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Jonathan Haidt does not see himself as an oracle of the social media age. He says his 2-million-copy-selling book The Anxious Generation does not tell anyone anything they didn’t know in their gut already: that smartphones and social media have wrecked the mental health and attentional control of a generation of teenagers.

Instead, the social psychologist (and professor at the New York University Stern School of Business) presents his role more as providing the articulation and evidence base for that gut sense, and then helping to shape a movement to realise the change we all want to see.

“The book has done so well all over the world because…it addressed something that [people] already saw happening,” he explains.

Such positioning has made being a critic of The Anxious Generation tricky: questioning Haidt’s use of evidence or his conclusions can become an attack not just on him - or on the powerful anti-smartphone campaigns that have adopted him, or the politicians that have bought into him - but on all of us, too.

So it’s unsurprising that Haidt’s critics - whom he labels “the sceptics” - are clear in separating the arguments. They say our gut feeling is right that social media and smartphones are a challenge the modern world needs to face. However, they are certain that Haidt’s articulation of that challenge and his prescription to solve it is, based on current evidence, very wrong.

“What Jon is selling is fear,” argues Andrew Przybylski, professor of human behaviour and technology at the University of Oxford. “It’s not scientific.”

Thus far, that message hasn’t made a dent in Haidt’s popularity. Indeed, the arguments of The Anxious Generation now percolate through political and public discourse as fact.

But is that because Haidt’s reading of the evidence is more convincing than that of his critics, or because we simply want to believe his (and perhaps our own) version of the story more?

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Haidt’s argument in The Anxious Generation is relatively straightforward: from 2012 onwards, teenagers across the Westernised world experienced a simultaneous “surge” of mental health challenges and dramatic loss of attentional control.

Citing a wealth of data and research sources, he argues this sharp increase was caused by the use of increasingly sophisticated social media platforms - accessed via smartphones - which led to four foundational harms: social deprivation; sleep deprivation; attention fragmentation; and addiction.

He says teenagers are uniquely vulnerable to these harms because their brains are not yet fully developed.

“There are many kinds of evidence, and they’re all pointing in the same way,” he concludes.

The book went viral soon after it was published in early 2024. Anti-smartphone campaign groups - - spread Haidt’s message widely on social media, helped by finely tuned algorithms. National media and , and policy partly (or perhaps sometimes directly) began to be formed .

Very quickly, Haidt became the evidence base for the multi-headed global campaign to get smartphones out of the hands of under-16s.

Watching on was a group of academics, each a specialist in the fields Haidt was discussing. They were confused about how he was so certain about research they knew was complex.

“When I read the book, I found it really hard to believe it was written by a fellow academic,” admits Tamsin Ford, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Cambridge.

And as Haidt’s popularity grew ever greater, some academics’ confusion turned to despair.

“There are a huge number of us who are experts in our fields, advising government on these issues,” says David Ellis, professor of behavioural science at the University of Bath and an expert on the impacts of digital technology. “And the work of Jon Haidt doesn’t come up unless it’s the butt of a joke.”

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Haidt’s critics have focused primarily on his two main arguments.

The first is that there is a mental health crisis of “epidemic” proportions among teenagers, and that this has been caused by social media platforms they access on their smartphones.

To establish that there is a mental health crisis among teenagers post 2012, Haidt primarily uses self-report (for example, young people’s survey answers) and medical data for this age group, which he says shows more suicides, more self-harm, more depression and an increase in other mental harms like feelings of alienation.

Ford argues that using self-report data for prevalence estimates is tricky owing to a “lack of methodological soundness and ‘noisy’ data”.

“A teenager with high scores on a mental health questionnaire at a single time point will include a mixture of those who have not fully understood the question or are mucking around, those who are having a one-off bad day or adjusting to a life stress and those with persistent difficulties that impair their function. The last are those with mental health conditions,” she explains.

‘What Jon is selling is fear. It’s not scientific’
-��Andrew Przybylski

In terms of the best UK prevalence data, she says the (which includes input from parents, teachers and clinical assessors) found prevalence of mental disorders in those between 5 and 15 years old increased between 1999 and 2004 by 0.4 percentage points and again between 2004 and 2017 by 1.1 percentage points (data for older teens has only been collected once, in 2017, so there is no data over time).

It’s an increase, but Ford says the data does not support Haidt’s description of a “tidal wave” of mental health challenges, nor a “surge of suffering”.

“He is going beyond the data,” she argues.

In the US, there are potential issues with the prevalence data, too. The cited medical reporting changes and a decrease in the number of adolescents without medical insurance as aspects that would have driven up the numbers, but not necessarily the prevalence. They found a number of other factors that should be considered, too.

“What we might be looking at is: teens are very depressed and we’re now better at catching it,” journalist and host Michael Hobbes suggested in the episode.

On the issue of whether social media and smartphones have caused a rise in mental health challenges in adolescents, Haidt is clear that the “largest single factor explaining the international increase [in mental health challenges] is the very rapid transition of childhood between 2010 and 2015, when they move from flip phones without social media to smartphones with social media”.

He evidences this through studies looking at the impact of social media and screens, and also through research explaining what is “needed” in the teenage years for development (for example, real-world interactions, sleep and age-sensitive content), and then arguing through research and data that smartphones take those things away from teenagers (for example, by reducing their real-world interactions and sleep, and exposing them to adult content).

“Do we really think a childhood where you’re not spending time with friends, you’re not paying attention to things, you’re not reading books, you don’t have hobbies, you don’t run around as much, you don’t sleep as much - we really think that kids are going to be fine afterwards?” he asks.

‘Blended’ research

Haidt says that when you combine the research studies, self-report and medical data, psychological and physiological knowledge about the teenage brain and more, you clearly find “a fairly consistent relationship in which heavy users of social media are at much higher risk of mental illness or poor mental health than everyone else” ().

In our interview, he says some of these heavy users will be depressed and then turn to social media, “but many more [studies] point to forward causation: that is, first a kid increases with their social media use and then they get more depressed”.

And while he agrees with his critics that the evidence base we have needs to be improved, he argues that if we did improve it, the causation would be even stronger because he believes there are currently too many “blended” studies.

He describes these as studies that look at total screen time. Within these, the elements that have a negative effect on mental health are lost among the many elements that have no effect. If, on the other hand, you study the effect of a specific social media platform on specific harms (Instagram causing depression in girls, for example), then he says you clearly see causation.

“The conceptual error is: if we blend everything together then we tend to find nothing,” he says.

And if this academic argument doesn’t convince you, he offers an even simpler reason for causation: “No one has proposed an alternative that can explain why [the rise] happened internationally,” he says.

(Note: this is a summary of Haidt’s argument; for the full details, there are multiple articles on After Babel that add to what is in his book.)

Haidt’s critics strongly disagree with his reading of the evidence base.

Candice Odgers, professor of psychology and informatics at University of California Irvine, concludes that current research “does not support the widespread panic around social media and mental health” and that “if our goal is addressing the main causes and contributors to youth mental health, then social media is not the logical place to start”.

“It is perfectly reasonable to take a safety-first approach to kids and social media,” she argues. “But when these decisions are made, it should not be because someone tells you science has discovered social media is the cause of serious mental disorders or will harm our children’s brains. That is the story that is being told, but not what the science says.”

‘To pin this on phones doesn’t just go way beyond the evidence - it is actually dangerous’
- Tamsin Ford

On the criticism of “blended” studies, Przybylski (alongside a colleague) that Haidt and others have misunderstood these studies.

Przybylski doesn’t believe the term “blended” is scientific and writes that the studies being criticised are the “transparent and robust methodological approaches for studying psychological and technological phenomena” rather than the “boosterism, doomerism, big tech lobbying, speculation and anecdote rife in the field today”.

In our interview, Przybylski adds that if the evidence really did match Haidt’s reading of it, we would be seeing much clearer signals of causality than we are getting.

“By the logic of his argument, the correlation between the use of technology and the outcome should be stronger,” he says. “As the algorithms have got more pernicious, more sophisticated, things should be getting progressively worse. [That hasn’t happened.] There is no sense of mechanism here.”

Ford says what we may be seeing in the data is the impact on a very small group of teenagers who are already vulnerable to extreme content featuring things like self-harm or promotion of anorexia, and we need careful research on how smartphones and social media interact with that vulnerability.

“There is a very small number of young people who are really vulnerable to seeing these things [on the internet or in films] and acting them out and changing their behaviour as a result,” she says. “They’re usually the young people who face multiple other challenges also, so how far are phones the problem then becomes a question.”

Critical factors missed

And on Haidt’s point about there being no other viable explanations for the rise in mental health challenges?

Many critics point to the influence of administration, classification and data collection changes of the nature Hobbes found while researching his podcast.

Ford says he has missed some other obvious contributing factors in the UK data, including closures of youth clubs and other safe spaces for young people, the world becoming more expensive and difficult to navigate, social changes with looser community bonds and more.

“One of the strongest and most consistent associations for poor mental health is poverty, and we’ve got more children living in poverty, and then we have this huge drop in accessibility to services…[so] there is no early intervention,” she says. “To pin this on phones doesn’t just go way beyond the evidence - it is actually dangerous, as it does not address these other critical factors.”

Odgers paints a similar picture for the US, saying the increase is “likely the result of a number of things ranging from changes in reporting guidelines, a greater willingness for young people to talk about mental illness…and real changes in the prevalence of youth mental health problems”.

Faced with these criticisms, though, Haidt remains resolute that his reading of the research is the correct one. Moreover, he believes the academic argument should not get in the way of action.

“The idea that parents should wait until the scientists agree - that policymakers should wait until the scientists reach consensus - is absurd,” he concludes.

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The second big claim in Haidt’s book is one he now feels he underplayed.

“The bigger damage [than that caused to mental health] is the damage to the ability to pay attention,” he reveals.

Haidt says tech firms worked out how to “hack” users’ brains to make their products more addictive. By priming the brain for a hit of the neurotransmitter dopamine (involved in, among many other things, feeling pleasure) and fulfilling that expectation in a variable way, a teenager gradually invests more and more in that product to get the reward - becoming increasingly unable to fight the pull of that “hit” until there is little time left for anything else.

Worse, so enticing is the experience that they can no longer pay attention to other activities.

“The time not gamified is painful, it’s more boring,” Haidt says.

He doesn’t believe all teenagers are “addicted” to their phones, but says that in studies that quantify problematic use of social media, video games and many other technologies, the numbers usually fall between 5-15 per cent, “so I sometimes say that around 10 per cent of teens will have problematic use, which describes use that is compulsive, and interfering with other life domains”.

However, he says that for all teenage users, their “desires are being hacked and their actions manipulated” and that we have “rewired childhood”.

“The majority of all of the people in the Western world born after 1995 have had their attentional capacities diminished and that is damage at an incalculable level,” he concludes.

Haidt’s evidence base for this claim includes whistleblower testimony that tech did set out to hook teenagers (with psychological research suggesting it works), evidence that teenagers are particularly vulnerable in a way adults are not (owing to executive function in young people not being fully mature) and self-report and study data about screen time usage.

He also cites general research around addiction and how teenagers react when a phone is taken away from them.

Finally, he points to educational data, stating that “we have a global decline in what kids are learning” and saying that the “ultimate” proof is that those who create the tech send their kids to tech-free schools and ban screens as “they don’t believe kids can withstand the hacking they’re doing”.

‘The idea that parents should wait until the scientists agree is absurd’
- Jonathan Haidt

Ellis has been a leading critic of the addiction narrative, believing the self-report measures being used are deeply flawed.

“We did a satirical paper a couple of years ago and we followed the mathematical formulas that people had used [in this research],” he says. “We managed to create a friendship addiction scale that demonstrated that 80 per cent of our sample were addicted to their friends, which of course is nonsense.”

Meanwhile, Nora Volkow - director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the US and one of the world’s leading experts on dopamine and addiction - says “there’s not a clear-cut definition of what addiction to a phone would be, [so] it is difficult to estimate the prevalence”.

She adds she knows of no studies that would support Haidt’s 10 per cent addiction figure. And she argues that we often jump too soon to saying someone is addicted.

“For most of us, we are [not addicted to our phones] - we are distracted by our phones…[Addiction is when] you’re so out of control that it results in pathological outcomes for the individual,” she says.

Where Volkow agrees with Haidt is that humans are becoming less attentive to information not curated in the ways adopted by social media and smartphones. However, she is just as concerned with the way other media such as television news presents information in shorter, more entertaining ways and has done so since well before 2012.

“The way we are providing information is increasingly very short lasting and very salient to capture our dopaminergic system,” Volkow says. “So you expect the next time you get a stimuli it will be something similar, and when it doesn’t come with all the whistles that are crafted with some of this information, of course you are much less attentive.”

She says the upside of shorter snippets of information is that we can now process a vast amount of data, but she says this will be “at a lesser depth” with a higher chance of misinformation.

She uses Google snippets as a prime example of more data being processed quickly by users, but usually in a heavily summarised, “surface” way.

Brains aren’t helpless

On the specific claim that social media has caused an “incalculable” level of damage to attention for the “majority of people” born after 1995 in the Westernised world, Gaia Scerif, professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a specialist in attentional control, explains that how distracting an individual finds social media and smartphones is much more complex than just being down to their age.

She says you don’t see the prefrontal cortex “suddenly light up at 25” and that attentional control will vary greatly due to genetic and other factors. Because of that, she says, “for some, there will be huge costs of a phone in terms of distraction; for others, there will be very little; and for some, none at all”.

Where individuals are affected, she states that “there is no evidence that a brain is ‘rewired’ through technology…This is not hardwired change that occurs”.

Both Scerif and Volkow recognise the distracting nature of a smartphone and its apps, but don’t see the brain as being helpless. Scerif says it is just one of many things the brain has to deal with in terms of distraction, with other humans usually being the most distracting.

Volkow, meanwhile, says there has always been competition from multiple stimuli on our attention and we need to work out where phones sit within that.

“When you fall in love, I can guarantee that person will be much more powerful than a cell phone in front of you, or 10 cell phones,” she says. “So it is understanding the relative position of the reinforcing stimuli that are salient.”

What about the evidence for the Westernised world becoming gradually less educated since 2012 as phones began to distract pupils, or that tech executives try to keep screens away from their children at home and at school?

On the latter, Margaret O’Mara, history professor at the University of Washington and author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, says there is no evidence most tech executives ban their children from screens (something journalist Damien Leloup ). She adds that the majority will use public schools that are “as full of screens as any other system, if not more so”.

On the educational claims, Matthew Kraft, professor of education and economics at Brown University, says it is true that National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in the US began a steady decline in the mid 2010s.

But while he believes digital devices have affected student success, he says there were several important macro changes in education policy happening at the same time, “including the weakening of test-based accountability for schools as well as common core curricular reforms”.

As for the rest of the Westernised world, Haidt cites the Programme for International Student Assessment to evidence a global decline in learning. But Pisa says the data shows mathematics scores were stable across participating countries between 2003 and 2018.

And although “average trajectories” in reading and science were downward, Christian Bokhove, professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton, argues that beyond the general picture, “many countries were not declining” in that period in any of the three subjects.

Echoing many of the other academics when it comes to their criticisms of Haidt, he argues that even if the data did show a universal decline, “there can be numerous causes for this”.

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It’s not just Haidt’s use of the evidence that has attracted criticism - it’s his proposed solutions, too.

Haidt says he does not support “laws banning kids from owning or having or using devices”; he says such a move would be “absurd”.

Instead, he writes in his book that parents are trapped in a “collective action” problem whereby the cost of not giving the phone or social media access to a teenager or child is “too difficult” because everyone else has one. “Many parents, therefore, give in,” he writes.

To counter this, he wants governments to regulate for compulsory age verification and raising the age of internet adulthood from 13 to 16 years old, which would help to create new “norms” ( on the website that accompanies the book) of no smartphones until 14 years old, no social media until 16 years old, phone-free schools and a more play-based childhood.

By “phone-free” schools, Haidt also means personal computers and tablets - essentially, internet-enabled personal devices. Speaking at an event earlier this year, he said that “anything you do digital is worse than anything you do manual, unless there’s evidence to the contrary”. And in our interview, he summarises the book An Ed-Tech Tragedy? published by Unesco as saying that “whatever the benefits [of edtech] may be, the distraction effects generally outweigh those benefits”.

He concludes that if we follow his proposals, we will “likely see substantial improvements in child and adolescent mental health”.

Haidt’s critics don’t believe that’s true - partly because of their aforementioned arguments that social media and phones have not solely caused those issues, but also because they believe the solution would have to start with much tougher regulation than Haidt suggests.

“Why are parents even having to figure threats out?” asks Przybylski. “Parents don’t have to pick between really safe and really dangerous trampolines - we have things in place to make sure it is very difficult to buy even a fairly dangerous trampoline.

“Tech companies [should be made] to share data so we can understand how to make phones safer, so we can regulate them and what is on them.”

Volkow adds she would like to see regulation very specifically around algorithms. “Cell phones have many, many advantages. So [to ensure we can still benefit from those], it’s important we regulate…the algorithms being used, because that’s what’s targeting that extremely compulsive pattern of people. If you regulate that, you protect people.”

‘If you regulate algorithms, you protect people’
- Nora Volkow

The critics are relatively united that, rather than banning phones, scaffolded use that ensures teenagers learn to deal with phones and social media in a safe way - helped by the above regulation - is the sensible way forward.

“We should be teaching kids to live in a technological world,” argues Przybylski. “Are we going to let kids just cope with that on their own at 16? And at the same time, we need to help parents: here is what parenting for tech looks like, here are some examples, here is that help you desperately need. And that should all be paid for by the tax money coming in from these tech companies.”

Ford says bans have “no evidence” of the sort of effects Haidt cites, and that they could do harm.

“For example, [communicating using] phones has been a way I have seen young people support each other through really difficult times and that would not have easily happened without that phone because of how far those young people were comfortable with face-to-face relationships during those periods,” she explains.

And she points out that the approach the critics are proposing for phones aligns with what Haidt advocates for teenagers more generally.

“Haidt is quite inconsistent here as he is saying we overprotect kids in other ways, that we don’t allow them to experience the world and learn, but on this [social media and phones], actually, let’s just ban it,” she says.

In terms of the push for a school ban on phones, Haidt is clear that government should support this by financing lockers or pouches and providing evidence for bans. In England, a pressure group has gone a step further by .

However, Pete Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, says there isn’t any good evidence that phone bans should be mandated or pushed.

He says some studies show positive outcomes, some negative and some no change at all. And the data is noisy: “A school that has a very strict phone ban probably has a lot of other stuff going on that could impact attainment.”

He also says - and Haidt concedes this point - that there would have to be numerous exceptions for children who, for example, need to track their diabetes via an app or use speech-to-text software.

“You’re not going to be able to produce a perfect policy, so how are you going to find a way through that?” Etchells asks. “And these things aren’t cost free. How are you going to be monitoring this, whose responsibility is it, what are the penalties for violations, what costs are associated with buying phone pouches or [staff time]? Could that money be better used more effectively on other initiatives to address the problems that you’ve identified?”

He doesn’t think government or Haidt are the people to make those calls: the school is.

“The best people to decide the level of phone use necessary in schools are those in the schools. They understand their community, the relationships that they need to manage and the way they want to approach education and feel they can do that successfully,” he says.

Finally, on the impact of edtech, for the past decade in the UK homework tasks, resources, timetables, communications, learning activities and much more (including the UK government’s flagship platform Oak National Academy) have increasingly been delivered via personal devices, be they laptops, tablets or phones. England’s educational performance has been celebrated globally despite that.

The Education Endowment Foundation, meanwhile, published that finds edtech can have a positive or negative impact depending on multiple other factors, while Unesco says it publishes many reflections and that the one Haidt cites “does not accurately reflect [our] policy position on the matter”, which is that “technology has the potential to enrich the educational experience, provided that its deployment in schools is guided by clear ethical principles”.

Haidt, though, maintains his reading of the research is right.

“I’ve not found any evidence that this stuff helps education,” he says. “Most of the time out of school is spent on a screen for most kids. My goal is that the time in school is not spent on a screen.”

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A point everyone agrees on in this debate is that smartphones and social media have changed the world to such a degree that adaptation is needed. And Etchells believes everyone involved wants kids to be safe, prepared for adulthood, to have better outcomes, and “to basically have a better time on the internet than we ever had”.

But there seems little chance of agreement between Haidt and his critics around much else. And that means we are faced with a choice of who to believe.

Haidt maintains that he isn’t overselling the evidence, that he is “speaking honestly about the scale of the damage” and that he will stake his reputation on being right that the evidence we have means we have to urgently take the course of action he prescribes.

“I would ask your readers to think which scenario seems more likely: that this was just a groundless moral panic and that the rapid transformation of life didn’t have any effect on kids, or that the scientists got too focused on too-small bodies of empirical evidence, and they couldn’t see the elephant in the room,” he concludes.

The critics are just as adamant that the science does not support Haidt’s reading of the situation. Etchells admits this is the harder sell.

“It’s really difficult to craft a story that explains the complexity of the research literature, but still gives people something to take away with them to do. And that’s what parents are craving,” he says.

Ultimately, though, Etchells is clear - as are many of the other academics - that if we were to ignore complexity here, we would pay a heavy price that would have an impact far beyond just this debate about smartphones.

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to say, ‘hang on, that’s not what the evidence says’, or ‘we don’t have evidence for that yet’, and I really, really worry about this,” he concludes. “There’s a road here where [people say], ‘well, we don’t need science and evidence because we can see it with our own eyes’.”