Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt explores the simultaneous rise in teen mental illness across various countries, attributing it to a seismic shift from a "play-based childhood" to a "phone-based childhood" around the early 2010s. He argues that the negative effects of this "great rewiring of childhood" will continue to worsen without the adoption of several norms and a more hands-on approach to regulating social media platforms.

But might technological advances and good old human resilience allow kids to adapt more easily than he thinks?

Jonathan joined Tyler to discuss this question and more, including whether left-wingers or right-wingers make for better parents, the wisest person Jonathan has interacted with, psychological traits as a source of identitarianism, whether AI will solve the screen time problem, why school closures didn't seem to affect the well-being of young people, whether the mood shift since 2012 is not just about social media use, the benefits of the broader internet vs. social media, the four norms to solve the biggest collective action problems with smartphone use, the feasibility of age-gating social media, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded February 14th, 2024.

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Photo Credits: Jayne Riew

Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercadus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.0	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems.
0:13.0	Learn more at Merkatus.org.
0:16.0	For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.0	visit Conversations with Tyler.com.
0:27.0	Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
0:31.0	Today I'm chatting with John Hite, who needs no introduction. We've already done an episode with him, but I should stress that John has a new book out in late March. It is called The Anxious Generation, and the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
0:47.0	John, welcome.
0:49.0	Tyler, great to be back, great to see you.
0:51.0	Let me start with some non-book questions, though they're related.
0:55.9	Who makes her better parents?
0:57.3	Left-wingers or right-wingers.
0:58.9	Right-wingers, there's a lot of data on this.
1:00.9	There's long been a slight gap where conservatives are a little happier than liberals,
1:05.3	and it's not clear why, is that parenting, who knows. But what I found in doing the research for the book
1:10.0	is that the gap between left and right became a chasm after 2012.
1:14.4	So I'll get to the reasons why that is, but the bottom line is
1:18.1	when kids are rooted in communities, they don't get washed out to see by the phone-based childhood by living by the virtual world.
1:27.0	So over and over again, whether we look at left right, whether we look at religion, what we find is that it's the secular
1:32.3	kids and the liberal kids who got washed out to
1:34.4	see got really depressed after 2012 and much less effect on the
1:38.0	conservative and religious kids because I think they're more rooted.
	...

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