Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the harms of social media and smartphones in the 2026 Compton Lecture
Haidt: “If all you’re doing is watching short videos and liking people’s posts, you’re not adding any value to anyone”
Photo courtesy of Jake Belcher
On March 4, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt delivered “Life After Babel: Democracy and Human Development in the Fractured, Lonely World that Technology Gave Us, ” a talk about the negative effects of social media and smartphones on teenagers, cognitive abilities, and democracy at the 2026 Karl Taylor Compton Lecture. The event, which was organized by the MIT Institute Events Office and held in room 10-250, received over 400 attendees. President Sally Kornbluth introduced Haidt and held a Q&A discussion with him after the talk.
Haidt is a professor at New York University’s (NYU) Stern School of Business, and a researcher on moral psychology. Before NYU, he taught psychology at the University of Virginia for 16 years. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Anxious Generation and The Coddling of the American Mind.
Haidt believes that the “best metaphor” to describe the issue at hand is the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which inspired the title of the talk. In the story, the descendants of Noah wanted to build a tower that reached the heavens. However, God viewed the tower as an act of hubris and punished the humans by confounding their languages so they wouldn’t understand one another.
Haidt regards this story as a metaphor for the devastating effects of digital technology on society. “It was supposed to connect us, but instead it is broken,” he said. “Things divide us and make it very, very hard for us to ever have common facts.”
The detrimental effects of social media on Gen Z
Haidt outlined the “great rewiring” of childhood in two parts: a play-based childhood that gradually declined from 1980 to 2010, followed by a phone-based childhood that started around 2010 to 2015. He called 2012 the “turning-point year” because of the iPhone’s rising popularity and Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram. Unlike earlier phones, smartphones had a lot more capabilities besides calling and texting, which led to people becoming “fodder for the attention economy.”
Because of the introduction of smartphones, Haidt considers childhood nowadays to be “very solitary,” stating that girls spend time on social media, whereas boys play video games. Using data from the National College Health Assessment, he presented a graph that showed a significant rise in mental health diagnoses among teenagers and young adults during the 2010s, especially for anxiety and depression. In the same period, statistics from the CDC showed a drastic increase in youth self-harm cases that required emergency room visits.
Furthermore, Haidt pointed out that the U-shaped curve for happiness has started to disappear for people in their late teens and 20s, meaning that young people have been reporting greater unhappiness on average. “You used to be happier than the middle-aged people, and in the span of five or ten years, that’s gone to be even or below,” he said.
Although critics have argued that the data does not provide evidence for causation, Haidt maintained that there is substantial evidence for a direct link between social media and worsened mental health. In his research, Haidt came across many studies that support his claim, including an internal study from Meta that found that users who did not use Facebook for a week felt less depressed and anxious.
Haidt then discussed the negative effects of social media on attention, which has hurt education outcomes. “If you imagine humanity with 10 to 50% of its attentional ability sucked out of it, there’s not much left,” he said.
Haidt also cited articles that found declines in test scores since the early 2010s — not only in the U.S., but also around the world. While COVID contributed to loss in learning, recent test scores have not shown a post-COVID recovery. “Nobody commented about the fact that the downturn didn’t start in 2021 — it started in 2012,” Haidt pointed out.
Haidt stated that the downward trend in test scores in Gen Z comes from their inability to concentrate, which comes from social media usage and other digital distractions. He criticized the idea of introducing computers and iPads for learning at school because of these devices’ many distractions, calling it the “most costly mistake” in education. He also lamented the decline in reading comprehension, stating that teenagers and adults nowadays cannot focus when reading.
In addition to a decrease in test scores and attention spans, Haidt discussed the negative effects on Gen Z’s communication and interpersonal skills. Compared to older generations, many Gen Z respondents reported lower agreement with statements such as “I persevere until a task is done” or “I make plans and follow through,” which has reduced young people’s ability to focus, to be patient and develop in-person relationship skills.
Haidt also pointed to a rise in Gen Z of what he called “spiritual degradation.” Ever since the invention of social media, teenagers are much more likely to say their lives feel meaningless and useless. “If all you’re doing is consuming content, if all you’re doing is watching short videos and liking people’s posts, you’re not adding any value to anyone,” he said.
Social media and democratic decline
After defending these claims, Haidt transitioned into the second part of his talk, in which he argued that the rise of social media has contributed to a decline in the quality of democracy in the U.S. and the world. He began by pointing out that James Madison’s greatest fear for American democracy — factions becoming “more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good” — has become the reality of American politics.
Haidt believes that the introduction of the like button and the retweet function in 2009 gave Twitter (now X) an enhanced virality that fostered a culture of intense public shaming, arguing that it created a poisonous environment for the democratic conversation and brought upon a disaster for the left which contributed to the growing support for Donald Trump in the years preceding the 2016 election.
Haidt asserted that social media platforms have enabled people to take “words out of context [and] put them on social media” to damage a person’s reputation. As a result, this has led many people to feel like they need to “walk on eggshells,” especially for faculty in large institutions who fear retaliation from their students.
He compared people’s ability to criticize others freely on social media to giving everyone a license to shoot. “How would people carry on with research? How would you disagree with someone?” Haidt asked. He said that this ultimately reduces the quality of democracy since social media encourages polarization, discourages open debate, and makes discussions and democratic discourse more hostile.
Furthermore, these platforms encourage outrage and conflict. According to Haidt, the far right often targets moderate conservatives while the far left targets moderate liberals, pushing both sides to extremes. More broadly, social media has promoted mistrust and misinformation, contributing to events such as the 2021 U.S. Capitol Attack.
Haidt then presented data that showed that the number and quality of democracies has fallen since 1990, arguing that this metric relates to how social media exacerbates Madison’s nightmare and enables authoritarian governments.
To explain why he believes social media has led to this effect, Haidt discussed the history of U.S. democracy, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In the book, Tocqueville wrote that the greatest advantage of democracy in the U.S. is the ability of democratic citizens to associate. The ability to associate refers to the ability to come together, compromise, and create solutions for the greater good. Haidt argued that social media has degraded this ability to associate by moving the democratic conversation to X, where quantity pushes out quality, convenience pushes out depth, and extremes are amplified.
Haidt ended the second part on democracy with a note on AI. He began with a quote from Frederick Douglass’s description of Sophia Auld, his enslaver. Of her Douglass said, “Alas! This kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and gradually commenced its infernal work… Thus is slavery the enemy of both the slave and the slaveholder.”
This “fatal poison of irresponsible power” is what Haidt believes will infect humanity with unrestrained power over AI and without any consequences for what you do to and with AI. He argued that it is already happening with the appearance of AI sex companions and AI-generated child pornography.
A call for action to limit social media usage
Despite his pessimistic outlook on social media and technology on society, Haidt went on to offer solutions to these problems. “I suggest that we start seeing social technology as being much more like the Frankenstein monster, something created out of bizarre science,” he said.
Haidt recommended adopting four norms: no social media, no smartphones before high school, no social media until age 16, and independent free play. He highlighted recent actions people have taken to reduce social media and screen time for teenagers, such as mothers who have banned phones in schools and countries like Australia banning social media for children under age 16.
Although Haidt believes that most of Gen Z has suffered childhood damage that may be irreversible, he asserted that there’s still hope: “If you change your habits, if you regain your attention, you’re going to get good results.” Drawing from his experience at NYU, he said that students who reduced or removed social media from their phones often found significant improvements in their lives: they were able to focus for longer periods of time, regain several hours of time a day, and feel less overwhelmed.
Haidt believes that a world where social technology is no longer wreaking havoc would be a world where social networks require authentication and possess reputational consequences to prevent the harm that comes from the mask of anonymity.
Additionally, Haidt believes that four requirements must be met before social tech stands the chance of better serving the U.S. and the world. First, tech creators must view social tech with either ambivalence or negativity. Second, tech companies must not be allowed to interfere with children and childhood development; age thresholds must be required and stringently enforced. Third, tech companies and developers must hire and work with psychologists and sociologists who can predict and prevent the harm technologies may cause society. Finally, social tech companies must be liable for the damage and loss of life they have caused. Only then will a positive impact from social technology be possible.
“So if you can change the discourse around this, change the way you’re thinking about it, stop the speeding train going over a cliff, then there really is hope,” Haidt concluded.