Social Media's Role in Declining American Society, with Jonathan Haidt

[00:00:00]now in the decades since Facebook went public social media platforms have transformed the face of society of course social psychologist Jonathan height 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 Christian thanks Jonathan hi thanks so much for joining us again uh you have written an article that I think last time I checked on the Atlantic it is still the number one most read it's titled why the past 10 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 the politics and the impacts of social media on our institutions in life I also want to know something that you follow pretty closely and that's the research of what social media is doing to the minds of children the behaviors of children and 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 is affecting kids today all right well thanks Harry 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 art article in the Atlantic is about how something changed something fundamentally changed in the nature of the social Universe in the early 2010s and everything got weird and kind of stupid after that and we see it clearly most clearly with 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 visual platforms Instagram and Tumblr the boys went more for YouTube uh and um 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 high we've had a doubling of the rates of suicide self-harm depression and anxiety um so that that has really drawn me in because this I think is a national emergency and 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 you know people are going to question that and say well with this correlation and there's causation um and I we even 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 that's right so there's a long history of moral panics especially around technology and I've been engaging with other psychologists who say that I'm fermenting a moral panic and the right to be concerned about that because most the previous times we freaked out about technology it hasn't uh it hasn't been this it hasn't been actually anything this time you 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 this time is different um two is that the timing is exactly what you'd 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 the as soon as most kids get on social media and right then the very next year rates of depression 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 yeah you know television is making us all crazy mom and dad you know do something but if you talk to the kids and Facebook Instagram they talk to the kids and guess what they say yep Instagram is what's making us depressed and anxious as you lay out that there is this research now showing the impacts of social media on an entire generation of young people now your article in your essay talks about this sort of stupefication 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 you know there have been hundreds of articles about how bad social media is and it's just trying this and that I think what I'm trying to add here is as a social psychologist I study morality and politics and I um I've become a big fan of John the philosopher John Stuart Mill who said he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that that is in order to really understand anything we 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 um and that's what we've always done in my career as a professor until around 2014 2015. and all of a sudden it became much more hazardous to question if you questioned if you even tweeted about a study that challenged the receive wisdom on Race gender transgender there are a couple of of sacred issues if you even suggested that 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 of intimidation when they think if I speak up terrible things are going to happen to me of unknown size like it could be nothing it could be a thousand tweets um it's that little bit of intimidation that's what makes people go silent and when critics go silent the group gets stupid that's the central point of my article people we've had polarization for a long time I mean the country was incredibly polarized in the 1960s it's not that this is a new thing what's new is this new Dynamics brought To Us by social media and especially Twitter that that we're not shooting the other side so much anymore we're shooting the moderates on our own side and so what happened in the in the early to mid 2010s is the moderates on the left and right begin to 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 institutions universities media the Arts museums K-12 education most all of these are dominated by progressives for for a variety of reasons most of which are not particularly bad you know there are different kinds of people in different professions but if if the left dominates in these industries and then all of a sudden we start shooting the moderates then the institution gets stupid and we see for example we see the imposition of policies like really you know you know Dei policies um diversity training these don't work I mean there's a there's there's no evidence that these work and there's some evidence that these things backfire but yet institution after institution does the exact 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 healthy democracy are no longer able to do their job achieve their mission and make intelligent choices when you say that the diversity initiatives don't work there's going to be a lot of people that push back immediately and 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 these don't work okay well to be clear I'm not saying that trying to improve diversity doesn't work 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 of dollars spent every year huge amounts of time and for no good reason and there's some evidence sometimes they backfire as for the larger issue of improving quality improving opportunity I'm 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 we know that and if anyone says otherwise they're in big trouble and then it's as though we say 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 science is complicated all these problems are complicated they're usually multiple factors feeding in to any kind of observed outcome difference and when social scientists and policy makers are told you must mark up that tree well usually they're barking up the wrong tree 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 we have this idea that um that diversity is good and diversity has many good effects 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 now diversity makes good more creative when you have good Norms when things are well structured we have to think really carefully that 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 viralized the ability to have any shared understanding of what we're doing shatters social media allows us to participate in micro stories that kind of Bubble Up and then are gone there is no ability to have a common understanding of what we're doing not that we ever are all one nation and all on the same page but there's a qualitative change when it's like here's the story of the day and and um so there's no possibility for shared stories in the age of social media widely shared stories um uh there's a huge decline of trust trust in each other and Trust in institutions and here I'm drawing on recent social science 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 a good thing in a dictatorship but it's very bad at building things up and in an ailing democracy like ours where our institutions need to be improved not rigged apart It generally has has made things worse so what are the implications if we are in a Perpetual state of outrage how does that influence what our society looks like 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 or knowledge generate 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 tracked for 200 years to have on and off with dictatorships and democracies 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 gotta well if the ship is sinking if we don't do anything we're going to become a Latin American 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 so let's talk a little bit about kind of what are the changes that we can do I mean sometimes when when you're mentioning kind of uh things that lead to political polarity especially in social media I also see that playing out in electoral politics 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 in the first is to harden Democratic institutions as you're saying the second bucket is we've got to change social medias that's less toxic and the third bucket is we've got to change what we're doing to children so they grow up that are able to handle this crazy divided democracy so the 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 close party primaries no other country does this to have a system in which our Congress people even state legislators as well in which they don't have to worry about what their constituents think the constituents don't matter unless they vote in the primary so if all of what you say and do is to appeal to the five of the ten percent of the people in your state or your District who actually are going to turn out and vote in the Republican primary or the Democratic primary you have to be more radical most of our our leaders our Congress people are good people they're generally smart people most of them are there to make the country better but so many of them when they get there they find it's impossible it's impossible to 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 let's talk a little bit about that basket of how to reform social media especially in the context of children what's happening with this new generation one thing that's very that's that I it's very frustrating to me is there 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 learned from Francis howgan 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 languages of the world there is no content information 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 and children should have to know their customers so that means 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 if you that's not a 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 uh you're 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 we get closed down because they're mostly fake or troll accounts and then people make death threats and rape threats can't just open 10 more accounts with a different name 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 I do agree that when you look when you look at it how things are going the chance for reform looks great but there are a lot of hopeful hopeful points so here's one the US Congress I think is hopeless um I I don't expect it to do anything for us ever really but the UK Parliament is actually doing great work UK Parliament is implementing a child appropriate age-appropriate design code and it turns out the platforms it's very hard for them have different Platforms in different countries so if the UK 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 the UK to California and if so California does it the platforms are going to have to adapt so there there are ways around the US Congress and it's complete paralysis um in terms of in terms of um you know in terms of other reforms Alaska has adopted this final five for them it's 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 the 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'd say this in the in the essay I keep kicking myself that I didn't close on this more inspiring note but you know the biggest thing is we can just all take it easy around each other once we understand that we're all being driven Crazy by this stuff it's like we're all being fed 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 um we have to go easier on each other if we're going to make it as a country NYU Professor Jonathan height thanks so much for joining us thank you Harry [Music] [Music]