Event details

Is the current wave of concern about smartphones and social media just another moral panic, like the ones that arose in response to radio, television, and comic books? Or is the new "phone-based childhood" interfering with human development in an unprecedented way? In The Anxious Generation, Professor Jonathan Haidt focused on mental illness as the primary outcome of concern. In this lecture, he will argue that such a focus vastly understates the psychological and sociological harms resulting from the "great rewiring of childhood" into its current phone-based form. Professor Haidt will expand the story beyond mental health to present evidence of declines in education, attention, happiness, risk-taking, social capital, and the foundations of liberal democracy, all linked to changes in technology. He will argue that this far-ranging international destruction of human capital and human potential calls for immediate attention and action from scholars, legislators, and parents.

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia

Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. In his most recent release, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness(Link is external) he brings to light the “great rewiring of childhood” in which play-based childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood. Jon continues to push towards the reforms to put an end to the youth mental health crisis.

Overall, Haidt’s research uncovers the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. His mission is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org(Link is external), The Constructive Dialogue Institute(Link is external), and EthicalSystems.org(Link is external).

Haidt is also the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom(Link is external), and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion(Link is external), and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure(Link is external) (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles,(Link is external) which have been cited nearly 100,000 times(Link is external). In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers(Link is external).” He has given four TED talks(Link is external) and strives to shine a light into what makes morality with his continued work.

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