Still, 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 Your suggestions for slowing downhave caused a lot of rejection.
Andrew Przybylski, an Oxford professor and frequent critic of Haidt, He told Platformer“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. At this point, I would say he doesn’t have it,” Chris Ferguson of Stetson University tried to take some of Haidt’s sting out of the argument. pointing out that the recent rise in suicides in the United States is not a phenomenon exclusive to teenagers. And Candice Odgers, of the University of California at Irvine, in her Nature magazine review In his book, Haidt claims he is contributing to a “growing hysteria” around phones and is “telling stories that are not supported by research.”
But Haidt and his lead researcher, Zach Rausch, are sticking to what Rausch calls “a normal academic debate.”
What they are trying to explain, says Rausch FortuneIt is “a very specific change that happened at a very specific time among a specific subset of children.” Furthermore, he offers, “I’m totally open to the idea that maybe we’re a little bit off about how much of the change over the last decade can explain. But I certainly think we’re in a very strong position to say that [smartphones and social media] have caused a fairly 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.
Which is the Anxious generation claiming?
The central idea of the book is that something changed in the lives of young Americans sometime between 2010 and 2015. “What we try to explain in the book is what changed during this period to help explain why Gen Z is so different. And the specific things they are different about are often related to their mental health, anxiety, rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and even suicide,” Rausch says.
He and Haidt point to a number of findings, including that the percentage of American teens who say they have had a “major depressive episode” in the past year has increased by more than 150% since 2010, with most occurring before the pandemic. And that among American girls ages 10 to 14, emergency room visits for self-harm increased 188% over that period, while suicide deaths increased 167%; among boys, emergency room visits for self-harm increased 48% and suicide increased 91%.
“We see this in the United States,” Rausch adds. “We see it across the Anglosphere, in English-speaking countries, and measures of well-being and mental health in many countries around the world are showing similar declines around the same time. So that’s the big issue we’re trying to address.”
What they theorize is that one of the fundamental things that changed in the period in question, specifically among young people and more especially among teenage girls, is “the movement of social life towards smartphones and social media, where they now spend very little time on platforms like Instagramwhich came out in 2010, [to] “In 2015, we will spend more than four or five hours a day on these platforms.”
It has changed the way children relate to each other, as well as to family and strangers. “That’s what we mean when we talk about the restructuring of childhood,” Rausch says. “It’s a restructuring of the way we interact. It’s our social ecosystem and how that’s really changed, and that makes it very different from other technologies. Television didn’t reorganize our relationships with everyone.”
The debate revolved around three issues:
First, Rausch says, skeptics are asking: Is there a mental health crisis, and to what extent? Second: Is it international or just happening in the United States? And third: If we agree that there is a mental health crisis, what is the role of social media?
But even if you don’t agree that such a crisis exists, Rausch notes, “social media still might not be safe for kids, right? This is something I feel is overlooked, like with the Report of the Surgeon Generalwhere the focus is on ‘Can you explain this huge increase?’ But there are all kinds of children’s consumer products that kill 50 children a year and that we immediately remove from the market.”
Conflict points: moral panic, lack of evidence
One consistent argument against the book, Rausch says, is that “there are a number of people who have studied media effects for a while and are very attuned to past panics around technologies, whether it’s video games or comic books, and there’s justified skepticism and concern that maybe this is happening again.”
In response, he points out, they try to argue that, simply, “This is this time. It really is different.”
The second detail that is pointed out to them has to do with the evidence that Raush and Haidt point out, by collecting all the studies they could find, all of which they collected in Google Public DocsThat amounts to “hundreds and hundreds… many of them low quality, some of them better quality,” Rausch says. Some critics point to studies that show a correlation rather than causation between, for example, social media and mental health problems.
But doing actual experiments with young people that might prove causation is tricky, he explains. “First of all, social media is relatively new, especially the kind we’re talking about, which is constantly evolving every year.” Also, “you don’t typically do experiments with kids. And doing the kind of experiment that we might want to do to really test this is completely unethical and would never be done — assigning one group of kids to have one kind of childhood and another group to have another kind of childhood.”
This makes it difficult to arrive at a very precise and conclusive scientific statement. “And that is the nature of social sciences,” he says, “and that is why there is so much debate.”
To bolster their arguments, Rausch and Haidt attempt to draw on several lines of evidence, including firsthand accounts from Gen Z, parents, and teachers, as well as internal documents from the social media companies themselves, such as Instagram Documentation of teenagers who report that using the platform worsens their body image and mental health.
Researchers have also focused on their belief that social media, especially when used intensively, has “addictive qualities” and will in turn cause withdrawal symptoms when used at a later time.
“A big part of the story is that we’re trying to tell what happens when a whole group of people move their lives onto addictive platforms,” he says.
Other reasons for rejection
“There are segments of people who are very optimistic about technology – they have a lot of faith in technology and believe that more technology will solve the world’s problems,” Rausch says. And for those who think that way, Anxious generationThe University of Nottingham’s findings might give the impression that “it’s just a bump in the road. Things are going to get better as we develop more technology to solve the problems that technology creates, and we’ll keep moving in that direction.”
There is also the “very real concern” of government control of social media, which Rausch calls “more of a libertarian critique.”
Finally, she says, there is concern that these issues are getting too much attention compared to other researchers’ equally important topics, from poverty to the opioid epidemic.
But, all arguments aside, he says, much of what Anxious generation has focused on is “irrefutable.” That includes not only the correlation between more intensive use of social media and anxiety or depressionbut the “much of the harm that happens on these platforms,” including the increase in sextortion cases, or teenagers being forced to send explicit photos online.
And what always reassures Rausch that they are on the right path is talking to a teenager, a parent or a teacher. “Whenever I have doubts,” he says, “I go to the source.”
