Jonathan Haidt
speaker
5,062 appearances
20 recordings
18 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard 26 Jun
Jonathan Haidt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And we bond together when we touch.
But when everything moved online, teens across the developed world lost most of those bonding experiences.
Levels of loneliness and anxiety began to rise almost immediately in many countries simultaneously.
And this wasn't just an historical correlation.
There are now multiple lines of evidence showing that social media is causing harm at an industrial scale.
One line is the dozens of experiments showing that when you randomly assign people, these are usually with adults, young adults, when you randomly assign people to greatly reduce their social media use for at least a week, their levels of anxiety and depression go down.
And one of those studies was done by Meta.
But what I've learned in the last two years is that I grossly understated the damage in the anxious generation, because I focused on the mental health outcomes.
That's where we have the best data, that's where we're doing the most work.
But I now believe that an even larger damage is the diminishment of the human capacity to pay sustained attention.
One third of all American teens say that they're on a social media platform almost constantly, just throughout the day.
And the main thing they're doing on those social media platforms is watching very short videos.
Young people call it brain rot, which is a funny term, but it might really be true, because the adolescent brain is always a brain that's being remodeled.
the neural network of a child has to convert itself, has to rewire itself to become the neural network of an adult.
And that rewiring process, the neurons finding each other, that's shaped by whatever you're doing every day.
And it's shaped by whatever everyone else says is prestigious.
Which means that puberty is the worst possible time for a human being to be on social media.
For our ultra-social species, that rewiring should be guided by huge amounts of social interaction in the real world, not by TikTok's algorithm.
I imagine there's a lot of parents in the audience.
So here's the first principle of what we might call techno-skepticism.
Showing 41–60 of 5,062 · page 3 of 254
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