Category Archives: Social Media

A Uniquely Stupid Decade

2016 Trip to Southwest USA, Alienation, Decline of the west, Health, Loneliness, Social Issues, Social Media

 

A few years after he appeared on the Bill Maher show which I posted about yesterday, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, showed up on Amanpour and Co. expanding on his ideas about moral mistakes of the past. He was again explaining how social media was a problem but as always he did so in a very nuanced fashion and based his comments on scientific data. He is not free range pundits spouting off without restraint. Now don’t make nasty suggestions about me.

 

Haidt spoke with Hari Sreenivasan about the corrosive effects of new technology and how they have transformed the face of society, how they could be improved, and how drastically they have affected young people in North America. They talked a lot about an article he had written in the Atlantic with the engaging title “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” It actually sums up nicely a lot of his thinking. He is actually working on book on the subject that I am looking forward to reading.

 

Haidt has been researching what social media is doing to the minds of children, the behaviors of children, and how maybe that contributes to the larger issues he is thinking about. He wants to go beyond the effects of new technology, and consider the effects on society. His research has showed how kids were the canaries in the coal mine and the ill effects they suffered were also suffered by adults later on. He says social media helped to make the decade from 2010 to 2020 a stupid one. Sreenivasan called it “stupefaction.”

 

This is how Haidt summed it up on Amanpour & Co. on American PBS in 2022:

 

“…something changed, something fundamentally changed in the nature of this social universe, in the early 2010s. And everything got weird and kind of stupid after that. And we see it clearly — most clearly with that the kids. All kids have been on screens all the time. When I was a kid, when you were a kid, we watched too much television. We couldn’t take the television with us to school or into the bedroom, and something changed when kids got smartphones. And it’s not just the phone, it’s especially social media. The girls went right for the digital platforms. Instagram and Tumblr. The boys went more for YouTube and video games. And at the time, people said, well, you know, maybe this is good for them to have so much stimulation. But actually, what happened, beginning in 2012, was that rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide all began going up. I mean, it wasn’t a gradual thing, it was like they were sort of stable until 2012 and then, it’s like a hockey stick. They’re now — most of them are 100 percent higher, we kind of doubled it, of the rates of suicide, self-harm, depression and anxiety. So, that has really drawn me in because this, I think, was a national emergency. One that is tractable. And I’ve been studying this in depth to try to figure out what is the evidence that social media actually is a contributor, and there is a fair amount now.”

 

Haidt is sensitive to the fact that many people will shout out that analysts like him and others have cried wolf in the past about the evil nature of modern technology. As he said.

 

“…there’s a long history of moral panic, especially around technology. And I’ve been engaging with other psychologists who say I’m fomenting a moral panic. And they’re right to be concerned about that because most of the previous times we freaked out about technology, it hasn’t been actually anything. This time, we believe is different for a couple of reasons. The first is that there’s never been a hockey stick graph, like that that sudden upturn in mental health problems. So, this time, it’s different. Two is that the timing is exactly what you would expect for social media. It’s not a gradual thing. It’s not like something changed and then something else kind of changed. As soon as most kids get on social media and right then, the next very year, rates of depression and anxiety start going up. And then, a final kind of data is, the kids themselves say it. I mean, when we were growing up, we didn’t say, yes, you know, television is making us crazy. Mom and dad, you know, do something. But if you talk to the kids,  about Facebook, Instagram, they talk to the kids and guess what, they say, yes, Instagram is what’s making us depressed and anxious.”

 

I have been trying to show that there is some serious rot in western society. Not that it is all bad. But there sure is some bad stuff around. Any society that allows it is to some extent in serious decline even though there are many good aspects  to it to. I will continue on the this in my next post.

 

Coddling the Youth

Alienation, Decline of the west, Free Speech, Freedom, Health, Social Issues, Social Media

 

Well before the recent reports by the CDC and the US Surgeon General,  about the shocking rise of suicides among youth, in 2018, Jonathan Haidt a social psychologist appeared on various television shows to flog his book about his ideas of what happened to American youth, particularly American teenage girls. One of those shows was Real Time with Bill Maher. The book is called The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and Bad Ideas are setting up a generation for Failure co-written by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.

The book has its origins in an observation by Lukianoff that in 2013 for the first time it was students asking for protection from words and books and ideas and speech. All of which should be protected by the Constitution. Students had protested speakers before, but they never before medicalized it. They said that if this person says something I will be harmed or damaged and people will be traumatized. Therefore, schools like universities should protect them from hearing such speech. This was something new and when they put it in terms of safety to their university officials those officials had no choice but to respond.

As Haidt said, “This brought with it a whole package of innovations: micro-aggression training, safe spaces, trigger warnings, all this stuff appears from out of nowhere from around 2013 and 2014.”This made Haidt realize that this new generation of campus students are even more fragile than the millennials. And they wanted protection. Free speech be damned.

This drove both conservatives and liberals nuts, though liberals had a harder time deflecting these claims.

Haidt pointed out that kids born around 1995 had a very different childhood than children born before them. They don’t get driver licenses as much, they don’t drink as much, they don’t go out on dates, and they don’t have sex as much. What are they doing? They sit at home on their devices often with each other and this seems to be changing social development.” Haidt asserted, “As a result the rates of anxiety disorders, depression, self-cutting, and suicide are way, way up.”

This is particularly true for girls, and it all begins around 2011. In 2013 this generation entered colleges. And that is when these attitudes came out. In part this is because their parents insist on watching them all the time. Instead of helicopter parents they call it bull dozing parenting. They clear out all obstacles for their children. Their children are prepared to face no troubles at all. To put it bluntly, they have been coddled.

The main proposal made by Haidt and Lukianoff is anti-fragility. As Haidt said,

“Some things are fragile like a wine glass. You knock it over it breaks. Nothing good happens. If something is plastic, you knock it over nothing gets damaged. It doesn’t get better. But some things have to be stressed or challenged. Your immune system for example.  If you constantly protect your kid’s immune system, use bacterial wipes constantly, you are actually hurting them. Then you are preventing the system from getting the information it needs. The same thing is true with social life. If you protect your kids from being excluded, from being insulted, from being teased when they grow up it’s like the Princess and the pea. Any little thing they encounter on campus now becomes intolerably painful.”

 

It doesn’t help that parents try too hard to be their kid’s friends. They negotiated too much. They say, ‘Hey buddy isn’t it time to go?’ According to Haidt, “Kids need instruction and authority.”

This is a very new phenomenon so scientists don’t yet have a lot of data about it. Yet Haidt was prepared to say this in 2018 (later he went even farther and I will get to that in later post): “The preliminary data suggests that the anxiety, the fragility, the mental illness, that is across the country, across social class and across races. And that’s why social media use is starting so early. That seems to be the most likely culprit of several likely culprits.  Just that  week (Oct/2018) students at the Munk University Debates in Canada were demanding that Steve Bannon not be allowed to debate David Frum. That would be a travesty if the organizers gave in.  The Munk debates in Canada went ahead after the same debate had been cancelled in the US by The New Yorker magazine who chickened out because of the uproar.  I lost a lot of respect for the magazine then. I was a subscriber at that time.

Bill Maher had a good point about this. He said allowing the kids to shout down debates is like allowing the kids to take over in their homes. And, of course all of this gives fodder to the right who blame the left wing for the coddling. And there is some truth to that.  In civilization this authority should never be given up to the youth. You don’t stop giving them guidance. On this the right is clearly in the right, in my view.

In 2018 Haidt was worried about what was happening on line. The boys were mainly playing games on the Internet.  They may be killing people but they talk to each other and they co-operate. So, it is not all bad. But the girls were doing something else. They were putting something out and then waiting anxiously for comments from others. They are governed by social comparison and the fear of missing out. With boys bullying is mainly physical. With girls it is relational. So, girls can never get away from it. That is why the suicide rate for boys is up 25%, which is bad, but it is up 70% for girls! This is serious stuff.

And he had more to say about it later. I will get to that.

 

Releasing the Young from their Handcuffs

Authoritarianism, Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues, Social Media

 

Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt is one of the most brilliant thinkers around. I first encountered him at Arizona State University where Chris and I have attended various lectures over the years during our winter stays.  I missed his lecture there by a couple of days, but thankfully got to hear his recorded lecture.

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) joined New York University Stern School of Business in July 2011. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, based in the Business and Society Program. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. I have been reading his articles and books for about 10 years and I still don’t know if he is a conservative or a liberal. I don’t think he is a socialist. He is an independent thinker. He wants to apply his research in social and moral psychology to help important institutions work better. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including Heterodox Academy.org. He doesn’t like orthodoxies.

His most recent research is teen mental health and how that is related to political dysfunction. He notes that we have deep political dysfunction that current teens will be stuck with even though they did nothing to create it. This reminds me of climate change. Same problem. According to Haidt the older generations have effectively prevented the teens from gaining the capacity to deal with the problems the older generations created and passed on to the teens. That’s not very nice.

Haidt has said that,

“Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat.”

 

The current adults have programmed the upcoming generation to fail, by bringing them up to be unable to think and act freely.  The new generation was forced to rely too much on their parents—the famous helicopter parents or even worse bulldozer parents. As a result, the teens are unable to learn how to deal with the world they have to face.

Haidt has learned a lot from an essay by an economist Steven Horwitz who argued that the loss of free play posed a serious threat to liberal societies because the upcoming generation has not learned the social skills needed to solve disputes.  They will have no chance  to solve them so will in all likelihood turn to authorities to resolve disputes that in turn will cause them to suffer “from a coarsening of social interaction” that could “create a world of more conflict and violence.”

Haidt has paid particular attention to the role of social media and its effects on these hapless teens. Here is how Haidt summarized his own research:

“And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.’

Haidt’s research showed a remarkable timing of youth attaching themselves to new social media and the rise of youth anxiety and depression.

This incapacity has been revealed most strikingly in university classes, though it is felt everywhere. Here is how Haidt described life for this generation at North American colleges:

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010, arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.

 That is one reason hat Haidt urges governments to reduce the damaging effects of social media on adolescents by reducing its availability to them. He urges that they not be allowed onto social media platforms until they have reached at least the age of 16. He also says businesses must be compelled to enforce such regulations.

He thinks the most important thing we can do for them is to let them out to play. We should stop starving children of the vital experiences they most need to become good citizens and that is “free play.”  Not organized play much preferred by helicopter parents. He likes the laws established in Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas where free-range parenting laws help to assure parents that they won’t get into trouble for “neglecting” their children by allowing them to play freely. Kids should also be allowed to walk to school and play in groups as they used to do.

This could go a long way towards detoxifying social media for teens and adolescents.

A lot of people point to social media as the culprit. Haidt backs it up with solid science.

 

Are Prayerful Hopes Enough?

Decline of the west, Health, Social democracy, Social Issues, Social Media

 

The American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (‘CDC’) is respected widely around the world, though among right-wing science-denying Americans not so much. Perhaps they don’t like their reports for ideological reasons rather than scientific reasons.

The CDC has issued a vitally important report that these same right-wing opponents will also want to reject. The report was called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (‘CDC Youth Risk Report). According to this report, teen girls in the US have experienced record levels of violence, sadness, and suicide risk in recent years.

The CDC Youth Risk Report also shone a spotlight on alarming statistics about young girls being forced into sex and harbouring serious thoughts of suicide. How is this possible in the greatest country in the world?

If the report is true, and I have heard no evidence-based critique of it, it is extremely important that American political leaders of all stripes not ignore it. Although more than 17,000 students participated in the report it was conducted in the fall of 2021 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Naturally many children, no doubt more than normally the case, were anxious and feeling isolated.

Jonathan Haidt a social psychologist at New York University and a leader at  a laboratory on social psychology has shown the scientific data does not support the idea that the cause of this problem is the pandemic. The evidence clearly showed that this trend predated the pandemic and there was only a surprisingly minor blip during the pandemic.

I want to also say that this is not an American problem.  Haidt confirmed that the science is very similar for Canada and the UK.

Nonetheless, according to Debra Houry, the Chief Medical Officer for the CDC “the results are alarming.”

The CDC Youth Risk Report said that more than 40% of high school students had feelings of sadness or hopelessness “that prevented them from engaging in their regular activities for a least two weeks of the year.” That is nearly half!  Do we think nearly half were just trying to get an extended vacation?

 

I know some students in Canada who had such feelings and they were real. Interestingly, girls suffered more than boys with rates nearly double that of boys. 57% of girls and 29% of boys felt persistently sad or hopeless. Added to that, nearly 1 in 3 teenage girls considered attempting suicide! That was 60 percent higher than 10 years earlier!

 

Finally, 1 in 7 teen girls said they had at some point been forced to have sex and nearly 1 in 5 had experienced violence within the past year.

Some parents on hearing about this report said they were filled with “prayerful hope” that this was a mere “reflection of this pandemic uncertainty.”

Personally, I hope that Evangelical supporters of right-wing regimes across the US consider more than just prayerful hopes and pay some attention to the scientific data, even if it’s not perfect. Relying solely on such hopes could be dangerous for young people.

They really need more than prayerful hope!

What is driving our youth to suicide?

Alienation, Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues, Social Media

 

While it is shocking that suicide is now the leading cause of death among young Americans, and the rates are rising among young women faster than among young men, the important question of course, is ‘what is driving our youth to suicide?’  And following that, ‘what can we do about it?’

 

As is customary, answers are hard to find. Theories are more abundant. Some have looked at the role of social media exposure, particularly with the use of smartphones. Some evidence suggests that girls who have had a faster rise in depression rates are experiencing more cyber bullying.  Some suggest this is because they use smart phones more than boys and text more than boys. The social connections so created are generally believed by mental health professionals to be more problematic than traditional forms of communication.

Drugs and alcohol are another popular culprit proposed by theorists. But there was no significant increase in the their use by young people during the time that rates of depression and suicide rose.

Some theorists have suggested the black box warnings the American Food and Drug Administration imposed in 2004 on things like anti-depressants have been counter-productive. That warning suggested to young people that the drugs could trigger suicidal thoughts, thus of course discouraging their use, even when they would have been helpful. According to Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist writing in the New York Times, “Within two years of the F.D.A. advisory, antidepressant use dropped by 31 percent in teens and 24 percent in young adults. Although antidepressant use recovered somewhat after 2008, it has remained below levels that would have been expected based on prescribing patterns before the warnings appeared.”

Friedman claimed that we need not wait until we know all the causes. We known enough, he said, that we know various psychotherapies and medications can be helpful. That might be true.  I am more concerned that we need to look deeper into the causes of this mental health crisis among our youth. But ultimately I agree most with the following statement and question he made: “Every day, 16 young people die from suicide. What are we waiting for?”

I think our failure to look seriously at this problem is itself a sign of serious civilizational decline. If we can’t look seriously and thoughtfully at such a problem at which problems can we look seriously?

 

A Marshall Plan for Children

Decline of the west, Health, Social democracy, Social Issues, Social Media

 

I am hearing a lot about mental health of young people in the United States. The stats are depressing. No pun intended. Kids are dying from self-harm and drugs. This is a wicked problem.

I don’t know the stats for Canada, but I know from experience that they must be similar and can’t be good. In fact, Jonathan Haidt , an American social psychologist who studies problems like this empirically, has said that the same statistics prevail in both Canada and the UK, making clear that they evince a western problem not just an American problem.

Young people are suffering. And young people should not suffer. That job belongs to old people and we shouldn’t give it up without a fight.

Kids  are dying in huge numbers on account of suicide and drugs. More than ever before.  One would think this would call for action–sort of like a war effort.

A good friend of mine actually knows something about the subject. Unlike me. He worked for many years in Brooklyn as nurse with indigent children and has decades of experience.  He tells me this problem is not a new one. People were just not paying attention. When he received  an award for New York City employees way back in 1992 he called for “a Marshall plan for children” in the city.  Actually, one is needed for the entire country and Canada too. “Unsurprisingly,” he said, “no such plan was forthcoming.”  He called the region where he worked with neo-natal children “a health care war zone.”  But as he pointed out, shoutouts from neonatal nurse practitioners don’t usually trigger changes in public policy like complaints by political leaders of western democracies.

Problems with the heath of young people in America, the richest country in the world, have been well known for decades but little or nothing was done until Joe Biden put the child tax credit into effect during his first year in office and this reduced poverty among children by an astounding 50% in 2021, but characteristically, when the Republicans took over control of the American House of Representatives they acted quickly to get rid of that ‘unnecessary’ expense. Tax cuts for rich people are important. What are poor children worth?  Republicans, including the 80% of Evangelicals who support them, care about “children” in the womb, but  outside the womb not so much.

Frankly, my friend is understandably pessimistic that things will ever improve. I hope he is wrong. I fear he is right. We seem to be doomed.