Escaping the Matrix

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. If I asked you what it means to be a good person, I'm guessing you would quickly rattle off a list of virtues. Good people are truthful. They are kind to others, helpful to those in need. They are loyal friends, generous, brave. They put the needs of others before their own needs. But if I were to ask you where those beliefs come from, or why you think kindness and bravery and generosity are virtues, You might have to pause for a moment to think. Let's say I make it even more complicated. I give you a scenario about 2 brothers who love each other dearly. One does something wrong and the other has to decide whether to turn him in. The second brother must choose between honesty and loyalty. Which virtue is more important? If you picked one, do you know why you chose it? TV shows and movies are filled with these kinds of moral dilemmas because they provide dramatic tension. When you have to choose between competing values, you might find yourself unsure if kindness matters more than courage, or if loyalty should outweigh honesty. Playwrights and poets have grappled with these themes for centuries because our moral choices define us. They help us distinguish friend from foe. They inform whom we love and whom we hate. Today, we examine the roots of our moral intuitions. We also tell the story of a man who asked himself a question few of us do: Why do I believe what I believe? Understanding the origins of our moral beliefs and the implications of this quest on young minds This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Making smart decisions includes considering how to protect your car and home and how much you're paying to insure them. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money, because when you've worked hard for something, Choosing insurance should be easy. Start your quote at libertymutual.com. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business. You need them. They need benefits. Work with Principal so they can help you help your team with a retirement and benefits plan that's right for them. Principal Life Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa.

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Jonathan Haidt grew up identifying as a Democrat. It wasn't something he thought about a lot. His friends and family all identified with the left.

So that was just the water I was swimming in. I didn't really think much about it. At the time in the '70s, in high school, like, that's what was cool was to be on the left. And I thought Republicans were, you know, stupid and evil, just like everyone around me seemed to think. And then, you know, once the Reagan era began in the '80s when I was in college, then it was just, you know, absolutely essential that you hate Reagan and everything he stood for.

John and his classmates and professors at Yale University were outraged by Ronald Reagan's cuts in domestic programs, his efforts to roll back environmental regulations, and his support for South Africa's apartheid government.

I was very moralistic, very judgmental. I had strong opinions about what was right and wrong. So, you know, all they seem to care about is tax cuts. They don't care about poor people. It's just that I never actually met a conservative until, really until I was in graduate school. And so it was just kind of obvious that if you care about people, humanity, and the planet, you have to be a Democrat.

But after John finished a PhD in psychology and went to Chicago for a postdoctoral fellowship, 3 life-changing things happened to him. First, he started to work with Richard Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago. The senior scholar taught John the first commandment of his field: quick judgments are antithetical to curiosity. When you swiftly pigeonhole people into good guys and bad guys, you never learn anything. Learning to see, to observe without preconceptions, was the essential tool of the social scientist. Outside the classroom, John's leisure activities were teaching him the same thing.

Okay, well, so here I have to turn us onto a track that I've never done before. So this was in June of 1993. I took LSD for the first time with my friends from graduate school. And here I was, a postdoc at Chicago. I'd been interested in Buddhism and Hinduism for a long time. I, you know, I'd read the Bhagavad Gita, and then I tried these drugs, first LSD, and then it was so transformative that I then tried psilocybin mushrooms a few times. And the effect that these drugs had on me changed not just my perspective, but my personality. So before June 11th, 1993, I was very judgmental, self-righteous. And when I went on this trip, It was like I was taken out of my world, out into a space where I could look down on the world and see not just my world, but an infinite set of worlds just out there, all doing what they're doing, and it all was okay. There's a feeling that this is just the universe playing out the way it needs to. All the beauty, all the ugliness, it's all just part of the universe the way it is. But I recently came across this beautiful passage from the poet Rumi. He says, out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. And that's exactly what happened to me.

That same year, John went on another trip, a physical trip, to India. He spent a few months in the temple town of Bhubaneswar, about 250 miles from Calcutta, or Kolkata as it is known today.

This is really the turning point of my life, is that, that year in 1993. I was there to study ideas of purity and pollution. I had done graduate work in my PhD on the emotion of disgust as a moral emotion. And in India, throughout South Asia, and really in most of the world, there are very elaborate notions of purity and impurity, or shuddha and ashuddha in Ori or in Sanskrit languages. And you find these ideas in the Hebrew Bible, you find them in ethnographies. They're almost universal ideas. And so I was there to interview people about them and really try to understand why do people care so much about when you take a bath or what you eat before you pray. So the key thing about moral disgust is that the human mind sees properties in objects that are not material. So, you know, if somebody offered you a sweater that had been worn by Adolf Hitler but it'd been completely washed, you know, would you wear it? And most people say no. It has an invisible Hitler essence. It's contaminated. And a lot of stuff follows this law of contamination, and it's a moral property. Now, that might just seem like a little quirk of morality. But then, as I was reading ethnographies about a variety of societies, well, it turns out the great majority of societies have these very strong beliefs about how biological properties get transmitted and they have spiritual ramifications. So for example, before you pray, and this is true in Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, you have to prepare yourself. It seems arbitrary. You have to bathe in a certain way, or you have to avoid certain foods. But what I came to see is that it's a way of orienting your life as if you have divinity within you. Most people, most cultures seem to proceed on the idea that We all have a little bit of divinity or God or something within us, and that obligates us to act in certain ways and not in other ways. So India, more than almost anyplace else, has very, very clear laws and rules about purity, pollution, bathing, food, illness. The physical and the spiritual are very tightly intertwined in Hinduism.

Bhubaneswar's Old Town, features an enormous, ornately carved stone temple that is more than 1,000 years old. When he was not doing his research, John would wander over to the temple and watch the worshippers.

It really felt like just entering a different world, and I was open to it in a way that I wouldn't have been if I was back in the United States. There's a different rhythm. There's a sense that, that the land, that everything has a kind of a, like, almost like a topography of purity. Like, there are certain things that are holy or sort of like up in a sense, and there are other areas that are polluted. And it really felt like, you know, like moving from a 2-dimensional world into a 3-dimensional world. And I just had to learn to be sensitive to properties that I couldn't see in my older life.

So much of what John saw in Bhubaneswar clashed with Western progressive notions of right and wrong. Notions of purity and pollution attached themselves to different groups, which led to the ostracisms of the Hindu caste system. There was hierarchy, inequality, and sharp gender divisions.

You know, a lot of Americans, when young Americans, when they go to India, you know, they're offended by the poverty, they're offended by the hierarchy, they're offended by the sexism. But I was there to sort of pretend to be an anthropologist and really to try to understand things. So I would be invited over to many homes for dinner, and the father would greet me and entertain me and talk expansively with me while his wife would be in the background serving and would rarely say anything. Now, as a young progressive American, that would normally have offended me, but I was trying to understand And over, over time, I got to see that a world in which it's not all about individuals, it's actually much more about groups, communities, families. And it's the opposite of egalitarianism, but that doesn't mean it's bad. It was like I could see people living in a network where they couldn't just act based on what they wanted to do. They had to check with lots of people. They had to make sure things were okay. And this fits with one of the main concepts in cultural psychology, which is, do you have an independent sense of self, or do you have an interdependent sense of self? And we Americans have what Hazel LaMarcus calls a big, thick, padded self. We're like a giant billiard ball. We roll around where we want. But what I saw was people who live in networks, They are enmeshed. They can't just move around as they please. I don't want to idealize this. They're often very frustrated, especially women with their mothers-in-law and all kinds of complicated family relationships. It's not that it's necessarily happy, but it is just a very different way of living, which people are deeply enmeshed and embedded.

So John, you've said that your experience in India led you to step out of the matrix. Is that a reference to the movie, The Matrix?

Oh yes, it's exactly the movie The Matrix, based on the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. And the key line is that the Matrix is a consensual hallucination. Now, as a social scientist, that's pretty damn good. Like, yeah, that's what society is. And that's kind of the miracle of human civilization. How do we do this? Together we construct a moral matrix. We live inside of it. We judge people harshly within our matrix and those in other matrices. And we don't know that we're in a matrix.

When John returned to the United States, he found himself consumed with the question that Keanu Reeves's character asks himself in the movie: How do you escape the matrix? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, because as your business scales, so does the complexity of fraud— new customers, new markets, new AI-driven attack patterns. Stripe Radar protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected flagged or blocked more easily based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers, keeping more of your revenue your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. As a young man, psychologist Jonathan Haidt absorbed the progressive values of his family and schools without question. But when he was nearly 30, Jon lived for a time in a socially conservative temple town in India. Many of the things he saw there clashed with his notions of right and wrong. But his mentor Richard Shweder had taught him that any system of morality must have helped people coexist. If it failed to do that, it would have gone extinct. So even when he had objections to a moral system, it was worth asking why it came about and how it helped people who subscribed to it.

One thing Shweder taught me is that every society is expert in some parts of human experience. and somewhat ignorant in others. And so even though I certainly prefer Western liberal democracies, the sense of anomie or meaninglessness that haunts us in the West is something that really was not much in evidence in a very saturated, religious, thick morality kind of place. Now, there are certain practices like dowry which lead to all kinds of terrible distortions in marriage and treating young women terribly. Again, I am not here to defend the Indian social order in general, but it is one of the great ancient civilizations with an extraordinary wisdom tradition. We have to really credit India and this tradition with giving us Buddhism, with giving us these ideas about the veil of Maya, about life is in some way an illusion, and we're better off if we understand that than if we just Act as though what we see is reality.

When John returned to the United States, he realized that his certainties about his own secular, progressive moral matrix had disappeared. His feelings of self-righteousness and superiority toward those with different moral frameworks had evaporated. He also noticed that many Americans also had views that overlapped were the moral frameworks he had observed in India. Religious and political conservatives in the United States also placed a high premium on tradition, on order. They too were likely to see ordinary objects imbued with sacred meaning. Why do some people care more about being egalitarian while others care more about loyalty and tradition? Why do some cultures glorify individual autonomy While others prioritize the family or the community.

You know, I was already becoming an intuitionist. That is, I was already coming to see that it's really gut feelings and intuitions that drive morality. And so I thought that actually the best metaphor is the tongue, the taste buds. All humans have the same 5 taste receptors: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami, a kind of a meat flavor thing. Yet our cuisines are different. So there's something universal, the 5 taste receptors, but cultures build upon that. They build a cuisine that is different. You can't just build any cuisine, but we don't all like the same cuisine. I thought, wow, this is a great metaphor for morality.

John started to look for the moral equivalent of taste receptors. What were the underlying drivers, the foundations, that lay beneath the bewildering array of moral frameworks that you see around the world.

And the most obvious one is that we're mammals. And as mammals, we have babies, and we care for these helpless babies. And so if we see any sign of a cute thing that's suffering, boy, does it get us. We feel like, oh my God, I've got to help this thing. So that hit me as a— that's a pretty strong moral intuition.

Reducing harm to others and protecting the vulnerable had to be one of the first pillars of any moral system. To be a good person is to care about others.

You know, while I was making up this theory, you know, I was having kids, and to see the way kids react to their stuffed animals and the way they get really upset if you sit on the stuffed animal, like, wow, that's the care foundation right there. They, they feel the pain of you sitting on their stuffed animal.

Our sense of fairness is the second moral taste receptor. It's why kids are so quick to holler, that's not fair, if a sibling gets a bigger scoop of ice cream.

There's a lot of research originally from Robert Trivers on reciprocal altruism, how we evolved to like to do favors for people, but we keep track of it because then they'll do us a favor in return and we don't want to get ripped off. So we've got all kinds of internal programming about fairness, exchange, cheating, catching cheaters. And it would be hard to argue that that's not part of our original equipment.

In Western countries, both progressives and conservatives value the moral foundation of caring. They also value fairness, but their cuisines have different flavors when it comes to this aspect of morality.

So fairness is so interesting because everyone, every society cares a lot about fairness. But it turns out there are 2 There are a couple of different kinds of fairness. All around the world, people are sensitive to if somebody or some group is taking more than they're giving. We then get very mad at them. That's unfair. They're exploiting us. Progressives care more about equality, especially equality of outcomes. And they think it's unfair if society ends up with big discrepancies of outcome. Whereas conservatives or free market libertarians would say, look, if somebody starts a business and creates more value, I want him to end up with a lot more than someone who doesn't. So everyone thinks they value fairness and the other side doesn't, but there are some conflicting notions of fairness.

The other 3 moral taste receptors that John identified were deeply informed by what he saw in India: loyalty, sanctity, and a respect for authority. John says Americans on the political right tend to value these qualities much more than progressives.

So loyalty, it was really about, are you a good member of your group? And humans evolved to be tribal creatures. We very quickly do us versus them. We love team sports for that reason. And loyalty is we're kind of monitoring each other. Are you really a team player? Are you out for yourself? And here too, we find stronger intuitions about loyalty tend to be found on the right than on the left. The next one is authority versus subversion. And that's, do you see the world as having structures that that are necessary for society to function, and it is incumbent upon all of us to respect those structures? Or do you say, no, you know, anything about authority is inequality, is oppression? If there are statues, let's pull them off their pedestals. And this is again part of our culture war. The right is livid at the way the left seems to attack, you know, the American Founding Fathers and statues. So it's a basic difference over whether authority, tradition, structure are valuable, or are they constraints on individuals. And then, uh, there's purity or sanctity, which is again this idea that things have invisible essences that we need to honor. So there used to be a debate in the '90s about flag burning. Should we amend the Constitution to prevent anyone from burning the flag? And on the left, people said it's just a piece of cloth, and if people burn it as an act of expression political expression, well, that's free speech. But people on the right are more likely to feel that there is an essence in the flag. That's why you must never let it touch the ground. There's all kinds of rules about it. It's more than a material object. And that's the dividing line.

As John reflected on his own upbringing and the views of nearly everyone he knew in high school and college, he saw that he and his family and friends had prioritized 2 moral foundations. Progressives were deeply animated by the moral foundation of caring, reducing harm, especially to the vulnerable. And they cared about reducing discrepancies in outcomes because that signaled unfairness.

And progressive moralities are mostly based on those 2, whereas social conservatives— and this was certainly true In India, social conservatives also value sort of loyalty, like group loyalty, authority, and purity and sanctity, those 3 additional taste receptors. So I started putting this metaphor out to try to argue with my fellow psychologists and philosophers that, you know what, we need to rethink morality because all of our research here is just on American morality. And it's actually on American progressive morality. We're not even including our own conservatives. So that's kind of what got me launched on this idea, which again comes in part from Richard Schwader, that the moral domain is actually very broad around the world. And the real story is, how did it come to be so narrow in secular progressive circles in Western countries?

To drive his point home, John came up with an analogy. He asked his fellow progressives to imagine a restaurant.

I developed this story about a restaurant owner who did some research and found out that sweetness is the most pleasant taste. So he opens a restaurant that serves only sweeteners. And you can come in and there's a menu, there's a whole menu. You can get different kinds of honey, different kinds of maple syrup, but it's all sweeteners. You know, and I tell the fanciful story of me walking in and, you know, being puzzled by what the hell's going on. Why do you only serve sweeteners? And the guy says, well, you know, because that's what people want.

Progressives and conservatives unconsciously prioritize different moral foundations. Each group lives inside its own matrix, but thinks its consensual hallucination must be universal. This routinely leads to conflict.

I think one of the clearest places to look for left-right differences is in intuitions and morals around the family and family structure. And what we see is that in progressive families, there's much more of the idea that the parents are not authorities. They don't just lay down the law. They talk with their kids. I was just reading recently about a movie, I think it's called Gentle Parenting, where you never discipline the kids, you try to talk with them. And so on the far left, I think people are very uncomfortable with authority, and they have a very strong sense that you have to treat everyone gently and with care. Whereas conservatives say, uh, no, you have to have a respect for authority. You've got to learn right from wrong. If you stray, there has to be some punishment. And in the long run, this is what's best for you and best for society. So if I love you, I'm going to teach you right from wrong. I'm not just going to try to reason with you gently. And so on all kinds of issues around the family, we see a big left-right difference. In fact, there was just an article in the New York Times about how Dog training is now polarized this way. And progressives, when they train their dogs, they don't want to give them orders. They want to be their friends, whereas conservatives, they want an obedient dog.

One of the benefits of what came to be known as moral foundations theory was it gave people a peek into what life was like in another matrix. It gave people a chance to understand those with whom they disagreed.

We were doing this work in the '90s as the culture war was heating up. And it really began to be clear that moral foundations theory was actually very useful in understanding the culture war. And this is actually one of the most gratifying parts of being a researcher. You put things out in the world and then you get emails from people saying, oh, thank you for your work. I finally understand my father-in-law. And you realize, oh, wow, yeah, what happened to you is like what happened to me. You actually get outside your moral matrix and you can disagree with someone without hating them because— You see that they are a human being pursuing ends or values that you can at least understand, even if you don't prioritize. And when that happens, now the world is a very, very different place. It's not full of good and evil people. It's full of different people. And you can have ideas about how we can improve it. But if your idea is we got to defeat the evil ones, that's kind of the history of the world, and it tends not to lead to a good place.

Once he saw how people's views were informed by their moral taste receptors, John found himself becoming less ideological. He started to feel that healthy societies need a mix of progressive and conservative ideas.

Not because I think the answer is always in the middle, but because I see the need for a kind of a yin-yang formulation that is Progressives are super sensitive to certain kinds of injustice and they drive forward rights revolutions. But if they're totally in charge and there's no brake, you get chaos, you get collapse. Left-wing revolutions tend to work out really, really badly. And if the right is in charge and there's no countervailing, you tend to get all kinds of social patterns that are repressive, that are brittle, that are exclusionary. So I became a committed principled centrist.

Around this time, John met a man named Greg Lukianoff. Greg is a lawyer who ran an organization focused on issues of free speech, especially on college campuses. The group mostly tried to restrain administrators from infringing on student freedoms. But starting in the early 2010s, Greg noticed something. Students on many campuses were demanding more intervention from administrators rather than less. When controversial speakers came to campus, it was now the students rather than the administrators who tried to keep them at bay.

Now, Greg is prone to depression, and he had a suicidal depression in 2007. Fortunately, he called 911 at the last moment, and they talked him into Going in for treatment. And when he was released from the hospital, he took therapy in CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, and he learned to identify cognitive distortions. That's what CBT is all about. You see that your mind goes into these patterns of catastrophizing, black and white thinking, overgeneralizing. And so Greg had learned to recognize those patterns in himself and talk himself out of them. That's 2007. Fast forward to 2013, 2014, Greg sees students saying, if this speaker comes to campus, people will die, you know, or they would label people, you know, he's a fascist. So these are cognitive distortions. And Greg's idea was that somehow these college students are learning to think in these distortions. Somehow college is teaching them to do that. And if they do that, they're going to get depressed.

If cognitive behavioral therapy reduced depression by teaching people to fight their tendency to catastrophize or overreact, Gregg's idea was that young people were being exposed to a kind of reverse cognitive behavioral therapy that was making them more depressed.

And I thought that was a really brilliant idea. And I had just begun to see examples of this on campus. We were reading stories from around the country about microaggressions and students demanding trigger warnings and safe spaces. All this started in 2014. It was not there in 2012. So Greg comes to talk to me, and I think his idea is brilliant, and I volunteer to help him write it up. And so we did, and we sent it to The Atlantic, and it was published in August of 2015. And they gave it the title, The Coddling of the American Mind, which we were a bit uncomfortable with because we didn't want to be accusing the students of being coddled. But actually, it kind of worked because coddled just means overprotected, and we've done that. We have vastly overprotected our kids in the real world and made them feel that the world is dangerous. I teach a course at NYU Stern called Work, Wisdom, and Happiness. I was co-teaching it with Barry Schwartz, a professor at Swarthmore who, who wrote a book on wisdom. And he assigned an article from The New Yorker that involved death and dying. And, you know, I can imagine that some students would find it uncomfortable. But we long had the idea in the academy that discomfort is not a reason to not talk about something. In fact, Our founding story is really Socrates, the gadfly of Athens, trying to make people uncomfortable. But suddenly we started getting reactions from students, whether it be in my teaching evaluations or other comments, that I shouldn't assign something that makes people uncomfortable. Or if you do, you should have given a trigger warning. We'd never seen that before. This was new.

So in some ways, I'm seeing a connection between the work that you were doing with the moral foundations theory, where you basically argue that one of the that people on the left care about deeply is protecting people from harm. And the examples you're telling me of what happened on college campuses of people saying, in fact, there are all these new dimensions of harm that we hadn't thought about previously that we should do something about.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I came to believe doing this work that monomania is dangerous. Monomania means focusing on one thing, becoming obsessed with one thing. And you might say, well, care, how could that be bad? Care is lovely. But what happens if you have a one-foundation morality and everything's about care? Well, you treat everyone as vulnerable, as easily harmed. You want to protect them. And before you know it, you have violated children's needs for challenge. We are not fragile. Children are not fragile. We actually need to be challenged in order to grow. And what an extraordinary disservice we're doing to our students if we let them graduate from college thinking that ideas that upset them should be shut down.

As young people and their parents increasingly experienced the real world as a place of danger and threat, John realized there was a powerful new force that offered them comfort and safety. Instead of venturing outside the home, kids were retreating into virtual worlds and video games. Instead of asking someone out on a date, teenagers were hiding behind their phones. And in place of close, deep friendships, intimacies that come with the risk of heartbreak and betrayal, social media platforms offered a seductive world of likes, emojis, and positivity.

Mr. Zuckerberg You and the companies before us, I know you don't mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product—

you have a product that's killing people.

That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt works at New York University. He is the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Jon, your most recent research focuses on the mental health of young people and the alarming spike in anxiety and depression. How does this connect to your earlier work, both your research on moral foundations and your theories about cognitive distortions among college students? Is there a through line here?

Well, yes, there is. So we knew that rising depression and anxiety was part of what was going on. Because if you're chronically anxious, you see everything as more threatening. You see a visiting speaker as more dangerous. And some researchers said like, oh no, you know, you guys are all wrong. There's no epidemic. You know, the kids are all right. And I thought, oh, did I, did I make a mistake here? So I created a doc, a Google document, made it public, and I put in all the research I could find on mental health. And it began to tell the story of an epidemic of anxiety and depression that began around 2012, 2013.

John believes that our worries about harm in the real world and the rise of social media giants like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have driven countless young people to seek refuge in their phones, at great harm to their mental health.

Let's look at the data from these long-running longitudinal studies that the federal government runs. One is the Monitoring the Future study, which surveys high school students every other year. And variable after variable about anxiety, depression, optimism, pessimism, life has no meaning, whatever you want to graph, it's a hockey stick. That is, things look okay up to 2010, and then all hell breaks loose. Around 2012, 2013.

So you're seeing more anxiety, more depression?

That's right. You're not seeing, like, more schizophrenia or bipolar. It's all related to mood disorders, anything about anxiety and depression. And interestingly and tragically, it's not just like kids are saying that they're more anxious. Hospital admissions for self-harm show exactly the same pattern, a really terrifying hockey stick for girls. And especially, my God, you look at preteen girls, Girls 10 to 14, they didn't used to cut themselves, but the rate for the preteen girls has more than tripled. And we see the same thing with suicide. Suicide rates have gone up for girls to the highest levels they've ever been at. It started in the early 2010s, sometimes around 2008. And for young girls, the rates are up more than triple.

It's worth stating here that while many scholars agree with John that social media is a big part of the problem— US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory in 2023 linking social media usage to the youth mental health crisis— there are scholars who feel other explanations are also possible.

People have all kinds of theories, like why did it start in 2012? So a lot of people say, oh, you know, school shootings. That was the Newtown massacre. And after that, kids had these terrifying lockdown drills. Well, okay, that does fit the timing, it's true. But why do girls in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the UK— why do they all start cutting themselves in 2013? It doesn't make any sense. Other people would say, oh, okay, global, has to be global. Oh, the global financial crisis. You know, I mean, lots of families had all kinds of financial difficulties starting in 2008. But that makes no sense either because things were really bad in 2008, 2009, 2010. But there's no change on the mental illness graphs. And then the economy starts getting better and better and better. And from 2011 through 2019, it gets better and better and better. Stock market goes up. Unemployment goes down. Depression and anxiety and self-harm and suicide keep going up and up and up.

So give me a sense of how much time young people are spending on their phones. You've collected some of this evidence. How much time are young people spending on their phones on these social media platforms and other apps?

So what we find is that teenagers are spending around 8 to 10 hours a day on their phones. And then there are other devices as well. Preteens are spending something like 6 to 8 hours a day on their phones. So these are astonishing numbers. And what that means is that it pushes out almost everything else. It pushes out sleep, exercise, time with friends, time paying attention to teachers. So that's one way to estimate it. The other is there's a question that Pew asks, which is, how often are you on the internet? And one of the options is, I'm almost constantly on the internet. And we've seen this with young people. Whatever they're doing, the phone is there. They're talking to someone, but they're looking up stuff. They're talking to someone, but they're actually also texting. And so about 45% to 48% say they're on almost constantly. That means something like 16 hours a day. Now, it's not 16 hours a day looking at the screen, but if you're doing what's called continuous partial attention, you're always thinking about what's going on in that chat, what's going on on this fight on Instagram. You're never fully present in the physical world. You're never fully present with the people around you. And so what that means is that young people, at least half of them, say that they're basically never fully present. They're always partially online. That's terrifying.

You've talked about why girls might be affected more than boys. Can you talk about this a little bit more, John? Because the numbers really are quite striking. Teenage girls seem to be really affected far worse than teenage boys.

That's right. So the simple component is just that they use it a lot more. But you have to say, why do they use it more? And here, I think the master psychological variable is this difference between 2 sort of high-level motivations. So everyone has a motivation for agency and for communion. Agency is the desire to be active in the world, to make things happen, to be a force. And communion is the desire to connect, to be part of a group, to be included. So all kids have both, but on average, boys are more— they seek out more, they seem to have stronger agency needs and a little less communion. Girls, the opposite. So what these companies do, they know their audience. They're all desperate to get, you know, if Instagram doesn't grab 11 and 12-year-olds, they're going to lose them to TikTok. They look at girls' concerns, fears, and motivations. They're afraid of being left out. If someone's talking about them, they need to know. So they've crafted Instagram to maximally hook young women. And it seems to offer communion, it seems to offer community, but once you get in, you're now constantly preyed upon about your insecurities, about your looks, about your life, about what people are saying about you. So for all these reasons, social media appeals to girls more, it traps them more, and it harms them more. For many kids, they get bullied, and bullying on social media is unlike anything before because It's not just like a few kids making fun of you or cornering you or threatening you during school. What many kids are finding now is social media makes it possible for them to be bullied 24/7, even on weekends, anonymously. And it's like everyone is talking about them or laughing about them. So for some kids, it's the bullying which leads to suicide. For some kids, it's the chronic social comparison. For some kids, It's the fact that they get caught up by sexual predators. There is such a range of harms that come to these kids, especially girls. So it's not just the opportunity cost. It's positively harming many of them.

I think if you talk to most teenagers today or young people today, they will tell you that, in fact, social media is a way for them to connect with other people, to have friends with other people, that if you took away their phones and took away their social media, Jonathan Haidt, would in some ways be depriving them of their social lives.

Well, that's true, but you got to look at it this way. Suppose you took everyone, you took all children, and you locked them up in individual cells in a gigantic prison, and then you connect them via tin cans with strings so they can talk to each other on their tin cans with strings. And then you say, I'm going to take away your tin cans with strings. Well, yeah, that would be bad. But what if you said to them, how about we break you out of prison? And you just like meet up and talk. Most kids would like that. And so, for example, there was recently a study published with college students asking them, how much would we have to pay you to not use TikTok or Instagram for, for a month? And they give some number. I think on average it was like $50 because they don't want to be kicked off when everyone else is on. But then the experimenter said, okay, we're actually going to try to get most people in your university to quit Instagram and TikTok for a month. If we succeed in doing that, how much would we have to pay you to go off? So the college students said, you know what? If I could pay to make that happen, I would. So they're trapped. And this is the key thing that everyone needs to understand about social media. It is a social trap. The kids are stuck on it, but they're only there because everyone else is.

What is the solution to this problem here, Jon? And of course, now we're venturing into the realm of policy, not necessarily psychology, but these are devices that are used by millions of people. These are companies that are here to stay. These are networks that are very hard to dismantle. What is your solution?

Delay. Delay. There's lots of talk about how to make it less toxic, but given what we know about child development, about what kids need, how much kids need physical play to be in touch with other kids, to have independence, for God's sakes, Let's let them get through childhood and at least early puberty before we throw them into this pit of craziness and despair. So what if we had a norm— not a law, a norm— saying no smartphones before high school? Let them get through middle school with just flip phones. Flip phones are great. They can call and text you. They can call and text their friends. Don't give a smartphone till high school. That would do an enormous amount of good, at least get them through early puberty where their brain is rewiring very rapidly before they're spending all day long on social media and other platforms. So that's norm number 1. Norm number 2, no social media till 16. The only reason most people let their kids have an Instagram account in 6th or 7th grade is because everyone else has one. So if your kid's the only one who's not on Instagram, then you're condemning them to— social isolation. But if half or most of the kids aren't on, then it's very easy to say no. The third norm is phone-free schools. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, imagine running a heroin treatment clinic and you say, you know, okay, you're all heroin addicts, you can bring your heroin in, but you have to keep it in your pocket. Please don't shoot up while you're in the clinic. You know, they can't do that, they're addicts. And in the same way, most schools say, oh yeah, yeah, we ban phones. Yeah, we tell the kids You're not— you can't take it out during class time. But of course they do. They text during class, they text between classes, they text and are on social media at lunch. So the phones are devastating to learning, to inclusion, to friendship, and the teachers all hate them. Why are we letting kids bring their phones into class? They should be locked up in a phone locker as soon as they walk in, and then they get them back at the end of the day. And the 4th norm is far more free play and childhood independence. We can't just take away the phones and say, okay, kid, sit and look at the wall. We have to restore the play-based childhood in which kids meet up after school and do stuff together. So if you did those 4 things, I think we would bring down rates of mental illness very substantially within 1 or 2 years.

So there's a paradox here because on the one hand, John, you're saying that we're coddling kids, we're overprotecting them. You've written a book called The Coddling of the American Mind. But you're saying that on social media and in digital spaces, we're not doing enough protection. It feels like those are opposite ideas.

They're not at all opposite. I see the apparent contradiction. Once you realize smartphones are like the cuckoo bird— so the cuckoo bird lays her egg in other birds' nests. That egg hatches quickly. And then the baby hatchling pushes out all the other eggs. A smartphone does that. When you give your kid a smartphone, it's going to push out almost everything else. They're going to sit there their whole childhood on the phone. My basic argument in The Anxious Generation is that we have overprotected our kids in the real world where they desperately need a huge amount of experience, and we've underprotected them online. Which is this insane adult space that is not made for children, in which a lot of kids are getting torn up. So there's no contradiction.

John increasingly finds himself going back in his mind to Bhubaneswar. Yes, there was inequality, hierarchy, and sexism in India, but the interdependence of people living in a dense social network served as a moat against despair. He says a similar moat is providing some protection against mental health issues for many conservative kids in the United States.

While we've known for a long time that liberals are a little bit more depressed, a little bit less happy than conservatives, that gap exploded after 2012. In other words, when you trace out these graphs, 2000, 2005, 2010, everything goes up around 2012, 2013. But conservative kids only go up a little. Liberal kids go up more. Boys go up a little. Girls go up more. Liberal girls go up the most. So this really hit liberal girls. So people who say that religion is important to them or who were raised in religious families, they're only a little bit worse off, whereas people who were secular, who say religion isn't important, they're much worse off. And so the way I interpret it is Conservatives and religious people are more rooted and anchored in their local communities. They're more parochial, whereas progressives are more secular, less religious, more cosmopolitan, less rooted, more citizens of the world. And that used to actually be conducive to happiness. But then when everything switches on to digital, when everything switches on to phones around 2012, 2013, The kids who are rooted and anchored are not much affected because they still have roots with people, whereas the kids who are not rooted got swept away in a tidal wave of anomie or normlessness. So Jean Twenge has shown that liberal girls spend by far the most time on social media, more so than any other group, and the kind of stuff they're consuming makes them feel the world is dangerous and stacked against them. So for all these reasons, it turns out gender, politics, and religion explain a lot of the variance in who is worse off since 2012.

Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist at New York University. He's the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Jon, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Shankar, what a pleasure.

You can find more of our conversation with Jonathan Haidt on our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. In that episode, we'll explore how Jon's ideas about technology and mental health apply to adults. Also, ideas about how to flourish in our daily lives.

She had feelings of love and openness and communion with strangers walking in a park that she'd been in many times. And here's what was so amazing. She was so moved by this experience that she wanted more.

You can listen to that episode, which is called 6 Practices to Elevate Your Life, and try Hidden Brain Plus for free by finding the show on Apple Podcasts. Just click on the episode and follow the prompts to sign up for your 7-day trial to Hidden Brain Plus. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you'd like to hear more of our reporting on the intersection of technology and psychology, check out the show notes for this episode. You'll find links there for several Hidden Brain episodes that I think you'll enjoy. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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