However, Haidt’s claim that Gen Z children are different from their predecessors in terms of mental health because they grew up with smartphones, as well as his suggestions to bring him back to normalhave sparked many negative reactions.
Andrew Przybylski, an Oxford professor and frequent Haidt critic, said Platformer“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now, I would say he doesn’t have any.” Chris Ferguson of Stetson University tried to pull the rug out from under Haidt highlighting that the recent increase in suicides in the United States is not a phenomenon specific to adolescents. And Candice Odgers of the University of California, Irvine, in her Nature review review In his book, he said Haidt was contributing to a “growing hysteria” around the phones and was “telling stories that are not supported by research.”
But Haidt and his principal investigator, Zach Rausch, maintain their position in what Rausch calls “a normal academic debate.”
What they are trying to explain, says Rausch Fortuneis “a very specific change that happened at a very specific time among a specific subset of kids.” He adds, “I’m quite open to the idea that we may be a little bit wrong about the extent to which this can explain the change over the last decade. But I certainly think we’re on very strong grounds to say that (smartphones and social media) have led to a pretty substantial increase in anxiety, depression and self-harm among young people.”
Here Rausch sets out the theories of The anxious generation and responds to criticism.
What is the Anxious Generation affirming?
The main idea of the book is that something changed in the lives of young Americans between 2010 and 2015. “What we’re trying to explain in the book is what changed during that time to help explain why Gen Z is so different. And the specific things that they differ on often have to do with their mental health, their anxiety, their rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, even suicide,” Rausch says.
He and Haidt point to a range of findings, including that the percentage of American adolescents who report having experienced a “major depressive episode” in the past year has increased by more than 150% since 2010, with most of those episodes occurring before the pandemic. And that among American girls ages 10 to 14, emergency room visits for self-harm increased by 188% during that period, while suicide deaths increased by 167%; among boys, emergency room visits for self-harm increased by 48% and suicides increased by 91%.
“We see it in the United States,” Rausch adds. “We see it across the Anglo-Saxon sphere, in English-speaking countries, and measures of well-being and mental health in many countries around the world show similar declines over the same period. So that’s the major problem that we’re trying to solve.”
What they theorize is that one of the fundamental things that has changed over the period in question, particularly among young people and especially teenage girls, is “the shift of social life to smartphones and social media, where they now spend very little time on platforms like Instagramreleased in 2010, (to) spend more than four to five hours a day on these platforms by 2015.”
Television has changed the way children interact with each other, with their families, and with strangers. “That’s what we mean by ‘reprogramming childhood,’” Rausch says. “It’s a reprogramming of how we interact. It’s our social ecosystem that’s really changed, and that makes it very different from other technologies. Television hasn’t reprogrammed our relationships with everyone.”
The debate revolves around three questions
First, Rausch says, skeptics ask: Is there a mental health crisis, and to what extent? Second: Is it international or is it only happening in the United States? And third: If you agree that there is a mental health crisis, what role does social media play?
But even if you don’t agree that such a crisis exists, Rausch notes, “social media still might not be safe for kids, right? That’s something that I think gets overlooked, like with the General practitioner’s reportwhere we always ask ourselves, “Can this explain this huge increase?” But there are all kinds of consumer products aimed at children that kill 50 children a year and that we immediately take off the market.
Sticking points: moral panic, lack of evidence
According to Rausch, a recurring argument against the book is that “many people have studied media effects for a while and are very sensitive to past panics around technology, whether it’s video games or comic books, and there’s a justified skepticism and concern that this could happen again.”
In response, he points out, they try to argue that, simply, “it is This time. It’s really different.
The second detail that they are challenged on concerns the evidence that Raush and Haidt pointed to, by gathering all the studies that they could find, which they all gathered in Google public documents. That’s “hundreds and hundreds… many of them poor quality, some of them better quality,” Rausch says. Some critics point out that the studies show correlation rather than causation between, say, social media and mental health problems.
But it’s hard to do real-world experiments on young people that could show what’s causing the problem, he says. “For one thing, social media is relatively new, especially the kind we’re talking about, which is constantly evolving every year.” Plus, “you don’t typically do experiments on kids. And to do the kind of experiments that you might want to do to really test this is completely unethical and would never happen — assigning one group of kids to one type of childhood and another group to another type of childhood.”
That’s why it’s hard to come to a very precise scientific conclusion. “That’s kind of the nature of social science,” he says, “and that’s why there’s so much debate.”
To support their arguments, Rausch and Haidt attempt to draw on a variety of sources of evidence, including first-hand accounts from Gen Z, parents, and teachers, as well as internal documents from the social media companies themselves, such as Instagram Documentation Teenage girls say using the platform is damaging their body image and mental health.
The researchers also focused on their belief that social media, especially when used intensively, has “addictive qualities” and, in turn, causes withdrawal when stopped.
“A big part of the story is about what happens when an entire group of people move their lives to addictive platforms,” he says.
Other reasons for resistance
“There are people who are very optimistic about technology, who believe strongly that technology will solve the world’s problems,” Rausch says. And for those who are very optimistic about technology, Anxious GenerationThe study’s results might suggest that “this is just a small bump in the road. Things will get better as we develop more technologies to solve the problems they create, and we’ll kind of keep going in that direction.”
There is also the “very real concern” about government control of social media, which Rausch calls “a rather libertarian critique.”
Finally, he adds, there is the fear that these issues are receiving too much attention compared to equally important topics studied by other researchers, from poverty to the opioid epidemic.
But all arguments aside, he said, much of what Anxious Generation emphasized is “irrefutable.” This includes not only the correlation between more intensive use of social media and anxiety or depressionbut the “large part of the damage that occurs on these platforms,” including the increase sextortion cases, or teenagers forced to send explicit photos online.
And what always reassures Rausch that he’s on the right track is talking to a teenager, a parent or a teacher. “Whenever I have a doubt,” he says, “I go to the source.”
