“Uniquely Stupid:” Dissecting the Past Decade in America

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, in the decades since Facebook went public, social media platforms have transformed the face of society, of course. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has observed how we are affected by this type of technology. And he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what went wrong and how social media could become less corrosive.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Jonathan Haidt, thanks so much for joining us again. You have written an article that I think, and the last time I checked on the Atlantic, it is still number one most read. It’s titled, “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” We will unpack that and you put social media at the center of a lot of it. Now, before we get to sort of the politics and the impacts of social media on our institutions and life, I also want to know something that you followed pretty closely and that’s the research of what social media is doing to the minds of children, the behaviors of children and how maybe how that now contributes to this larger essay and larger topic that you’re talking about. So, what do we know about the research on how social media if affective kids today?

JONATHAN HAIDT, SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST, NYU STERN SCHOOL OF BUSINESS: Well, thanks, Hari. Thanks so much for having me on. And I think that is the best place to start because that’s where, I think, the evidence is clearest. And actually, the kids were the canaries in the coal mine. My article in the Atlantic is about how 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, as 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 double 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.

SREENIVASAN: Now, you know, people are going to question that and say, where there’s correlation and there’s causation, and we have the surgeon general putting out a warning. I mean, this is something that, you know, we are used to on the equivalent scale of saying that tobacco is a bad idea to consume.

HAIDT: That’s right. So, there’s a long history of moral panic, especially around technology. And I’ve been engaging with other psychologists who say I’m fermenting 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, Facebook, Instagram, they talk to the kids and guess what, they say, yes, Instagram is what’s making us depress and anxious.

SREENIVASAN: As you lay out, there’s this research showing the impacts of social media on an entire generation of young people, I mean, your article and your essay talks about this sort of stupefaction. And you kind of lay out the evidence. But break it down for us in kind of a couple of big parts. How do we measure the general stupidity, so to speak, the increase of that stupidity and then, what’s causing it?

HAIDT: You know, there have been hundreds of articles about how bad social media is and it’s destroying this and that. I think what I’m trying to add here is, as a social psychologist, I study morality and politics and I have become a big fan of the philosopher John Stuart Mill who said, he no knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. That is, in order to really understand anything, you have to look at it from multiple perspectives. We have to have different viewpoints pushing against each other. That’s what we do in universities. And what we’ve always done in my career as a professor, until around 2013 or 2014. And all of a sudden, it became more hazardous to question. If you questioned — if you even tweeted about a study that challenged the received wisdom on race, gender, transgender, there are a couple of sacred issues. If you even suggested there was another side, huge social sanctions would rain down on you on Twitter and other platforms. And here’s the key thing. When people feel even a little bit intimidation, when they think, if I speak up, terrible things are going to happen to me of unknown size. It could be nothing. It could be 1,000 tweets. It’s that little bit of intimation, that’s what makes people go silent. And when critics go silent, the group gets stupid. That’s the central point of my article. We had polarization for a long time. I mean, the country is incredibly polarized in the 1960s. It’s not that this is a new thing. What’s new is these new dynamics brought to us by social media and especially Twitter, that we’re not shooting the other side so much anymore, we’re shooting the moderates our own side. And so, what happened in the early to mid-2010s is the moderates on the left and right begin go silent and the extremes get super empowered. And at that point, I think the Republican Party goes off the rails one way. It’s not that the Democratic Party went off the rails. It’s not — there’s an asymmetry. It’s not — on the left, it’s not the Democratic Party, it’s the fact that almost all of our major cultural institution, universities, media, the arts, museums, K12 education, most of all these are dominated by progressives for a variety of reasons, most of which are not particularly bad, you know, there are different kinds of people and different professions, but if the left dominates in these industries and then all of a sudden, we start shooting the moderates, then institution gets stupid. And we see — for example, we see the imposition of policies, like really, you know, DEI policies, diversity training. These don’t work. I mean, there’s no evidence these work and there’s some evidence that these things backfire. But yet, institution after institution does the exactly same thing over and over again. And when I talk to the leaders, they know this doesn’t work. They know what they’re doing is foolish, but they have no choice. That’s what I mean by structural stupidity. That our institutions, which are crucial for a healthy democracy, are no longer able to do their job, achieve their mission, and make intelligent choices.

SREENIVASAN: When you say that the diversity initiatives don’t work, there’s going to be a lot of people that push back immediately say, look, this is trying to address or redress inequalities and inequities in the workplace that have been structural, that have given people a leg up, and what’s wrong with that? How do we know that this don’t work?

HAIDT: OK. Well, to be clear, I’m not saying that trying to improve diversity is more. I’m saying diversity training, formal diversity training. That’s an area where there is a lot of research and there’s not really any research to show that it works. So, that’s just one example of a policy widely implemented, tens of billions spent every year, huge amounts of time and for no good reason. And there’s some evidence that sometimes they backfire. As for the larger issue of improving equality, improving opportunity, I am very supportive of that. I’m a social scientist. I want us to do things that will actually work. But what happens is, we approach problems where we know what the answer is regardless of the data. We know that the answer is certain kinds of prejudice or certain kinds of structural factors, we know that. And if anyone says otherwise, they’re in big trouble. And then it’s as though we said like, well, here’s the tree, we’re going to bark up this tree. That’s the only tree we’re allowed to bark up. And sometimes that’s the right tree, but social sciences complicate it. All these problems are complicated. They are usually multiple factors feeding in to any kind of observed outcome difference. And when social scientists and policymakers are told, you must bark up that tree, well, usually, they’re barking up the wrong tree.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you write in here that the connective tissue that binds a lot of our institutions together is three things, social capital, strong institutions and shared stories. And you essentially say that social media tears at every one of those three things.

HAIDT: We have this idea that diversity is good. And diversity has many good affects. But diversity also makes things come apart. And so, for a large secular nation like the United States, you have to look at what are the forces holding us together? What are the things blowing us apart? You know, if diversity makes it more creative when you have good norms, when things are well-structured. We have to think really carefully about how to get the benefit from America’s diversity, but it’s hard to do because if you critique it, you could get in big trouble. Now, in terms of what it actually holds a country together, traditionally, it’s shared Gods, shared blood, and shared enemies. That’s what nations usually have used. So, we have a challenge and it is a great experiment. And when social media came in, when everybody was on social media beginning around 2012, 2013, when it gets hyper virilized, the ability to have any shared understanding what we’re doing shatters. Social media allows us to participate in micro stories that kind of bubble up then are gone. There is no ability to have a common understanding of what we’re doing. Not that we ever all are one nation or all on the same page, but there’s a qualitative change when it’s like here’s the story of the day. And so, there’s no possibility for shared stories in the age of social media, widely shared stories. There’s a huge decline of trust. Trust in each other and trust institutions. And here, I’m drawing on recent science stuff — political science research showing that social media generally leads to a decline of trust. Social media is incredibly powerful for tearing things down, and that can be good thing in a dictatorship, but it’s very bad at building things up. And in an ailing democracy like ours, where institutions need to be improved, not ripped apart, it’s generally has made things worse.

SREENIVASAN: So, what are the implications if we are in a perpetual state of outrage? How does that influence what our society looks like?

HAIDT: Democracy is hard. The founding fathers knew that. They knew that democracy is unstable and generally blows up. So, they gave us a republic with democratic features. And the crucial thing to keep a democracy running is you have to have good institutions, you have to have good democratic institutions and good epistemic (ph) or knowledge generating institutions, and we had those for a while in America. Those are now declining. What happens if you try to have a democracy without good institutions? I think the answer is Latin America. Latin American countries have been trying for 200 years to have on and off with dictatorships and democracy. I fear that if we don’t take major action now, if we don’t get serious about saying stop the fighting over stupid little things, we’ve all got to — well, the ship is sinking. If we don’t do anything, we’re going to become a Latin America democracy with a lot more political violence, a lot more instability, many more constitutional crises. This I fear is where we’re headed unless we can really change what we’re doing.

SREENIVASAN: So, let’s talk a little bit about kind of what are the changes that we can do? I mean, sometimes when you’re mentioning kind of things that lead to political polarity, especially in social media, I also see that playing out in electoral politics.

HAIDT: Once we appreciate that we’re running our democracy outside the range of sustainability, if we keep going as we are, I believe we’re going to fail as a country. So, what do we do? I think there are three buckets of reforms, three things we have to do. And the first is to harden democratic institutions as you’re saying. The second bucket is we’ve got to change social media so that it’s less toxic. And the third bucket is we’ve got to change what we’re doing to children so that they grow up better able to handle this crazy, divided democracy. So, on the democratic reform bucket, I think, is the most important reform we could possibly have, and that is, it’s completely insane to have closed party primaries. No other country does this. To have a system in which our Congress people — even state legislatures as well, in which they don’t have to worry about what their constituents think, their constituents don’t matter unless they vote in the primary. So, if all of what you say and do is to appeal to the 5 or 10 percent of the people in your state or your district who actually are going to turn out and vote in the Republican primary or Democratic primary, you have to be more radical. Most of our leaders are Congress people are good people. They’re generally smart people. Most are there to make the country better, but so many of them, when they get there, they find it’s impossible to do good. They get sucked into the game. We’ve got to change the game. Especially because we expect things are going to get even worse. The pressures on them are going to get even worse. The polarization is going to get even worse.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk a little bit about that basket of how to reform social media, especially in the context of children and what’s happening with this new generation.

HAIDT: One thing that’s very — that’s — it’s very frustrating to me, is there’s so much going on with social media and most of the action is in the architecture. It’s all about the viral dynamics. That’s what changed. That’s what we have to fix. Unfortunately, all of the discussion is about content moderation. But one thing we learn from Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, is that content moderation only gets a tiny fraction of what’s out there, and that’s only in English. In most of the language of the world, there is no content observation. Facebook has nobody who speaks most of the world’s languages. So, what we need to do to reform social media is not more or less content moderation, it’s change the architecture so that it doesn’t take stupid, nasty stuff and blow it up to millions of people. People have always been posting or writing stupid, nasty stuff. The problem with social media isn’t that, it’s that it takes stuff and makes it hyper viral within days. So, we need architectural reforms. Social media companies that are large that affect democracy in children should have to know their customers. So, that the identity authentication. You can still post under a fake name, but to be able to open an account on a platform that has section 230 protection and viral dynamics, that’s not constitutional right to have those viral dynamics, to open an account, the platform should be able to verify that you’re a real person, not a bot or a Russian agent, in a particular country and that you’re old enough to be using the platform. If we do those three things, most of the accounts would get closed down because they’re mostly fake or troll accounts, and then people who make death threats and rape threats can’t just open 10 more accounts with a different name.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that we have the appetite to be able to make some of these changes because the structures that are in place do reward the people who are in power right now?

HAIDT: I do agree that when you look at how things are going, the chance for reform looks grim. But there are a lot of hopeful points. So, here’s one. The U.S Congress, I think, is hopeless. I don’t expect it to do anything for us ever, really. But the U.K. parliament is actually doing great work. The U.K. parliament is implementing a child-appropriate and age-appropriate design code. And it turns out the platform, it’s very hard for them to have different platforms in different countries. So, if the U.K. can do something good, and they are, that’s going to put a lot of pressure on the platforms. California is now considering — actually this week, this coming week, California is considering applying the age- appropriate design code from U.K. to California. And if so, California does it, the platforms are going to have to adapt. So, there are ways around the U.S. Congress and its complete paralysis. In terms of other reforms, you know, Alaska has adopted this final four voting system. But they did it by referendum. Now, in general, I’m not a fan of referendums. But because the political process is so broken and the party with more power is never going to agree to a reform, so in states that have a referendum, I think this is very popular. Everyone’s fed up with what’s going on. So, by referendum, any state could change its voting system. So, I think there are ways. And then, the third thing is, even though I’ve been focusing on structural reforms, there’s a lot that we can each do as individuals, and I wish I said this in the essay, I keep kicking myself, I didn’t close on this more inspiring note, but, you know, the biggest thing is we could all take it easier on each other. Once we understand that we’re all going crazy by this stuff, it’s like we’re all being fed by poison gas. And so, when people do extreme things and stupid things, don’t get mad at them, don’t tweet how terrible they are, just ignore it. Just ignore it. We have to go easier on each other if we’re going to make it as a country.

SREENIVASAN: NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, thanks so much for joining us.

HAIDT: Thank you, Hari.