Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt presented a forceful analysis of the damage smartphones and social media are doing to our cognition, our civic fabric, and our children’s wellbeing, while calling for renewed action to ward off their effects, in the latest of MIT’s Compton Lectures on Wednesday.
“Around the world, people are getting diminished,” Haidt said. “Less intelligent, less happy, less competent. And it’s happening very fast … My argument is that if we continue with current trends as AI is coming in, it’s going to accelerate. The decline of humanity is going to accelerate.”
Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of the recent bestseller “The Anxious Generation,” which suggests that the widespread adoption of social media in the 2010s has been especially damaging to young women, making them prone to anxiety and depression.
But as Haidt has continued to examine the effects of social media on society, he has started focusing on additional issues. Our inability to put our phones away, our compulsion to check social media, and the way we spend hours a day watching short-form videos, may be causing problems that go far beyond any rise in anxiety and depression.
“It turns out, it’s not the biggest thing,” Haidt said. “There’s something bigger. It is the destruction of the human capacity to pay attention. Because this is affecting most people, including most adults. And if you imagine humanity with 10 to 50 percent of its attentional ability sucked out of it, there’s not much left. We’re not very capable of doing things if we can’t focus or stay on a task for more than 30 seconds.”
Whatever solution may emerge to these problems, Haidt declared, is going to have to come from “human agency. People see a problem, they figure out a way around it. That’s what I’m hoping to promote here [to] this very important audience. So please consider what I’m saying, these trends, and then work to change them.”
Haidt’s lecture, titled, “Life After Babel: Democracy and Human Development in the Fractured, Lonely World That Technology Gave Us,” was delivered before a capacity audience of over 400 people in MIT’s Huntington Hall (Room 10-250).
The lecture spanned a variety of related topics, with Haidt presenting chart after chart showing the onset of declines in cognition, educational achievement, and happiness, which all have seemed to occur soon after the widespread adoption of smartphones in the 2010s. The individual adoption of smartphones, he notes, has been compounded by the way schools brought internet-connected computing devices into classrooms around the same time.
“The biggest, the most costly mistake we’ve ever made in the history of American education [was] to put computers and high tech on people’s desks,” Haidt said.
Distractible students with shorter attention spans are reading fewer books, he noted; some cinema students cannot sit through films. The top quartile of students is continuing to do well, he noted, but for most students, proficiency levels have dipped notably since the 2010s.
“Fifty years of progress in education, 50 years of progress, up in smoke, gone,” Haidt said. “We’re back to where we were 50 years ago. That’s pretty big, that’s pretty serious.”
As Haidt mentioned multiple times in his remarks, he is not an opponent of all forms of technology, or even personal communication technology, but rather is seeking to mitigate its harmful effects.
“I love tech, I love modernity, we’re all dependent on it, I love my iPhone,” Haidt said. Just as he finished that sentence, an audience member’s cellphone started ringing loudly — drawing a huge laugh from the audience.
“I did not plant that, that was a truly spontaneous demonstration of what I’m talking about,” Haidt said.
Haidt was introduced by MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth, who called him “a leading voice for reforming society’s relationship with technology.” She praised Haidt’s work, noting that he wants to “encourage us to imagine a more positive role for technology in humanity’s future.”
The Karl Taylor Compton Lecture Series was introduced in 1957. It is named for MIT’s ninth president, who led the Institute from 1930 to 1948 and also served as chair of the MIT Corporation from 1948 to 1954.
Compton, as Kornbluth observed, helped MIT evolve from being more strictly an engineering school into “a great global university” with “a new focus on fundamental scientific research.” During World War II, she added, Compton “helped invent the longstanding partnership between the federal government and America’s research universities.”
Haidt received his undergraduate degree from Yale University and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught on the faculty at the University of Virginia for 16 years before joining New York University. He has written several widely discussed books about contemporary civic life. Haidt observed that the problems stemming from device distraction and compulsion appear to have hit so-called Gen Z — those born from roughly the mid 1990s to the early 2010s — especially hard, though he emphasized that people in that cohort are essentially victims of circumstance.
“I am not blaming Gen Z,” Haidt said. “I am saying we raised our kids in a way — we allowed the technology companies to take over childhood. We allowed a few giant companies to own our children’s attention, to show them millions of short videos, to destroy their ability to pay attention, to stop them from reading books, and this is the result.”
For a portion of his remarks, Haidt also examined the consequences of social media for politics, showing data that chart the global diminishment of democracy since the 2010s, while the world has become soaked in misinformation and conflictual online interactions.
“That, I think, is what digital technology has done to us,” Haidt said. “It was supposed to connect us, but instead it has broken things, divided us, and made it very, very hard to ever have common facts, common truths, common stories again.”
Towards the end of his remarks, Haidt also speculated that the effects of using AI will be corrosive as well, intellectually and psychologically.
“AI is not exactly going to make us better at interacting with human beings,” Haidt said.
With all this in mind, what is to be done, to limit the intellectual and social damage from tech devices and social media? For one thing, Haidt suggested, we should be less impressed by high-tech innovations and social media.
“We need to disenthrall ourselves from technology,” Haidt said, paraphrasing a line written by President Abraham Lincoln. He added: “I suggest that we have a generally negative view … of social media and of AI.” This kind of “more emotionally negative or ambivalent view” will make it easier for us to reverse the way technology seems to control us.
As a practical matter, Haidt suggested, that means taking steps to limit our exposure to technology. His own public-advocacy group, The Anxious Generation Movement, suggests a set of four reforms: No smartphones for kids before they are high-school age; no social media before age 16; making school phone-free, from bell to bell; and giving kids more independence, free play, and responsibility in the world.
Certainly there is movement toward some of these concepts. Some school districts in the U.S. are banning or limiting phone usage; Australia has also instituted a ban on social media for anyone under 16, while a handful of other countries have announced similar plans.
“There’s a gigantic techlash happening right now,” Haidt suggested. For all the sudden changes technology has introduced within the last 15 years, it is still possible, for now, for people to find a way out of our tech-induced predicament.
“The good news is, there is human agency,” Haidt said.