Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
jonathan height 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 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 critical counts
he has not yet read the brilliant
writing of jonathan height 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 how
we take the letter path
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now to your
friends here's jonathan height
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 so 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
the good the bad and the ugly of social
media
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 um and i began
growing alarmed in the in the early
2000s about how bad polarization was
getting and i began studying
um 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 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 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 two thousand eight two
thousand like 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 lucianov 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 coding the
american mind which wasn't primarily
about social media either it was about
you know this sort of a rise of of
depression anxiety
but after that things got so much worse
everywhere and that's when i began to
think like whoa 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
cuddling of the american mind that's the
individual psychology at play or the the
way parenting and education works
to make uh sort of emphasize
anti-fragility
of the human mind
uh as it interacts with the social media
platforms and the other humans through
the social so all that beautiful message
that should take us an hour or two to to
cover or maybe a couple of years yes but
so let's start if it's okay
uh you said you wanted to challenge some
of the things that mark zuckerberg has
said in a conversation with me uh what
are some of the ideas he expressed that
you disagree with okay there are two
major areas that i study uh one is what
is happening with teen mental health it
fell off a cliff in 2013 it was very
sudden um and then the other is what is
happening to our democratic and
epistemic institutions that means
knowledge generating like the
universities journalism
so so my main areas of research where
i'm collecting the empirical research
and trying to make sense of it is
what's happened to 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 well
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 um uh
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 um but they're
relatively level in the early 2000s and
then all of a sudden around you know
around 2010 to 2013 depending on which
statistic you're looking at
all of a sudden they begin to shoot
upwards um 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 increase
it's not like oh 10 20
no the increases are between 50 and 150
um depending on which group you're
looking at um you know suicide for
pre-teen girls think thankfully it's not
very common um 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
um australia new zealand are very
similar they're just after a little
delay so whatever we're looking for here
but but yet it's not it's not as clear
uh in the germanic countries it's 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
um that and it started right around 2012
2013 it wasn't gradual um 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 pre-teen girls
the hardest um there is no other
explanation the complexity here and 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 60 in the 60s and 70s
doesn't mean that that was the cause of
the crime so what i've done
and this has worked with gene twenge uh
who wrote the book igen is um because i
was challenged you know when i when greg
and i put out the book the the coddling
of 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 a
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
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
eye glasses it was a very catchy claim
and it's caught on and i keep hearing
that
um but let me unpack why that's not true
and then we'll get to what mark said
because what mark basically said here
actually i'll read it
by the way just to pause real quick uh
is
you 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 there is a cause which is not just
social media but the the like button and
the retweet a certain mechanism of
virality that that was
invented or perhaps yeah some aspect of
social media is the cause 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 videos i
mean so connecting people is good i'm
not a luddite um 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 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 tick tock i suspect
it's going to end up being having a lot
of really bad effects uh 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 um well this
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 it
and that at scale is a very interesting
effect being connected across the globe
especially during times of covert 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
uh 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 uh
we're not
rigorous in a scientific way about the
negative and that's what we're trying to
do
here
um and
so
that brings us to
the mark zuckerberg okay but wait let me
just pick up on the issue of trade-offs
because um
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 we
have done without social media and
covered like we would have been sitting
there alone in our homes
yeah if all we had was uh you know
texting telephone zoom skype multiplayer
video games whatsapp um
all sorts of ways of communicating with
each other oh and there's blogs and the
rest of the internet yeah we would have
been fine did we really need the
hyper-viral 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 it's not clear to me
that adding in
this particular business model of
facebook twitter tick tock 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 piece that's
very hard to because youtube has 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 uh in this large document that
you're putting together uh on social
media uh called social media and
political dysfunction collaborative
review with the
chris bale that includes i believe
papers on youtube as well it does but
yeah again just to finish up with the
nuance yeah um uh youtube is really
complicated because i can't imagine life
without youtube it's incredibly useful
it does a lot of good things um it also
obviously helps to radicalize terrorist
groups and and murderers so um 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 um 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
to 14 that's the area in which they
almost all get smart phones and they
become daily users of the girl so the
girls go to instagram and tumblr they go
to the visual ones the boys go to
youtube and video games those don't seem
to be as harmful to mental health or
even harmful at all it's really um
tumblr instagram particularly that seem
to really have done in girls mental
health um so now
okay so let's look at the quote from
from mark zuckerberg
so uh at uh at 64 uh minutes and 31
seconds on the video i did i'm coded
this guy this is the this is excellent
this is the very helpful youtube
transcript youtube's an amazing program
um you ask him about francis haugen you
give him a chance to respond
uh and here's the key thing um
uh 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
um i think an accurate characterization
would have been the kids using instagram
uh or not kids but teens is generally
positive for their mental health that's
his claim that youtube that uh 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 uh so
first just a 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 are happy
we can't know that but but facebook
knows it um so should they be compelled
to uh to reveal the data we need that
so you raise just uh
uh 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 question is
no and then mix results and questions
include things like does social media
make people more angry or effectively
polarized right
that's the one that we're going to get
to that's the one for democracy yes
that's democracy so 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 you
know comment add studies tell us what we
missed and it evolves in real time in
any direction the yes or the oh yeah we
specifically encourage because i look my
the center of my research is that our
gut feelings drive our reasoning that's
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
said great say so tell us um so i put
together this document and i'm gonna i'm
gonna put links to everything on my
website if users if you're sorry if
listeners viewers go to
jonathanheight.com
socialmedia 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 and other things like it though
that's right exactly right so yeah so
the thing i want to call attention now
is this document this document here with
the title teen mental health is
plummeting and social media is a major
contributing cause um so ben sasse and
chris coons are on the judiciary
committee they had a subcommittee
hearing on uh nate priscilli's bill uh
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 uh 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. um 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
self-reported survey you ask people
uh how yeah how anxious are you these
days yeah how many hours a week do you
social media
that kind of stuff and then 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 uh i forget the
term you use but more
uh so non-self-report data behavioral
data behavioral data that's right where
you actually have self-harm
and uh 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 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 on the y-axis is the percent of u.s
teens who had a major depression in the
last year that's right so when this data
started coming out around so gene
twang's book igen 2017 a lot of people
say oh she you know 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
they're they're giving higher rates
there's more diagnosis but underlying
there's no change no because these gra
these 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 um
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
so we have a catastrophe and this was
all true before kovid covet made things
worse but we have to realize um you know
covet'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 um well uh
just again to just go through the point
then i'll stop i i just feel like i'm i
just really don't want to get out the
data to show that market 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 point one typically um
that's the first point the second point
um is that um this 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 well 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 well-being
therefore range from about r equals 0.15
to r equals 0.10 um
so that's the range we're talking about
and that's for boys and girls together
um and a lot of research including hers
and mine show that girls it's higher so
for girls we're talking about
correlations around point one five to
point two i believe gene twangy and i
found it's about point two 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 0.09 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 you
know 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 uh this is really good to learn
because i quit potatoes and it had no
[Laughter]
uh and it's a russian that was a big
sacrifice
um they're 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
uh 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 sort of the mark
zuckerberg
statements
so first of all do you think
mark is aware of some of these
studies
so
if we if you put yourself in the shoes
of mark zuckerberg and the executives
that 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 is is there a stable science now that
you can start to investigate and and
also maybe uh 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 and we could talk about the
potential you have to be very sort of
objective about the potential bias in
those kinds of leaks you want to
it would be nice to have a non-leak data
like
like yeah it'd be nice to be able to
actually have academic researchers able
to access in de-individuated
de-identified form um the actual data on
what kids are doing and how their mood
changes and and you know when people
commit suicide what was happening before
and it'd be great to know that we have
no idea
so what 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 the researchers are
thinking about this like let's they
treated this like sugar
you know because the data usually shows
a little bit of social media uses and
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
um 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
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 leonardo skinnezy who
wrote the book free range kids if there
are any parents listening to this please
buy lenora's book free range kids and
then go to letgrow.org it's a nonprofit
that lenora and i started with peter
gray and
daniel shukman
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 about
your age
they so they really begin 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
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 we're 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
schabilski showing that the damage is
greatest
for girls between 11 and 13. so there is
no way to make it safe for pre-teens 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 until you're 16. we need to
raise the agent and force it that's the
biggest thing so i think that's a really
powerful solution but
it's a
it makes me wonder if there's other
solutions
like controlling the virality of
bullying
so 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 i it might be
difficult to convince them to do so
uh
and also
for me as an adult who grew up without
social media
it's so
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 viral
how virality works on these platforms if
it's possible to design a platform that
leads to growth anti-fragility but does
not lead to depression
self-harm and suicide that like finding
that balance and making that is 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
right as a parent it's very hard to stop
your kid i have stopped my kids from
getting on instagram um and that's
caused some difficulties but um but they
also have thanked me because they see
that it's stupid they see that what the
kids are really on it
what they post they see that the culture
of it is is stupid as they say so
um 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
um so and ultimately physical play is
the way
uh to
to develop
physical to 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
robbed them of so anyway that we should
move on because i you know 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 sort of range
there's also experimental evidence we
collect uh true experiments with random
assignment and they mostly show an
effect
and there's um eyewitness testimony
you know
with the kids themselves you talk to
girls and you pull 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's 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 yes
twitter yes that's ultimately maybe in
the long term that there's no way
there's no way to make it safe there
it's unsafe at any speed 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 now 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 um 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
who how are people responding to the
post that i made between period you know
between classes um i mean i do it you
know i tried to stay off twitter for a
while but now 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
i the the thing where i disagree a
little bit
is i agree with you in 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 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 right
that driven if we can get a business
model as you're saying i'd be all for it
and 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
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 uh
maximize your long-term well-being
in theory in morality land it should i
don't think it's just more than 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 discipline oh yes oh
yes
so our brains are structured
to be
uh really good at approach and avoid so
we have circuits the front left circle
isn't over simplification 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 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 hyper-activated
everything's a threat uh 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 let you know the role person
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 the
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 you
find ways that we can all get sixty
percent of what we want
uh and that that ends when everyone's
anxious and angry 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 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
uh
uh drive clicks to their off-site uh
articles
is it just human nature
that loves drama can't look away from an
accident when you're driving by it is
there is there something to be said
about the reason i ask these questions
is to see can we start to figure out
what the solution would be
uh for to to uh to alleviate to
de-escalate not yet not yet let's first
we have to understand
um 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 um so human nature is
tribal we evolve for intergroup conflict
um we love war um we we uh the first
time my buddies and i played paintball i
was 29 um 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 more 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
um but otherwise you want cooperation to
generally prevail in the society that's
how you create prosperity and peace
and if you're gonna have a diverse
democracy you really better focus on
cooperation not on tribalism and
division
uh and there's a wonderful book by yasha
monk called the great experiment that
talks about the difficulty of diversity
in democracy and and and what we need to
do to
get this right and to get the benefits
of diversity
so that's human nature
um now let's imagine that the
technological environment makes it
really easy for us to cooperate let's
give everyone telephones and 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
um now instead of that let's give them a
technology that encourages them to fight
so early facebook and twitter were
generally lovely places um you know
people old enough to remember like they
were fun there's a lot of humor um you
didn't feel like you're going to get
your head blown off no matter what you
said um
2007 2008 2009 it was still fun these
were nice places mostly and like almost
all the platforms started off as nice
places
um but and this is
the key thing in the in the article in
the atlantic article
on babel on 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 uh adapting to a world we can no
longer share that's what i proposed but
they they a b tested what's the title it
gets the most clicks and it was why the
past 10 years have been using the bible
the tower of babel is is a um
is a driving metaphor in the piece so
what first of all what is it what's the
top of babel what's what's babel what
are we talking about okay so the tower
babel is a story in 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
um acting again like gods um
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
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
um what the hell happened to us and it
wasn't until i reread the babel story a
couple of years ago that i 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
um so it's a story about fragmentation
and that's what's unique about our time
so
so meta or facebook wrote a rebuttal um
to my article they disputed what i said
uh 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 we're
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 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 is 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
um 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 um prosecutor i'm
sort of like oh you know it's like a
like a witch trial mindset um
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 other division we saw
before it's a little different than
viral wave once you get some people who
can who can use social media to
intimidate you get a 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 postdoc 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 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 or they're 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 wasau
and wasa'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