On February 12, 2025, the James Madison Program hosted Jonathan Haidt
for a lecture titled, "Far Beyond Mental Health: What the New
Phone-Based Life is Doing to Human Development, Social Capital, and
Democracy." This was the annual Harold T. Shapiro Lecture on Ethics, Science, and Technology.
Is the current wave of concern about smartphones and social media just
another moral panic, like the ones that arose in response to radio,
television, and comic books? Or is the new "phone-based childhood"
interfering with human development in an unprecedented way? In The
Anxious Generation, Professor Jonathan Haidt focused on mental illness
as the primary outcome of concern. In this lecture, he will argue that
such a focus vastly understates the psychological and sociological harms
resulting from the "great rewiring of childhood" into its current
phone-based form. Professor Haidt will expand the story beyond mental
health to present evidence of declines in education, attention,
happiness, risk-taking, social capital, and the foundations of liberal
democracy, all linked to changes in technology. He will argue that this
far-ranging international destruction of human capital and human
potential calls for immediate attention and action from scholars,
legislators, and parents.
Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New
York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from
the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and taught for 16 years in the
department of psychology at the University of Virginia.
Since 2018, he has been studying the contributions of social media to
the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction.
In his most recent release, The Anxious Generation: How the Great
Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, he
brings to light the “great rewiring of childhood” in which play-based
childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood. Haidt continues to
push towards the reforms to put an end to the youth mental health
crisis.
Overall, Haidt’s research uncovers the intuitive foundations of
morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the
cultures of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. His mission
is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other,
and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt
has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply
moral and social psychology toward that end, including
HeterodoxAcademy.org, The Constructive Dialogue Institute, and
EthicalSystems.org.
Haidt is also the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern
Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and of The New York Times bestsellers The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion,
and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas
are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg
Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles, which have
been cited nearly 100,000 times. In 2019 he was inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect
magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers”. He has given four TED
talks and strives to shine a light on what makes morality with his
continued work.