Jonathan Haidt’s incredibly well-timed decision to surf on the wave of a moral panic about kids and social media has made him a false hero for many parents and educators. In my review, I noted that his book, “The Anxious Generation,” is written in a way that makes adults struggling with the world today feel good, because it gives them something to blame for lots of really difficult things happening with kids today.
The fact that it’s wrong and the data don’t support the actual claims is of no matter. It feels like it could be right, and that’s much easier than doing the real and extremely difficult work of actually preparing kids for the modern world.
So what happens when an actual expert confronts Haidt on this?
Earlier this year, we had Dr. Candice Odgers on our podcast. Unlike Haidt, she is an actual expert in this field and has been doing research on the issue for years. The podcast was mostly to talk about what the research actually shows, rather than just “playing off Haidt’s” misleading book. However, Odgers has become the go-to responder to Haidt’s misleading moral panic. She’s great at it (though there are a ton of other experts in the field who also point out that Haidt’s claims are not supported by evidence).
Still, Odgers keeps getting called on by publications to respond to Haidt’s claims. She’s done so in Nature, where she highlighted what the research actually shows, and in The Atlantic, where she explained how Haidt’s supported proposals might actually cause real harm to kids.
Many people have been wondering if Haidt and Odgers (who were at UVA at the same, Odgers as a grad student, Haidt as a professor) would have a chance to debate directly, and that finally happened recently during a session hosted by UVA. This gave them a chance to discuss what the research says directly. I recommend watching the whole discussion, which is an hour and a half long, though most of the discussion on the research comes in the first half.
What came across to me, and which Haidt admits at the very end, is that Odgers knows the research in this space better than anyone, and she wasn’t going to let Haidt get away with making broad generalizations not supported by the data. Here’s a snippet of her responding to Haidt insisting that the research supports his position, including that he was seeing the same thing across the Western world. But Odgers points out that’s not what the research shows:
Jon, I’m going to actually I’m going to follow up. So there’s a 2023 Lancet paper that came out. And all of the analyses there’s tremendous variability like you know in terms of mental health across countries. But if you both look at symptoms and you look at suicide, there’s been a general trend for declining rates across all European countries in Canada, Australia. You can pick out certain measures and certain time periods where there might be an increase, but I’ve always been curious of how these cross-country comparisons. So how that becomes evidence that this is somehow causing? Or if we see different trends and different countries at different times, that that creates the story? So… I don’t see what you’re seeing.
She also suggests that Haidt’s problem is that he has a story and then went back searching for data to support it. Rather than going in and seeing what the data actually says:
The cross-country comparisons, you know, they’re they’re often a starting point to see whether there might be something interesting correlationally going on, but it’s a very slippery place to start and I think you know, unless you start with the pretty clear hypothesis about what should explain those differences, if you’re just looking at trend lines and then going backwards and starting to fill in an explanation, it’s hard to follow where it goes and whether or not we’re just fitting these lines to our existing theories, but I’ll leave it.
Haidt jumps in to insist you don’t need a pre-existing hypothesis to find something. This is technically true because of course you can sometimes find something that way. But also, it is kind of a big deal right now, given the replication crisis which started in Haidt’s own field of psychology. The crisis was brought on by researchers hunting through data to try to prove something. This is why pre-registered studies are increasingly so important. So having Haidt just act like not having a hypothesis initially seems pretty tone deaf.
Similarly, I’ll note that Haidt frequently jumps between arguments that aren’t directly connected. When asked about evidence on mental health, he talks instead about things like sextortion and catfishing. Obviously, being a victim of those kinds of attacks and abuses can impact mental health, but that’s still a much smaller part of the issue and isn’t directly related to the larger issue of scrolling on social media and how it impacts mental health.
There’s a lot more in the discussion, but I’m really hoping that more people recognize that Haidt’s position doesn’t seem to really be supported by the evidence. Watching Odgers confront him is enlightening, but too few people will see it. Instead, politicians, parents, and school administrators are all acting as though Haidt has it all figured out. Mostly because it absolves them of having to do the hard work of teaching kids how to use these tools appropriately.
