Jonathan Haidt

American social psychologist whose The Anxious Generation argues that smartphone and social media adoption caused a mental health crisis in adolescents across the Western world.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business who has written widely on moral psychology, political polarization, and the psychology of religion. The Anxious Generation, published in 2024, makes his most high-profile and contested argument: that the rapid adoption of smartphones by adolescents beginning around 2010–2012 caused a genuine mental health crisis, particularly among girls, that is directly causally linked to the rise of social media platforms designed to exploit adolescent attention.

Haidt’s argument draws on epidemiological data showing a sharp deterioration in adolescent mental health across Western countries after 2012, and on theories about the developmental needs of children and adolescents that smartphones and social media systematically undermine. The book is well-organized, clearly argued, and has generated significant public debate, contributing to real policy conversations about phone use in schools.

The book has also been subject to serious methodological criticism from researchers who argue that the causal link between social media and mental health outcomes is weaker than Haidt implies, that the data supports correlation more robustly than causation, and that other explanatory factors deserve more weight. Amy Orben, Andrew Przybylski, and others have published specific rebuttals. These are genuine scientific debates, not just motivated pushback, and readers should engage with them. Haidt’s argument may be directionally correct while overstating its certainty — a common combination in popular social science.