- The long arc of history bends towards greater and more complex levels of cooperation.

But, today's guest says that, over the last 10 years, American society has become ever more fragmented all thanks to the rise of social media.

He's Jonathan Haidt this week on Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to a Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And, I'm G. Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

- This week, we're joined by Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business.

He's also the author of countless provocative essays and leading publications.

We reached out to him after reading one of his essays this past spring in the Atlantic.

Why the Past 10 years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.

We're gonna try to get an answer today.

He's also the author of countless books and a real contribution to the show.

Jonathan, thank you so much for being with us.

- My pleasure, Jim.

- So, I mentioned the...

The article that we read last summer or last spring, we're gonna chat about that in a little bit, but I was curious a little bit about your own history and sort of journey to this moment.

You described yourself earlier in your career as a partisan Democrat.

And, today, you describe yourself as nonpartisan.

And, in fact, interested in building bridges between the...

The divisions in American society.

What led you to that moment?

- So...

So, I'm a social psychologist and my story, my personal story, is just totally typical for a Jewish American kid, raised in the suburbs of New York city.

Progressive, ran a gun control group in college, always voted for the Democrats, and was very frustrated when George W. Bush won election twice, when I thought he should have won election zero times.

And, it seemed to me studying, moral psychology, that the Democrats had really no idea how to talk about morality outside of... Outside of politically progressive enclaves.

And, since I was studying how morality varied across cultures, I thought, well, I can help them.

And, so I would write memos.

I would try to use, as many professors do, use their research to help their team win.

And, so I was doing that originally, and I thought I'd write a book on all of this, which became the Righteous Mind.

But, as I was writing the book, I realized the problem we're facing in this country is so serious.

This is around 2010, 2011.

The problem is so serious that we...

This is not about one side winning.

This is about the future of the country.

And, at the same time, as I was immersing myself in the best conservative writing and libertarian writing, I began to see that, actually, there are really good ideas on all sides.

And, if you just stay within your group, you actually don't understand anything.

So, that's what led me to step out, stop being on a team, and just start saying, you know what?

We've got a huge problem in this country.

And, this is like an all hands on deck moment.

We've gotta figure out what the hell is happening to us.

- One of the things that I think distinguishes your work as well is the use of narrative.

The article that we mentioned earlier, it begins with a thought experiment, challenging the reader to think about the Tower of Babel.

What is the power of narrative in the work that you do?

- So, I taught psych 101 at the University of Virginia for 17 years.

And, I had to try to convey hundreds of experiments and findings to a room full of 18 year olds.

And, one thing I realized very early on is that I should use psychology to teach psychology.

I should be manipulative.

I should do things so that they will learn more.

And, one of the first things I learned in lecturing is that if you explain and experiment really well, it's hard to follow.

It takes a lot of work.

But, if you make it a story, if you say, well, here's the problem they were working on.

And, then they face this challenge, and they figured they could overcome it this way, and they set it up like this.

And, here's what the subject experienced.

If you put it in a narrative form, it's effortless.

It's like getting on a train and then you just go forward.

And, this is why long stories are conveyed around the world in rhyme even.

Our brains are story processors.

They're not very good at just like hard logic.

- So, you've been warning for a number of years, speaking of young people, the negative effects of social media on young minds.

And, we've had other guests on this show that have examined that.

What has struck you... What is... What are these negative negative effects?

And, are they intensifying even today?

- Yes.

So, I've been studying polarization for a long time, and it looked as though things were just sort getting gradually worse, but then something weird begins to happen around 2014 on university campuses first.

Many students were coming in around then with this really defensive posture.

They saw everything as a threat.

They saw books, and words, and speakers as violence, as something which was going to hurt people.

And, we couldn't understand it, but a year or two later, I wrote an article with my friend, Greg Lukianoff, where we tried to analyze it in terms of somehow students were coming in using the very same cognitive distortions that Greg had learned to stop using when he learned to do cognitive behavioral therapy.

And, so why is it that students were coming in suddenly so depressed and anxious around 2014?

I didn't realize until a couple years later, but by digging into the research, the hundreds of publications, what we found is that the mental health crisis in the United States begins very, very suddenly, right around 2013.

The lines for depression and anxiety are fairly level for the millennial generation, but once you get gen Z, kids born around 1997 or later, gen Z suddenly gets very depressed around 2013.

And, they got on social media right between 2010 and 2012.

They began to use it every day.

So, I've been engaged in a debate with other researchers.

I believe I can show that it's not just correlation, that there's a lot of experimental evidence and other kinds of evidence that it's especially girls, young girls, going on social media during puberty or before puberty, even as young as 10, 11.

This is an incredibly bad way to have your young brain develop.

This is...

It makes all the worst parts of middle school 10 times more powerful.

So, I do believe that... That the crisis, the mental health crisis that this country is facing, which the surgeon general has been warning about for the last year is caused in large part, not entirely, but in large part, by the fact that our adolescents, our young kids, and especially young girls, are growing up on Instagram.

And, that's insane.

- So, what is the appeal of Instagram and other platforms in terms of why kids as young as 10 or 11 are flocking there and then being influenced, as you said, the effect on the developing brain is profound.

I've written about this in my own journalism, but what's the appeal?

What is the magnet?

What's the attraction?

Or, you could even say, what is the basis of the addiction?

- Yeah, so there are many attractions.

So, the first is just screens.

You know, when the three of us were growing up, I imagine our parents were very upset that we couldn't take our eyes off the television set, but it's not just screens of stories made up by older people.

It's actually things being posted by your friends.

So, there's a lot of attraction to what's going on on these platforms, but the companies have set up a trap and they know it, that is none of us...

I don't...

I've never met a parent who wanted their 11 year old daughter to be on Instagram, never, but our 11 year old daughters come to us as mine did, or as... As many do, and say, everyone's on Instagram.

When you hit sixth grade, everyone's on Instagram.

Everyone has an account.

And, if I don't have one, I'll be left out.

So, the companies know that they have the kids and the parents in a trap, and each person is reluctant to take their kid off, 'cause they'll be isolated.

- Yeah, so the culprit here of social media.

In the article that caught our attention, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, I mean, spoiler alert, the answer again is social media.

What is social media doing to us societally?

And, is it a direct line from the crisis and mental health that you identified earlier?

- So, I think the cause and mechanism there are a little bit different.

I'm writing a book on this now.

The title is going to be Life after Babel, adapting to a world we may never again share.

And, I, finally, this weekend began writing the first chapter, and I argue that the kids were the canaries in the coal mine, the gen Z dives into social media, and their social life is on it.

And, guess what?

You can't have a normal, healthy, social life on social media.

Kids need to be playing with each other, talking, having normal human interaction.

But, this canary in the coal mine metaphor, speaking of stories, also works quite well for a democracy.

Our... Our public and political lives migrated onto these platforms also around 2010 to 2012.

The platforms come out around 2004 for Facebook, but they don't really rise to dominance until around... Until the early 2010s.

And, I argue in the book that the same sort of thing has happened to our democratic discourse, that you can't have normal democratic discourse.

You can't talk about things in a normal way on social media.

And, the key reason is that, right now, like what we're doing, I'm not worried that you're going to attack me or that some stranger's gonna shoot me with a dart gun.

Like, that's just crazy.

That's not gonna happen.

But, if we were talking on Twitter, that would happen.

If we were...

If we were conversing on Twitter, we're not really talking to each other.

What Twitter in particular has done is said, why don't you all have conversations for free, but it's gonna be in the middle of the Roman Coliseum.

And, so you can talk to each other, but the stands are filled with thousands of people who pay to see blood.

That's why they're there.

They don't wanna see you work things out.

They're there to see you fight, and attack, and humiliate each other.

And, if we all are in that situation, well, that's the most unpromising possible environment for productive democratic discourse.

- You've said earlier that these companies know they are setting a trap and that trap ensnares many, many people.

And, of course, obviously not just young people, but people of all ages.

What is the sense of morality there?

What... What obligation do these companies have to correct that if there's even a way to correct that?

I mean, obviously these are profit making companies.

So, their bottom line is the bottom line.

Talk about that, 'cause this is a very large area of concern.

- Yes, so my...

Okay, so I'm a social psychologist.

I fell into a business school.

I teach here at the NYU Stern School of Business.

And, my official title is professor of ethical leadership, because, in a business school, everything has to have leadership in the title.

But, I teach a course on professional responsibility.

I think a lot about the exact question that you just asked, Wayne.

And, some people take a minimalist view where, as long as the company doesn't break the law, their obligation is to the shareholders, make as much money as possible.

But, most of us, and most Americans, and even most business people don't see it that way.

They do see that companies have some obligations, at least not to hurt people.

At least when they foist harmful external costs on others, they have an obligation to at least clean those up.

Now, I've spoken to a lot of people in the tech industry, a number of leaders of companies.

And, these are mostly idealistic people who think that they're doing good for the world.

And, if you look at say a company like Google, the sort of the DNA of a company, the founder's ethos does last for a while, not forever, but 5, 10, 15 years, it really does last.

And, so, with Google, I've seen repeatedly that they're at least trying.

I think they're at least trying.

They make a lot of question...

Decisions you might say are questionable, but they've made some decisions that I believe show that they do have some ethical compass.

They're not just trying to maximize revenue.

Facebook, from the reports that we read, from biographies of the company, is not like that.

Facebook, as far as I can tell, has had one imperative throughout.

It's not to make money necessarily, its growth.

Facebook, from the very beginning, when Mark Zuckerberg started it, he understood the power, he understood what happens in an exponential sort of market, but where the value of a network is not proportional to its size, it's proportional to the square or the cube of the size.

So, any little bit of growth creates vastly more value.

And, Facebook has basically been committed to growth at any cost.

And, that means getting people more engaged, even if it's in order to fight.

- Jonathan, one of the... One of the themes that you carry throughout this article is the danger of fragmentation.

That essentially what social media done has balkanized American society to the point where we don't have the same things that once bound us together.

Is it just an American phenomena or are we seeing this globally, wherever social media is present?

- So, to understand what's happening in any country, you need to look at the centripetal forces pulling it together and the centrifugal forces is blowing it apart.

So, if a country is very large and very diverse, like America, there's a lot more danger of fragmentation.

If you're Iceland or New Zealand, or any small homogeneous country, it's much easier to have people have a sense of one for all, all for one.

Scandinavian countries can have these great social democracies, because they have or used to have a sense of there but for the grace of God go I, we don't have that in America.

So, we're very different.

We're more dynamic, but we also have many more fragmentation lines.

Social media comes along and it...

It also taps into our unique media environment where we have a first amendment.

That means there can be very little regulation.

And, so the problems in America, our different media environment, our large size, our diversity, and our two party political system.

Two is a very bad number to have of political parties.

One is the worst, but two is the second worst number.

So, parliamentary democracies, where they have to form coalitions are more resilient.

They're more resistant to this fragmentation that we have in America.

So, the data, I've collected all the data I can find on what's happening in other countries.

And, the answer is that there was a peak of... A number of democracies and democratic health around 2010, 2011, in there.

And, it's been a slight decline after that.

And, then a steep decline in the late 2010s.

America has... Has had, by far, the biggest increase in polarization and a relatively rapid decrease in democratic quality.

But, we're not alone.

Many other countries are having this too.

- John, do you see a solution of any kind?

And, if there is a solution to this, who might promulgate it, who might push it, are we talking government, are we talking reform of industry?

What are we talking about?

Is there any hope here?

I guess is another way of putting it, 'cause, so far, this is depressing, real, but depressing.

- Yeah, yeah.

So, yes, my article is incredibly bleak.

I am incredibly pessimistic.

I think things are gonna get a lot worse in the next five or 10 years, but let me put some hope in here, which is that there are cycles of history.

Many historians have talked about this, going back to some of the ancient Greeks, going back to Iban Caldune, a Muslim sociologist in the 14th century.

A community faces struggles or a crisis, it comes out of it.

It builds institutions.

Those last a little while, two or three generations, but they begin to decay.

And, several historians and theorists have pointed out that we were due for a crack up around 2020 anyway, sometime the 2010s, 2020, we were due for a crack up.

And, this was predicted back in the 90s.

So, in some sense, what we're experiencing now in America is that, as a country, we had such an incredible peak of cohesion, and effectiveness, and world dominance, and scientific productivity in the late 20th century, so, in part, what's happening is, in a sense, a natural decay.

We have no idea how far down it'll go.

We don't know how long the breaking period will last.

It could be a decade or two.

It could be longer.

We don't know, but the odds are that 50 years from now, things will be a lot better, and the technology could end up giving us the best democracy ever.

It's just that, for now, this new technology is breaking almost everything and social media in its present form is very good at tearing things down, but it's just not good at building things.

- So, here's a question that we put to people of knowledge and learnedness, such as yourself, when there's a major problem.

And, the question is, what would you say to the, quote, unquote, average person, the average citizen, resident of this country, or other countries for that matter, what can those people, what can we do as individuals to perhaps move things in a good direction?

- So, first, in my Atlantic article, I think a major...

The major idea there that people are finding helpful is that our country is divided into different kinds of groups.

According to one study, there's seven different groups, the far right group, the far left group, those are the activists who are extremely angry, they're using social media, especially, to intimidate their moderates.

They, of course, we need a range of political opinion, but social media has made those two groups extremely powerful.

The middle 80% of the country is the exhausted majority.

And, so there's not much that I can say to the far right and the far left.

They wouldn't listen.

I believe the problem is that social media has given them so much power to harass and intimidate people, and they mostly intimidate the moderates on their own side, and the leaders of organizations.

We're all enthralled to them.

We're all afraid of them.

We're all afraid of getting shot with social media darts by them.

So, what I'd say to the middle 80%, and let's face it, it's the middle 80% that's gonna be watching a show like this.

What I'd say is, is you are not alone.

In fact, most people feel as you do, whether you're on the right or the left, most Americans love this country, want to coexist, are afraid of what's happening, and so if you stand up and behave decently, if you stand up and defend people who are being attacked unjustly, if you stand up for the good of the game in the country, that is, it's not all about defeating the other side.

At some point, we have to do some things that are actually good for the country.

So, if you stand up, despite the fear that we... That most of us have, people will think well of you.

Some people will come and support you.

And, in the long run, that's the honorable and patriotic thing to do.

- Jonathan, your concerns about social media, I think, are well founded and wonderfully articulated.

The historian in me though wondered where were the leaders, what role do individual political leaders play in this mess that we're in right now?

- Yeah, so you'd asked me about what the common people should do.

So, I focused on that, but, in my article, it was more about what you just asked.

That is, because my analysis is that certain structural things have changed, not just about information flow, but about the nature of social relationships, and those things are incompatible with democracy.

In fact, it's...

If you read Federalist 10, Madison writes about the danger that democracies face from faction, this was his biggest concern.

So, since I believe the main problems are structural, the main solutions have to be structural too.

And, it's things like I suggested in my article, three reform imperatives.

There's three things that we really need to do.

And, here, it takes leadership to do them.

The first is we have to harden or at least adapt our democratic institutions for a world with much greater outrage.

And, I think we're gonna... We can expect a return of much more political violence as we had in the 60s and 70s.

So, how are we gonna have elections when election officials are being harassed and the children are being threatened?

How are we gonna do that?

So, we have to... We have to really harden our democracy against what might be coming, which is much more intimidation and violence.

Second, we have to reform social media and make it much less toxic to these democratic institutions and to our knowledge generating institutions.

So, I work in universities.

I saw this happen in universities.

We're all afraid of saying anything that might offend anyone now, because we'll be destroyed on social media.

So, our universities are not working right anymore.

It used to be, we're supposed to be provocative.

We're supposed to question received wisdom.

Now, if you question received wisdom on any sacred matter about especially about gender, race, immigration, any other hot button topic, you could... You're gonna have serious problems.

So, our epistemic, our knowledge generating institutions are broken or breaking.

I don't wanna overstated it.

They are damaged.

So, I found that an organization called Heterodox Academy, if people would go to heterodoxacademy.org, you'll find all kinds of ideas there for what we can do to improve that institution.

We have to look at all of our institutions and make them... Make them work better, even despite the presence of social... Of social media in this form.

And, the third, the third reform imperative is we have to reverse the mental health catastrophe of gen Z.

We have a generation coming up that is very fragile, anxious, depressed.

We never gave them the chance to work out conflicts on their own.

We were always there to resolve conflicts for them.

And, then the same generation that was deprived free play outdoors, like, well, like previous generations which grew up even when there was a lot of crime outside, people, kids played outside.

Gen Z was denied that.

And, then they happened to be the first generation that got social media in middle school.

So, we have to... We have to return to free range child rearing that is kids need independence in order to practice independence.

And, let's remember the American experiment, when we use that phrase, what's an experiment in?

It's an experiment in self-governance.

And, yet, in the 90s, or late 90s, we stopped kids from ever getting to practice self-governance.

They're always supervised.

So, we gotta start letting kids out by age eight, encouraging to go out and play, and not spend their childhood on their devices, near adults.

- You know, I...

The article you describe, this witches brew that we're talking about, as Madison's nightmare, James Madison's nightmare, and that resonated with me.

I remember in graduate school, I read an article, an essay by Julian Benda, who was a French philosopher in the 1920s, who lamented the rise of partisan newspapers, partisan news sources, ethnic newspapers, political... Papers associated with particular political parties, because it fragmented society.

He was worried in the 1920s about another great war.

And, he was right.

What is it about fragmentation in particular that is so dangerous to democracy, and peace, and stability?

- Yeah.

So, I would never wanna live in a country that banned or even tried to suppress ethnic newspapers and small associations.

The issue is that human sociology has this interesting recursive structure that is we form groups, but our groups combine with other groups to form larger groups.

You see this in the military.

So, having small groups is not a problem, as long as you also have some encompassing identity, some shared stories.

So...

So, I grew up as part of the... My parents grew up, I should say, as the... A generation of Jewish immigrants that assimilated.

They had a very strong Jewish identity, but they had a very strong American identity.

And, I think that's great.

That worked out incredibly well for America, for the Jews, for groups that assimilated.

So, you can have your local cuisine, you can have your local stories, but as long as we have something that binds us together, then it all works.

What I argue in the essay is that social media shreds everything very, very quickly.

You can't have any more stories that are shared.

In fact, I don't think we'll ever have shared stories again in our lifetime.

We'll just have lots of temporary little stories, finding groups together, largely in opposition to other groups, but nothing will really last.

So, I think America is unusual in not being founded on blood and soil.

It's founded on shared values in a shared story.

So, America, I think, is especially vulnerable to this shredding effect that social media has of tearing down any possibility of a common story.

- Jonathan Haidt, that is a sobering place for us to leave this conversation, but we wanna thank you for your work and for sharing some of it with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But, if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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