what de Tocqueville said about Americans. Like, there's a problem, we get together, we figure out how to solve it. And he said, whereas in England and France, people would wait for the king to do it, but here, like, you know, roll up our sleeves, do it. That's the can do mindset. That's front left cortex, discover mode. If you have a national shift of people spending more time in defend mode now you. So everything that comes up, whatever anyone says, you're not looking like, oh, is there something good about you thinking, you know, how is this dangerous? How is this a threat? How is this violence? How can I attack this? How can I, you know, so, so if you imagine, you know, God up there with a little lever like, okay, let's, let's push everyone over into, you know, more into Discover mode and it's like Joy breaks out Age of Aquarius. All right, let's shift them back into, let's put everyone in defend mode. And I can't think of a better way to put people in defend mode than to have them spend some time on partisan or political Twitter where it's just a stream of horror stories, including videos about how horrible the other side is. And it's not just that they're bad people, it's that if they win this election, then we lose our country or then it's catastrophe. So Twitter. And again, we're not saying all of Twitter, you know, most people aren't on Twitter and people that are mostly not talking about politics, but the ones that are on talking about politics are flooding us with stuff. All the journalists see it all major mainstream media is hugely influenced by Twitter. So if we put everyone, if there's more sort of anxiety, sense of threat, this colors everything and then you're not, you know, the great thing about, about a democracy and especially a, you know, or a legislature that has some diversity in it is that the art of politics is that you can grow the pie and then divide it. You don't just fight zero sum. You find ways that we can all get 60% of what we want and that, that ends when everyone's anxious and angry.

So, so let's try to start to figure out who's to blame here. Is it the nature of social media? Is it the decision of the people at the heads of social media companies that they're making in the detailed engineering designs of the algorithm? Is it the users of social media that drive narratives like you mentioned, journalists that want to maximize drama in order to drive clicks to their off site articles? Is it just human nature that loves drama? Can't look away from an accident when you're driving by? Is there, is there something to be said about. The reason I asked these questions is to see can we start to figure out what the solution would be for to, to, to alleviate, to de, escalate?

Not yet. Not yet. Let's. First we have to understand, you know, as, as we did on the teen mental health thing okay, now let's lay out what is the problem, what's messing up our country, and then we'll. We can talk about solutions. So it's all the things you said, interacting in an interesting way. So human nature is tribal. We evolve for intergroup conflict. We love war. We. We. The first time my buddies and I played paintball, I was 29, and we were divided into teams with strangers to shoot guns at each other and kill each other. And we all. Afterwards, it was like, oh, my God, that was incredible. Like, it really felt like we'd opened a room in our hearts that had never been opened. But as men, you know, testosterone changes our brains and our bodies and activates the war stuff. Like, we've got war stuff. And that's why boys like certain team sports, it's play war. So that's who we are. It doesn't mean we're always tribal. It doesn't mean we're always wanting to fight. We're also really good at making peace and cooperation and finding deals. We're good at trade and exchange. So, you know, you want your country to. You want a society that has room for conflict, ideally over sports. Like, that's great. That's totally. It's not just harmless, it's actually good. But otherwise, you want cooperation to generally prevail in the society. That's how you create prosperity and peace. And if you're going to have a diverse democracy, you really better focus on cooperation, not on tribalism and division. And there's a wonderful book by Yasha Monk called the Great Experiment that talks about the difficulty of diversity in democracy and what we need to do to get this right and to get the benefits of diversity. So that's human nature. Now let's imagine that the technological environment makes it really easy for us to cooperate. Let's give everyone telephones in the postal service. Let's give them email. Like, wow, you know, we can do all these things together with people far away. It's amazing. Now, instead of that, let's give them a technology that encourages them to fight. So early Facebook and Twitter were generally lovely places. You know, people old enough to remember, like, they were fun. There's a lot of humor. You didn't feel like you're going to get your head blown off no matter what you said 2007, 2008, 2009, it was still fun. These were nice places mostly. And like, almost all the platforms start off as nice places. But. And this is the. The key thing in the article in the Atlantic article on Babel, after Babel.

The Atlantic article, by the way, is why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid.

Yeah, my title in the magazine was After Babel. Adapting to a World we can no Longer share is what I propose. But they a B tested. What's the title? It gets the most clicks. And it was why the past 10 years have been unique.

So babble. The Tower of Babel is. There's a driving metaphor in the piece. So what? First of all, what is it? What's the Tower of Babel? What's. What's Babel? What are we talking about?

So the Tower of Babel is a story in, you know, early in Genesis, where the descendants of Noah are spreading out and repopulating the world, and they're on the plane of Shinar, and they say, let us build us a city with a tower to make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered again. And so it's a very short story. There's not a lot in it, but it looks like they're saying, you know, we don't want God to flood us again. Let's build a city and a tower and to reach the heavens. And God is offended by the hubris of these people acting again, like gods. And he says, here's the key line. He says, let us go down and confuse their language so that they may not understand one another. So in the story, he doesn't literally knock the tower over, but, you know, many of us have seen images or, you know, movie drama, dramatizations where a great wind comes and the tower is knocked over and the people are left wandering amid the rubble, unable to talk to each other. So I've been grappling, I've been trying to say, what the hell happened to our society? You know, beginning in 2014, what the hell is happening to universities? And then it spread out from universities, it hit journalism, the arts, and now it's all over companies. What the hell happened to us? And it wasn't until I reread the Babel story a couple years ago that I thought, thought, whoa, this is it. This is the metaphor. Because, you know, I've been thinking about tribalism and left right, battles and war. And, you know, that's easy to think about, but Babel isn't like, you know, and God said, let half of the people hate the other half. No, it wasn't that. It's God said, let us confuse their language, that they. None of them can understand each other ever again, or at least for a while. So it's a story about fragmentation and that's what's unique about our time. So. So Meta or Facebook wrote a rebuttal to my article. They disputed what I said. And one of their arguments was, oh, but you know, polarization goes back way before social media. And, you know, and it was happening in the 90s. And they're right, it does. And I should, I did say that, but I should have said it more clearly with more examples. But here's the new thing. Even though left and right were beginning to hate each other more, we weren't afraid of the person next to us. We weren't afraid of each other. Cable tv, you know, Fox News, whatever you want to point to about increasing polarization, it didn't make me afraid of my students. And that was new. In around 2014, 2015, we started hearing, getting articles. You know, I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students frightened me. It was in Vox in 2015, and that was after Greg and I had turned in the draft of our, of our first draft of our coddling article. And surveys show over and over again, students are not, not as afraid of their professors. They're actually afraid of other students. Most students are lovely. It's not like the whole generation has lost their minds. What happens. A small number, A small number are adept at using social media to destroy anyone that they think they can get credit for destroying. And the bizarre thing is it's never. It's rarely about what ideas you express. It's usually about a word, like he used this word or this, you know, this was insensitive, or, you know, I can link this word to that. So it's, It's a. It's. They don't really engage with ideas and arguments. It's a real sort of gotcha prosecutor, almost like a, you know, it's like a, Like a witch trial mindset. So.

So the unique thing here is there's something about social media in those years that a small number of people can sort of be catalysts for this division. They can start the viral wave that leads to a division that's different than the kind of division we saw before.

It's a little different than a viral wave. Once you get some people who can, who can use social media to intimidate you get a sudden phase shift. You get a big change in the dynamics of groups. And that's the heart of the article. This isn't just another article about how social media is polarizing us and destroying democracy. The heart of the article is an analysis of what makes groups smart and what makes them stupid and so because as we said earlier, you know, my own research is on post hoc reasoning, just post hoc justification, rationalization. The only cure for that is other people who don't share your biases. And so if you have an academic debate as like the one I'm having with, you know, with these other researchers over social media, you know, I write something, they write something. I have to take account of their arguments and they have to take account of mine. When the academic world works, it's because it puts us together in ways that things cancel out. That's what makes universities smart, what makes them generators of knowledge. Unless we stop dissent, what if we say on these topics there can be no dissent? And if anyone says otherwise, if any academic comes up with a research that says otherwise, we're going to destroy them. And if any academic even tweets a study contradicting, what is the official word, we're going to destroy them. And that was the famous case of David Shore, who in the days after George Floyd was killed and there were protests. And the question is, are these protests going to be productive? Are they going to backfire? Now, most of them were peaceful, but some were violent. And he tweeted a study, he just simply tweeted a study done by an action African American, I think, sociologist at Princeton, Omar Wassau. And Wasow's study showed that when you look back at the 60s, you see that where there were violent protests, it tended to backfire. Peaceful protests tend to work. And so he simply tweeted that study and there was a Twitter mob after him. This was insensitive, this was anti black, I think he was accused of, and he was fired within a day or two. So this is the kind of dynamic, this is not caused by cable tv. This is not caused. This is something new.

Can I just on a small tangent there in that situation, because it happens time and time again, you highlight in your current work, but also in the coddling of the American mind, is the blame on the mob, the mechanisms that enables the mob, or the people that do the firing? The administration does the firing?

Yeah, it's all of them.

Well, can I. I sometimes feel that we don't put enough blame on the people that do the firing, which is. That feels like in the long arc of human history, that is the place for courage and for ideals. Right? That's where it stops. That's where the buck stops. So if there's going to be new mechanisms for mobs and all that kind of stuff, there's going to be tribalism. But at the end of the day. That's what it means to be a leader, is to stop, stop the mob at the door.

But I'm a social psychologist, which means I look at the social forces at work on people. And if, and if you show me a situation in which 95% of the people behave one way and it's a way that we find surprising and shameful, I'm not going to say, wow, 95% of the people are shameful. I'm going to say, wow, what a powerful situation. We've got to change that situation. So that's what I think is happening here, because there are hardly any in the first few years. You know, it begins around 2018, 2019. It really enters the corporate world. There are hardly any leaders who stood up against it. But I've talked to a lot, and it's. It's always the same thing. You have these, you know, you know, people in their. Usually in their 50s or 60s, generally, they're progressive or on the left. They're accused of things by their young employees. They don't have the vocabulary to stand up to it, and they give in very quickly. And because it happens over and over again. And there's only a few examples of university presidents who said, like, no, we're not going to stop this talk just because you're freaking out. No, you know, we're not going to fire this professor because he wrote a paper that you, that you, you don't like. There are so few examples I have to include that the situational forces are so strong now. I think we are seeing. We are seeing a reversal in the last few weeks or months. A clear sign of that is that the New York Times actually came out with an editorial from the editorial board saying that free speech is important. Now, that's amazing that the Times had the guts to stand up for free speech because, you know, they're the. The people. Well, what's been happening with the Times is that they've allowed Twitter to become the editorial board. Twitter has control over the New York Times, and the New York Times literally will change papers. I have an essay in Politico with, with Nadine Strossen, Steve Pinker, and Pamela Paresky on how the New York Times retracted and changed an editorial by Brett Stevens. And they did, in a sneaky way, and they lied about it. And they did this out of fear because he mentioned iq. He mentioned IQ and Jews. And then he went on to say, it probably isn't a genetic thing, it's probably cultural. But he mentioned it, and the New York Times. I mean, they were really cowardly. Now, I think they. From what I hear, they know that they were cowardly. They know that they should not have fired James Bennett. They know that they gave into the mob, and that's why they're now poking their head up above the parapet and they're saying, we think that free speech is important. And then, of course, they got their heads blown off because Twitter reacted like, how dare you say this? Are you saying racism, racist speech is okay? But they didn't back down. They didn't retract it. They didn't apologize for defending free speech. So I think the Times might be coming back.

Can I ask your opinion on something here? What in terms of the Times coming back, in terms of Twitter being the editorial board for prestigious journalistic organizations, what's the importance of the role of Mr. Elon Musk in this? So, you know, it's all fun and games, but here's a human who tweets about the importance of freedom of speech and buys Twitter. What are your thoughts on the influence, the positive and the negative possible consequences of this particular action?

So if he is going to succeed in. If he's going to be one of the major reasons why we decarbonize quickly and why we get to Mars, then I'm willing to cut him a lot of slack. So I have an overall positive view of him. Now, where I'm concerned and where I'm critical is we're in the middle of a raging culture war, and this culture war is making our institutions stupid. It's making them fail. This culture, I think, could destroy our country. And by destroy, I mean we could descend into constant constitutional crises. A lot more violence. You know, not that we're going to disappear, not that we're going to kill each other, but I think there will be a lot more violence. So we're in the middle of this raging culture war. It's possibly turning to violence. You need to not add fuel to the fire. And the fact that he declared that he's going to be a Republican and the Democrats are the bad party. And, you know, as an individual citizen, he's entitled to his opinion, of course, but as an influential citizen, he should at least be thoughtful. And more importantly, companies need. Companies need and I think would benefit from a Geneva Convention for the culture war in which. Because they're all being. They're all being damaged by the culture we're coming into, the companies. What we need to get to, I hope, is a place where companies do. They have. They have Strong ethical obligations about the effects that they cause, about how they treat their employees, about their supply chain. They have strong ethical obligations, but they should not be weighing in on culture war issues.

Well, if I can read the exact tweet, because part of the tweet I like he said, in the past, I voted Democrat because they were mostly the kindness party, but they have become the party of division and hate. So I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. And then he finishes with now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.

Okay, what do you make of that? Like, what do you think he was thinking that he came out so blatantly as a partisan?

Because he's probably communicating with the board, with the people inside Twitter, and he's clearly seeing the lean, and he's responding to that lean. He's. He's also opening the door to the. To the potential bringing back the former president onto the platform and also bringing back. Which he's probably looking at the numbers of the people who are behind Truth Social saying that, okay, it seems that there's a strong lean in Twitter in terms of the left. In fact, from what I see, it seems like the current operation of Twitter is the extremes of the left get outraged by something, and the extremes of the right point out how the left is ridiculous. Like, that seems to be the mechanism that's the source of the drama. And then the left gets very mad at the right that points out the ridiculousness. And there's this vicious kind of cycle.

That's the polarization cycle. That's what we're in.

There's something that happened here. There's a shift where there's a decline, I would say, in both parties towards being shitty.

Okay, look, what everything about the parties, that's not the issue. The issue is, should the most important CEO in America, the CEO of some of our biggest and most important companies? So, yeah, so let's imagine. Let's imagine five years from now, two different worlds in one world, the CEO of every Fortune 500 company has said, I'm a Republican because I hate those douchebags, or I'm a Democrat because I hate those Nazi racists. That's one world where everybody declare. Everybody puts up a thing in their window. Everybody. It's cultural everywhere, all the time, 24 hours a day. You pick a doctor based on whether he's red or blue. Everything is culture war. That's one possible future which we're headed towards. The other is we say, you know what? Political conflict should be confined to political spaces. There is A room for protest. But you don't go protesting at people's private homes. You don't go threatening their children. You don't go doxing them. We have to have channels that are not culture war all the time. When you go shopping, when you go to a restaurant, you shouldn't be yelled at and screamed at. When you buy a product, you should be able to buy products from an excellent company. You shouldn't have to always think, what's the CEO? I mean, what an insane world. But that's where we're heading. So I think that Elon did a really bad thing in launching that tweet that was, I think, really throwing fuel on a fire and setting a norm in which businesses are going to get even more politicized than they are.

And you're saying specifically the problem was that he picked the side.

As the head of. Yes, as the CEO, as a head of several major companies of, you know, of course we can find out what his views are. You know, it's not like it's a. I mean, actually with him, it's maybe hard to know. But, you know, it's not that a CEO can't be a partisan or have views, but to publicly declare it in that way, in such an really insulting way, this is throwing fuel on the fire and it's setting a precedent that corporations are major players in the culture war. And I'm trying to reverse that. We've got to pull back from that.

Let me play devil's advocate here. So because I've gotten a chance to interact with Quite a few CEOs. There is also a value for authenticity. So I'm guessing this was written while sitting on the toilet. And I could see in a day from now saying, lol, just kidding. There's a humor, there's a lightness, there's a chaos element. And that's. Chaos is not.

Yeah, that's not what we need right now. We don't need more chaos.

Well, so yes, there's a balance here. The chaos isn't engineered chaos. It's really authentically who he is. And I would like to say that there's.

I agree with that.

That's a trade off. Because if you become a politician, so there's a trade off between in this case, maybe authenticity and civility. Maybe like being calculating about the impact you have with your words versus just being yourself. And I'm not sure calculating is also a slippery slope. Both are slippery slopes. You have to be careful.

So when we have conversations in a vacuum and we just say like, what should a person do? Those are very hard. But our world is actually structured into domains and institutions. And if it's just like, oh, you know, talking here among our friends, like we should be authentic, sure. But the CEO of a company has fiduciary duties, legal fiduciary duties to the company. He owes loyalty to the company. And if he is using the company for his own political gain or other purposes or social standing, that's a violation of his fiduciary duty to the company. Now there's debate among scholars whether your fiduciary duties to the shareholders. I don't think it's the shareholders. I think many legal experts say it's the company's illegal person. You have duties to the company. Employees owe a duty to the company. So he's got those duties. And I think he, you know, you can say he's being authentic, but he's also violating those duties. So it's not necessarily he's violating a law by doing it, but he certainly is shredding any notion of professional ethics around leadership of a company in the modern age.

I think you have to take it in the full context because you see that he's not being a political player. He's just saying, quit being douchey.

Suppose the CEO of Ford says, you know what, let's pick a group. I shouldn't do a racial group because that would be different. Let's just say, you know what? Left handed people are douchebags. I hate them. Like, why would you say that? Like, why would you drag me left handed people?

What you said now is not either funny or light hearted because I hate them. It wasn't funny. I'm not picking you. I'm saying that statement. Words matter. There's a lightness to the statement in the full context. If you look at the timeline of the man, there's ridiculous memes and there's nonstop jokes that. My big problem with the CEO of Ford is there's never any of that. Not only is there any of that, there's not a celebration of the beauty of the engineering of the different products. It's all political speak channeled through multiple meetings of pr. There's a, there's there's levels upon levels upon levels where you think that there, it's, it's really not authentic. And there, you're actually, by being polite, by being civil, you're actually playing politics because all of your actual political decision making is done in the back channels. That's obvious here. Here's a human being, authentic and Actually struggling with some of the ideas and having fun with it. I think this lightness represents the kind of positivity that we should be striving for. It's funny to say that because you're looking at these statements and they seem negative, but in the full context of social media, I don't know if they are.

But look at what you just said in the full context. You're taking his tweets in context. You know who doesn't do that? Twitter. Like, that's the Twitter.

Well, that's the fun of the problem.

There is no context. Everything is taken in the maximum possible way. There is no context.

Oh, you're saying.

So this is not like, you know, yes, I wish we did take people in context. I wish we lived in that world, but now that we have Twitter and Facebook, we don't live in that world anymore.

So you're saying it is a bit of a responsibility for people with a large platform to consider the fact that there is the fundamental mechanism of Twitter where people don't give you the benefit of the doubt.

Well, I don't want to hang it on large platform because then that's what a lot of people say, like, well, you know, she shouldn't say that because she has a large platform, and she should say things that agree with my politics. I don't want to hang it on large platform. I want to hang it on CEO of a company. CEOs of a company have duties and responsibilities. And, you know, Scott Galloway, I think, is very clear about this. You know, he criticizes Elon a lot as being a really bad role model for young men. Young men need role models, and he is a very appealing, attractive role model.

So I agree with you. But in terms of being a role model, I think I don't want to put a responsibility on people. But, yes, he could be a much, much better role model.

I mean, to insult sitting senators by calling them old. I mean, that's. That's, you know.

Yeah, I won't do both. Sideism of like, well, those senators can be assholes too. Yeah, but that's fair enough. Respond intelligently as I tweeted, to unintelligent treatment. Yes, yes. So the reason I like. And he's now a friend, the reason I like Elon is because of the engineering, because of the work he does.

No, I admire him enormously for that.

But what I admire on the Twitter side is the authenticity, because I've been a little bit jaded and worn out by people who have built up walls, people in the position of power, the CEOs and the politicians who built up walls and you don't see the real person. That's one of the reasons I love long form podcasting. Is it especially if you talk more than 10 minutes, it's hard to have a wall up. It all kind of crumbles away. So I don't know. But yes, yes, you're right. That that is a step backwards. To say at least to me. The biggest problem is to pick sides, to say, I'm not going to vote this way or that way. Leave that to the politicians. You have much the importance of social media is far bigger than the bickering, the short term bickering, any one political party. It's a platform for where we make progress, where we develop ideas through sort of rigorous discourse, all those kinds of things.

So, okay, so here's an idea about social media developed through social media from Elon, which is, you know, everyone freaks out because they think either, you know, oh, he's going to do less content moderations. The left is freaking out because they want more content moderation. The right is celebrating because they think the people doing the content moderation are.