Revisiting Jonathan Haidt on how tech can change social media and save democracy

Gen Z in the workplace, changing norms, and anonymity

Today, we conclude a special two-part look-back at our 2022 conversations with Jonathan Haidt.

Haidt, who co-wrote the book “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” and also co-founded the Heterodox Academy, also wrote an extended essay in The Atlantic on “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

In last week’s edition our own Josh Wolfe sat down with Jonathan to discuss structural stupidity, the United States after Babel, free speech, and campus politics. This week, they explore potential solutions, including how social media products can reduce trollish amplification as well as how founders and CEOs can change their corporate cultures to enhance the growth of their Gen Z employees.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For more of the conversation, subscribe to the Riskgaming podast.

Josh Wolfe:

So when we think about fixes for the structural stupidity you’ve talked about, part of it seems to be a generational issue. A lot of it is coming from what you called “the coddling of the American mind.” People were, for whatever reason, kept indoors, avoided conflict.

I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn. I grew up in a screaming household — lots of conflict and lots of confrontation and you learned to develop a thick skin.

There is something with this younger generation that is palpably different.

Jonathan Haidt:

So yes, it's two separate problems that connect. A lot of what we've been talking about is also being done by Gen X and Baby Boomers on Twitter and Facebook. So within all the generations there are people behaving badly.

But there is a special problem with Gen Z. That is anyone born after 1996 or so. They suddenly have much higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide. Sometime in 2010–2012, you get these sharp upward curves.

Something happened to the mental health of America's kids, and it makes them fragile and anxious. This is part of what we saw on campus. At the same time Greg Lukianoff was saying, “weird things are happening,” every counseling center in America was saying, “We’re flooded. We don't have enough therapists all of a sudden.”

A lot of people said Gen Z would grow out of it. They can't do this in the real world. But corporate America has largely accommodated them, just as we accommodated them in the universities.

We had a wave of depressed, anxious young people. And when people are anxious and depressed, they look out at the world and don't see things as opportunities, they see things as threats. So if a professor says some speaker is coming to campus or some book is assigned — it's not an opportunity. It's a threat.

At the time it started, a lot of people said, “Oh, it's just college students. They'll grow out of it. They can't do this in the real world.” But corporate America has largely accommodated them, just as we accommodated them in the universities.

Josh Wolfe:

I remember talking to you years ago. You had a hypothesis that these people, this group of kids, may take this sensibility with them into the workforce. And that it would spread first in the most frequent hiring employers — the media, marketing, newspapers, TV — and then go into the corporate and investing world. I think this is something that has been observable.

Jonathan Haidt:

Yes. That's right. Greg and I published our book (The Coddling of the American Mind) in 2018. We had to stop writing in the spring of 2018. I wanted to have a chapter on what happens when this comes to the corporate world.

When you graduate from college, everything's been about you. Everyone's investing in you. Now you have to make the transition to realizing you’re an employee. You have to generate value for my employer.

We had a few anecdotes, but we decided we didn’t have enough for a chapter. So we submitted the manuscript. And then, beginning in the fall of 2018, you suddenly start hearing a lot more stories about generational conflicts in the workplace. Stories about young workers saying, “I'm anxious. I don't want to come into work tomorrow. I can't do this deadline.”

When you graduate from college, everything's been about you. Everyone's investing in you. Now you have to make the transition to realizing you’re an employee. You have to generate value for your employer. In any case, we've seen an explosion of exactly the same kinds of conflict we have on campus.

As you say, it's especially in the industries that are hiring from elite schools. The industries that are more in the creative zone — and a lot of tech, not all of tech, but a lot of tech companies.

Josh Wolfe:

Part of me wonders if there's any correlation with the incredible bull market run we've had for the past 10 or 15 years. If there's a downturn, do some of these trends exacerbate, because stress is going to be higher? Or do they abate? If we hit a recession, stocks are down, are some of the young people that are acting very entitled suddenly like, okay, actually maybe I have to conform?

Jonathan Haidt:

I think that is possible. But also, let's be clear that our perceptions are shaped by who is speaking up on social media. And that is never representative of the larger population. What I have found is that most members of Gen Z are curious. They want to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas. It's a small number who have embraced the slandering, slurring and attacking of other people. But most students are afraid of speaking up because they're afraid of a small number of their fellow students.

So I don't want to say that most of them feel entitled in the way you were talking about. But I would say that they've been under-socialized. First of all, Gen Z is much less likely to have ever had a job than the Millennials or any previous generation. They simply didn't have summer jobs as much. And part of that is that college has gotten more competitive. For American middle-class families and above, the point of childhood has become getting you into an Ivy League school.

So they literally have had less life experience. They've had less mentoring. And I think it's important that you work for a boss who goes hard on you.

Second, surveys show that Gen Z is very concerned about economic stability. Understandably. They've been raised since the global financial crisis, the pandemic. They're anxious. But yes I think we will see many of them trying to get with the program.

Now, here's my advice, since there are a lot of people listening to this who have their own companies or are in the tech world. What I have found is that Gen Z is not in denial. They're not defensive. They know they have problems. They want to grow. They want to learn. And if you have the concept of antifragility, everything goes smoothly.

Josh Wolfe:

So let's explain that. What is antifragility?

Jonathan Haidt:

Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, also wrote this wonderful book called Antifragile. He points out that there are certain things that are fragile, like glass. So you don't let babies play with glass. We give them plastic, plastic is resilient. But if you drop a plastic cup, it doesn't get better.

And Taleb was interested in systems where, if you drop them, they get better. He was thinking, for example, of the banking system. If a system hasn't been stressed, it gets weak, but if it has been stressed, it adapts and it gets strong.

Josh Wolfe:

And that's true whether it's forest fires or muscles in the body.

Jonathan Haidt:

Exactly. And of course, the immune system. If we protect our kids from dirt and germs, we actually make them weak. They have to be exposed. This is why peanut allergies have exploded. It's because we started protecting kids from peanuts in the 1990s.

So you explain the concept of antifragility, everyone in Gen Z gets it right away. So say your new hires haven't had summer jobs. They've been overprotected their whole lives. They're inexperienced. It's not their fault. There's no reason to be angry. Say to them: “I really want you to succeed in this job. And that's why I'm going to give you hard feedback. I'm not doing it because I'm mad at you. I'm doing it because I want you to grow.”

Josh Wolfe:

I'm really caught by that peanut analogy because denying exposure exacerbates sensitivity, and that's true of peanuts. And that's true of difficult conversations and difficult situations.

Jonathan Haidt:

That's right. So, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler did research on the Framingham Heart Study databases. They have a wonderful book called Connected, and they show that, if you take up smoking, your friends are more likely to take up smoking. But so are your friends’ friends and so are your friends’ friends’ friends. That's hard to believe, but they do find the third-order effect.

Josh Wolfe:

And I think it was the same thing with obesity.

Jonathan Haidt:

Yep. Exact same with obesity. But here's the thing relevant for us: same with happiness and sadness, same with emotions. And it's more contagious for women than men. When a man is depressed, it doesn't make other people depressed because men don't talk about it. Whereas if a woman is depressed, she's more likely to talk about it and so it will spread more.

And what we see is that, when all the kids go from mostly not having a smartphone to having one, the boys go especially for YouTube and video games. The girls go for the visual platforms. They go for Instagram and Tumblr and Pinterest. Those are the three that are mostly female.

And so, the girls are now spreading ideas and emotions. And you get extraordinary contagion. And I think this is why the rates of anxiety and depression just skyrocket among girls.

Josh Wolfe:

I’m still thinking about how technology amplifies everything. And I'm still trying to grasp how technology can be a constructive salve for that. I wonder if there's something that could be a layer on the information that could detect when there's something that is being labeled or to just raise to our awareness.

Jonathan Haidt:

Yeah. Yeah. I see where you're going with that, but…

Josh Wolfe:

I think you are not optimistic.

Jonathan Haidt:

Well, we give people calorie counts, right? We can tell them this Big Mac has this ingredient and therefore you shouldn't have it or something. But if what's operating is not rational thought but a deeper set of motives — like the lust for fat and sugar and salt — it's very hard to have our rational mind go up against that. Especially when you're a kid.

Josh Wolfe:

I'm thinking about how our natural propensity for sugar and fat evolved when those things were scarce. And now it's abundant, and we are drinking lots of sugar. At the same time, you have all of these people who are fitness nuts today, and there's a social contagion around the people who are involved in CrossFit on Instagram. So there holds this sliver of hope that maybe there can be positive contagion with good things.

If we can do that, maybe there's a mental fitness that people can broadcast in the same way that you're getting status today for, you know, being a provocateur.

Jonathan Haidt:

I see what you're saying. This sounds promising. It makes me think: there are a lot of things we’ve faced as a society like alcohol, marijuana. When I was in high school in the 70s and 80s, a lot of kids died in drunk driving accidents. I mean, it was a major cause of death. And now, it's way, way down. We learned how to adapt. It took a while.

Josh Wolfe:

Is that because shame worked, does shame still work? Did we shame people? I remember Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Drinking and driving became socially taboo.

Jonathan Haidt:

Yeah. I'd maybe want to see a historian’s account of how the norms changed, because ultimately the norms did change. And it was a national change.

Right now, social media is so new, but it may be the case that in 20 years we will have worked out a way to live with it without having to do so much damage to kids. So yes, there may be a future in which we adapt to it.

My concern, one, is that the political chaos and the generational damage may be so severe that even though we could theoretically figure out a better way to be, we might get tripped up.

And two, it used to be possible to change norms nationally. But that's pre-Bable. After the Tower of Babel has fallen, I don't think it is possible.

Josh Wolfe:

Your next book…

Jonathan Haidt:

It’s called Life after Babel: Adapting to a world we may never again share.

Josh Wolfe:

What are the reforms that you have contemplated that could actually fix this problem? Particularly on social media.

Jonathan Haidt:

It is going to be hard. But if we're going to do it, there will be three buckets of reform. The first is, we've got to harden our democratic and epistemic institutions. The second is we have to make social media less toxic to those institutions. And the third is we have to prepare the next generation to live in this crazy and probably much more violent democracy.

Josh Wolfe:

Let's take the second one.

Jonathan Haidt:

Yeah, that's most relevant to your audience. So first. Please everyone stop talking about content moderation. Please. Stop it. I'm so sick of it. It's not that important and there's no solution. The left wants more of it, the right wants less of it. So we're not going to get a bipartisan compromise. And that's not where the action is anyway.

The problem on social media is not that somebody can post some crazy, terrible conspiracy theory. They've been doing that for hundreds of years. The John Birch Society was doing that. There's all kinds of places you can do that. But before 2009, it couldn't go viral to millions of people within a few days. It's the architecture that has made it so the more obnoxious you are, the further it goes. That's the problem.

There's two sets of reforms that I think are really powerful. One is to look at who is posting. You can't walk up to a bank and say, “Here's a bag of money. Open an account for John Q Smith.”

Josh Wolfe:

Anonymity.

Jonathan Haidt:

Yeah, anonymity. Banks have “Know Your Customer laws,” and I think large platforms should have them too. It doesn't mean that you have to show your driver's license to Facebook. But … suppose anyone can open an account just to view what other people are saying. If you want to have the right to post content, though, you have to get verified as a human being who's old enough to use the platform. Of course, you can always post anonymously, but you have to get verified.

That would eliminate almost all of the bots right away, and that would also control some of the trolls — even though many trolls already use their real names. If there's even that low level of accountability, people will not be quite as much of a jerk.

Another one I was talking about with Reid Hoffman a couple weeks ago. Right now, the incentives are that the more of an asshole you are, the more successful you are. But what if we reverse that? What if you have Facebook and Twitter code your degree of aggression? And so, if all you do is attack people, use obscenity and exclamation points, you get a five on a 1–5 scale.

When users open accounts, their filters are set by default to 4. So I see everybody who's 1–4, but I won't see anyone who's a five. And they can't see me. They can say whatever they want, but why should my public square be full of assholes?

Josh Wolfe:

This is a great idea because, whether it’s a restaurant or an Uber driver, you typically want a highly rated person.

Jonathan Haidt:

Well, that's exactly right. So now, all of a sudden, the incentive is don't be a jerk. If you're a complete asshole, fewer people will see you.

What do you think? Would that work?

Josh Wolfe:

I think it's very clever. I think rating systems have worked for all kinds of content. Netflix obviously has their algorithms to see when people are watching, and then when more people are watching, they try to dial up that kind of content.

Jonathan Haidt:

Obviously, somebody who is righteously indignant — indignant about racism or global warming — we want to make sure this doesn't pick that up. It has to basically pick up trollishness. Actually, that's what AI is great for. You just need to identify, you know, the 1–3 percent of people who are like this.

Josh Wolfe:

Right, the passionate versus the outright jerk.

Jonathan Haidt:

Yeah, that's right. I think that's very clever. I like that one.

But look, even if that itself doesn't work, the tech community is so creative. Can you all do better? Can you come up with something else?

Josh Wolfe:

It really comes down to incentives because as a friend of ours says, social media is inherently good, social media based on advertising is inherently bad. It's really about the incentives for engagement. But if there is a counter system, whether it was a regulatory one or a consumer-led campaign to self-regulate some of this content, I think it would be a great benevolent thing.

Jonathan Haidt:

From your mouth to God's ears, as my grandmother used to say.

Josh Wolfe:

Or Zuck’s.

Jonathan Haidt:

Yes, to Zuck’s ears.

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