jonathan haidt, welcome to hardtalk. thank you so much, steve. it is a pleasure to have you here. now, of course, your home base is new york university, across the pond in the united states. right now, that university — along with many others in the us — is in ferment, with students occupying certain grounds within the university. mm—hm. you've written a lot over many years about the intellectual atmosphere on campus in america, so i want to begin by asking you what you make of these protests. so, of course, the right to protest, we're all in favour of. the key issue for me is intimidation. this is what began in 2015 — a change in the nature of campus life, so that people

who are making a political point are doing it not with persuasion but with intimidation. and i've done a lot of writing about how it was the arrival of social media that allowed people to intimidate others, threaten any dissenters with mob reactions. so my previous book, the coddling of the american mind, was about this strange, new and really kind of frightening morality that came to us right around 2015 — it wasn't there in 2013. and so i'm starting this way because this is the backstory to what's happening today. yeah, but what you've already said is important because you have made it clear in the past that you reject the notion that words can be seen as violence. mm—hm. and you basically say that, intellectually speaking, we all need to have thicker skins. mm—hm. we all need to understand that offence can happen, it can be taken, but it is not akin to violence. that's right. so when you use that word "intimidation" about a bunch of young people chanting slogans about the israeli actions in gaza, is that

really intimidation or is it actually... no, that's not. ..free expression? oh, no, that's fine. that's perfectly fine for them to chant slogans. what began happening in 2015 is the social consequences of dissent became so serious, people were afraid to question certain favoured political views. and once people who are espousing these views feel that they have the field to themselves — whatever they do or say is ok because they're on the right side of history — so this is when the shout downs started. now we get to intimidation. it's in 2015 - a little in 2014 — that we get students saying, "you know what, this speaker is a conservative, "this speaker is a fascist, this speaker is "contrary to my view. "we're going to shout them down." and almost no university punished any of the students who did shout downs. this is called the heckler�*s veto. this is not free speech. my partner — my writing partner, greg lukianoff, the president of the foundation for individual rights and expression, one of the greatest free speech activists — was very clear about this. shout downs, stopping people

from attending a talk, stopping speakers from speaking — none of this should be permissible on a college campus. what happened was, nobody ever did anything about it. and that sent the message that if you're protesting for certain political causes, you can do and say whatever you want. you can intimidate people, you can threaten people — nothing's going to happen to you. so that's the backstory. so now we get to this awful situation, the awful wargoing on... and of course, there are passions. of course, there are protests. and if it was just marches...and slogans, that's normal political speech. what about tents on lawns? i don't know where your office is in nyu, but... it is literally the building... ..there have been hundreds of students camping out near... yes. at my office building. really? the courtyard of nyu stern was the site of that big event at new york university. to the extent that encampments block students from going to class, well, that's wrong. it's against university policy and it interferes with the basic functioning of the university. now, of course, if you want

to do civil disobedience and do that, you can do that and then you should pay the consequences. the whole point of civil disobedience is you're willing to go to jail for it. so i think that's where we are. universities are exploding in part because they never made clear boundaries before, and it's very hard to start now. do you see parallels with a sort of �*60s spirit of rebellion? because, again, you've talked extensively about the degree to which you worry that there is a sort of groupthink in the universities and that intellectual life has been somehow tamed and curtailed, and there's a lack of passion and curiosity on campus. that's right. well, you can certainly see passion today, and you can certainly see a spirit which is saying, "no, we will not accept "the authority of the university president to stop us "putting our tents up." and going much further, they're saying, "no, "mr president and the politicians of america, we will not accept "america continuing to finance israel's war in gaza." do you like this spirit

or are you worried by it? oh, well, if it's... you know, when you put it that way, i do see this as normal political protest. i mean, students in the �*60s were protesting especially the vietnam war, so i do see a continuity with that. it'sjust a very different time. and the general spirit that we had in the �*60s, the general spirit of people back then was from... there was a movement towards freedom, towards love. there was a very different spirit. what's happened with gen z, this is... what's happened with gen z — that is, people born 1996 and afterwards — is their activism is very, very different. there's not the spirit ofjoy. in fact, there's research that until around 2012, people who were politically active, people who were even activists were happier than others. they were coming together to do something. but since then, once gen z becomes the students, activists are actually the least happy people, or they�* re less happy.

a lot of their activism is online, it's... it's coming within a world that is governed by social media and what people will think about you on social media. so, this is all so new — i haven't been able to study what's happened in the last couple of weeks, i've been so busy with the book. hmm. things are moving fast. no, well, the book that you refer to — the anxious generation — very much focuses on the impact of the smartphone and social media on very young minds — that is, children. but before we get to that — and i promise you, we're going to get to that very soon — ijust want a broader thought about the impact of these technologies, particularly social media, on the broader political atmosphere in the united states because, again, in your writing over many years, you've talked about deepening polarisation, and you've suggested that it's getting worse, not better. yeah. how directly do you link that to — as i said at the very beginning — changing technologies, the way in which we communicate in different ways with each other? yeah. something changed in the nature of society and things have been

really weird since about 2014, 2015. and what that weirdness is, is once you hyperconnect people... now, we connected people by telephone long ago and that didn't cause craziness. but when you connect people by social media, which is not a direct connection — it's magnified by algorithms, extremists get the most views — so once we get all connected by this hyper—viral social media in the early 2010s, everything gets weird. a metaphor that i use is, imagine if, you know, if you're the california department of forestry and you have 100 years of experience fighting forest fires, you know all the issues about the wind and sun and everything. and then one day, god says, "you know, this earth "with its 20% oxygen atmosphere, it's kind of boring. "let's make it 80% oxygen. "let's just make it 80. "let's just see what happens." and of course, what would happen is everything would burst into flames almost instantly. any time there's a spark, it becomes a forest fire. that's where we are now. so we have a lot of experience understanding protests and political action, but since 2014 or so, everything is so combustible, everything is so explosive,

everything can spread so fast, so it's too soon to tell what's going to happen with these protests. but we're in a new era when weird things happen and it's very hard to predict. but ijust wonder, you know, because you're a social psychologist rather than a straightforward data scientist, how you can be sure that when you see weird stuff happening, you can ascribe it to a particular phenomenon — in this case, the transformational changes we've seen in the use of smartphones and social media. that may be a correlation, they're both happening at the same time — the weirdness plus the smartphone. yeah, mm—hm. doesn't mean there's a cause and effect relationship there. that's right. yeah, i cannot be certain about this. so there are two major topics i hope we're going to talk about. one is the effect of this new media environment, social media, on our political life — that's the one we're talking about now... that's where we are now. ..and that's the one where there are no experiments, it's hard to prove causality, it's a giant mystery. it's incredibly important to figure this out, and it's

really hard to understand what's going on. the other one is, what has the new technological environment done to children? now, there, we have a lot more data, it's easier to study. there are experiments, and i think i can show that there is clear evidence of causality, and there's some relatively easy solutions. 0n the democracy side...there aren't. well, you've issued me an invitation i can't resist. now, let's focus on what is happening to a generation of children. you're calling them generation z or generation zed — it's basically children born after about 1995. yeah, that's right — 1996 and on is gen z. all right, and your contention is that something profound is different with this generation from all those that came before... yes. ..and it is connected to that little device most of us have — the smartphone — and to the way in which social media exploded in terms of usage for that generation of young people. yes, but let me insist right away that there are two parts to the story, and everyone focuses on the phone part — it's the more dramatic, it's the easier to see —

but, really, what my book is about is human childhood. what is human childhood? why is it so long? why is it that human children, not other primates, why do human children grow fast for a couple of years, then we slow down and... and then we speed up at around age 11, 12, 13 — somewhere in there, we have a growth spurt. why the slow period? it's mysterious until you realise human childhood is an adaptation for cultural learning. and so once we understand what normal human childhood requires — huge amounts of play, good role models, practising skills you'll need as an adult — it takes a long time to do this. once we understand that, now we can see the two halves of the story that i'm telling in the book. the story that i tell is, it's notjust, "0h, kids got on social media and they went insane." it's, we eliminated the play—based childhood — that's what our ancestors always had for literally tens of millions of years. all mammals play. so that went... until about the 1990s

in britain and america, kids were outside playing with each other unsupervised. we began to crack down on that in the �*90s. by 2010, it was mostly gone. it was not a conscious decision. it was... it appears that a big driver of it was that we lost trust in each other in anglo... fear took over. yes. in anglo societies, in part because of cable tv, we were exposed to more stories of children who are kidnapped, more stories about sexual predators. there was more discovery of sexual abuse in institutions, so some of it was very real. but for whatever reason, in anglo countries, we really lost trust in other adults. and when you lose trust in other adults, you don't let your kids wander around the town because you don't trust that other people will intervene if necessary. so to put it crudely, then, kids in this period, they are given less space and freedom to roam in the physical world... exactly. ..the real world. they're given less interpersonal, face—to—face connection with their peers. mm—hm. and then we get to the technological side of this equation. exactly. they are given a device

which allows them to sort of lose themselves in a whole new digital world. mm—hm, exactly. that's right. imagine the walls closing in on you over a few decades, to the point where you're basically in solitary confinement, and then someone hands you this magic window and you can put it on yourjail cell, and through that magical window, you can go anywhere in the world. it's exciting, you interact with people, but you're always just sitting in your cell. actually, for people who've seen the movie the matrix, it's kind of like that, with the bodies lying in pods and their brains being sucked dry of energy. right, well, there you go. there's a metaphor that is deeply negative. and all of this to you, in the end, is portrayed in a pretty bleak... yes. ..and maligned sort of context, because you connect this to data, and the data is about mental health problems surging in children and young people. absolutely. you know, i could go through some of the figures. depressive episodes amongst girls increased 145%, you point out,

between 2010 and 2021. a little less for boys, but similar. mm—hm, yeah. you talk about a whole raft of different ways in which young people's mental health is clearly suffering. that's right. comes back to my point earlier about correlation and causation. great, let's talk about that. how can you convince me that that is a causal relationship? that's right. so what we do in the social sciences is we usually start with correlations because it's easy to gather that data. there's a ton of correlational studies, and they were actually converging on the finding that when you look at the amount of time that kids spend on social media, and then you look at their self—reported mental health, for boys, that correlation is very, very low. but if you focus on girls and social media, it's substantially larger. now, it still isn't large in absolute terms because you have such measurement error — you're not picking up most of the variance in the world — but a signal in all of that data is the relative risk of mental illness for those who are heavy users versus light users, and there we see very big effects. girls who are heavy users —

four or five hours a day — are three times more likely to be depressed than those who are light users. now, this isjust correlation, starting... so you would say it's quite possible... yeah. ..that those girls who become the heaviest users of social media have mental health problems to start with. yes, that's right. that's right. this is just phase one. phase one, we start with the correlations and the evidence is there very consistently. no—one finds reverse... no—one finds that it's correlated with positive stuff. the next step we move on to then are longitudinal studies and true experiments. i'lljust skip to the true experiments because those are the simplest. you want to look at situations where somebody has randomly assigned 200 college students, let's say, to reduce their social media a lot, and then 200 don't and you see what happens. and what we find is that if it's just for a couple of days that they go off, there's no real benefit because often people are in withdrawal. but the studies that go for at least three or four weeks, they generally do find an effect. people are happier, they're less anxious. but i want to point out, all of this is doing research on individuals as though social media was like sugar.

like, if you consume less sugar, are you less happy? but the real thing we need to look at is groups, because when you take a kid off social media, you're isolating that kid. what we need to look at is what happens when a whole school goes phone—free, something like that. and there we see very large effects. right, but even a school is a relatively small group on its own. i'm looking at the work of psychologist candice 0dgers, whom i know you've... let's talk about that. ..talked to and you've addressed her points. i mean, she says that a whole bunch of studies, notjust in the united states but across the industrialised world, do not marry with your conclusions. she says that your notion of an epidemic of mental illness directly tied to kids' use of smartphones and social media is not supported by the science. now she cites... but what she... 0h, let's go through what she says. let me just finish, because it's important people hear this. a 2023 analysis, for example, of wellbeing and usage of facebook, for example, across 72 countries, delivered no evidence connecting the spread of social media to mental illness.

that's right. that was a study by matt vuorre and andrew przybylski. and what they did was they took a data set called the global burden of disease, which has estimates of mental illness for 170 countries, and they correlated that with estimates of internet penetration. they found nothing. but whenever you look at these studies, when you dig in, you find there's always a trip, there's something going on. and in that study, the gbd, the global burden of disease, is not actual data. there is no data from 170 countries. it's a set of estimates based on projections from economic factors and other things. and when you look at what the gbd says about what happened in the united states, it says nothing happened. so these estimates are divorced from reality. so how does that tie in with the adolescent brain cognitive development study, for example, in the united states, which found no evidence of drastic changes connected to digital technology use? imean... but look... i could cite you several others, too.

it says... i just wonder whether you have ever paused and thought, "you know what? "my ideas seem to make sense, and they seem to sort of match "what i've anecdotally seen for myself, "but the data foundation" — according to others — "just isn't there"? so i have been extremely careful about this for the last five years. i've worked very systematically. when i started this in 2019, i wasn't sure, and there was a big study by professor przybylski that seemed to indicate that social media was no more dangerous than eating potatoes. so i looked into that study. i gathered that... i took all the studies i could find on both sides. when you put all the studies together, what you find is that the correlational studies, that one study was a real outlier. but the key thing is to move on. what i did is i moved on from the correlational studies to the experiments. the way we separate causality from correlation is with experiments. and i've gathered all the experiments that i can find on both sides. so i've been very, very attentive to the question of correlation versus causation. 0dgers said that i have no

evidence, which isjust false. mmm, 0k. i have a lot of evidence. she's free to say she doesn't agree with my evidence, but she cannot say that i have no evidence. let me ask you something else. let us suppose that you are right that there is a cause and effect here, and it is very important. we all care about our kids' mental health. what is the best way to address it? is it by government, legislation, politicians taking measures directly, sort of addressing what the social, huge, big tech social media companies are doing? or is the onus better put on parents to change the way that they — indeed me, as a parent — raise our children? the key to the solutions is to recognise this is not like a biological addiction. this is not like our kids are addicted to cigarettes. this is a social trap. we're caught in a social trap. the platforms engineered it this way. you do believe they're deeply malign, do you? yes. deeply cynical and manipulative? meta... from meta, we know from a whistle—blower, what they brought out,

that meta knows what it's doing to kids and it has not taken corrective action. it's done a few things here and there. yeah, i mean, we should put on the record that facebook denies any manipulation, any malign intent whatsoever. well, there certainly is no malign intent. look, nobody set out to hurt kids. and when we talk about the tech industry, that's thousands of companies, only a few of which are hurting kids. so let's just be clear. it's a few companies. the biggest harm, i believe, is done by instagram and tiktok, snapchat. there are a few that are really... ..where you find most of the harm. so do you think legislation can and does work? it's already in place in the european union, putting a new responsibility on social media companies to protect children, and if they don't, they can be fined very serious amounts of money. the uk has got a new law in place, which isn't quite as draconian, but it's getting there. the chinese have extraordinarily draconian laws. do they work? so we don't know yet. these laws are very new. in the united states, we have the weird thing that the tech industry got a special exemption from lawsuits. we can't sue them for

what they do to our kids. so i am hopeful that in the uk and the eu, you'll try things. companies need to be held responsible for the external harms they cause to people. do parents need to be held to responsible as well? parents are trying, and even if you're trying, it's almost impossible. it's very hard to raise your kids the way you want because we're stuck in a trap. the reason why...we have to give our kids phones when they turn 9,10, 11 is because they say, "mom, everyone else has a phone, i'll be left out." so that's why this is not a biological addiction, although it partly is. it's especially a social addiction. everyone has to be on because everyone else is on. and so the way out is with norms that break the collective action problem. so what i'm proposing, as an american, i can assume that my congress will never do anything. it's completely dysfunctional. so what i propose in the book is, here are four norms that we can do, even if we never get any help from legislators. we can do these ourselves if we can organise in groups — and the school is a great place to organise. here are the four norms. they're very simple.

no smartphone before high school in the united states, which is around age 14, although here, in this context, 14 is right in the middle of your secondary school. so the norm here is going to be no smartphone until the end of secondary school, no social media until age 16 — it would help to raise the age legislatively — phone—free schools, which does not require legislation but could be helped, and then far more independence and free play and responsibility in the real world. those four norms would roll it back. fascinating. the four norms are very clear. are you not in danger, to coin a phrase you're rather fond of in different contexts, of over—coddling society by giving people instructions, and schools instructions, and demanding that we change the way our kids use their smartphones? you're kind of sowing a moral panic, then saying, "here's the solution." and i'm mindful that you've warned against the over—coddling of people in a society in the past. are you not in danger of doing it yourself? hold on a second. it's only a moral panic if it's groundless. so my critics say that the kids are ok, there's no mental

health crisis, there's no evidence that the phones are bad for you. i think all of that is untrue. if they were right, i'd be sowing a moral panic. if i'm right, then i'm ringing the moral alarm, and that needs to be done. so time will tell. i think within a year, we'll know whether i'm right or whether they're right. that's the first thing. i don't think this is a moral panic. the second thing is, coddling is about overprotection, which denies you experience. that's what my previous book was about. when we over—protect children, they don't get out into situations where they might face some difficult situations. they might get lost. they might get into a conflict. they learn how to be self—governing. that's what kids need. they need millions of cases of facing difficulties. if we block that, that's coddling. what i'm saying is not, "let's coddle them in the virtual world." what i'm saying is, if they have the virtual world with them — and they're spending about nine or ten hours a day on their phones in the united states — if they're having that, the phone is an experience blocker. right. so, what i'm saying is, let's take the phone away, and notjust take the phone

away in a punitive way. let's give them back a normal human childhood, the one that their parents had and their grandparents had, which they actually want. it's a fascinating subject. we have to end there. but, jonathan haidt, i thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. 0h, steve, i can't believe the 25 minutes went that quickly. chuckles: well, it did. hello. well, your bank holiday monday probably came with a rain interruption at some point. it was pretty unsettled. some lengthy spells of rain across the southeast of england, but plenty of showers elsewhere. 0thers, though, managed some sunshine. and in lincolnshire, we had 11 hours of sun, so it wasn't so bad there, whereas others

had the downpours. and across parts of northern england, we had a couple of funnel clouds spotted — one over saddleworth moor and another one in the derbyshire area. the weather is going to be improving, though, over the next few days as a ridge of high pressure starts to move its way in and that will tend to settle the weather down. a slow process. we've still got a bit of rain left over across southeast england, one or two showers elsewhere, but these will tend to fizzle over the coming hours. and temperatures as we start off tuesday morning, generally around 8—10, the coldest spots down to about five degrees. and that's probably where we'll have the best of the early morning sunshine. now, what you do start off the day cloudy, and particularly around some of these north sea coasts, it could be quite grey. some mist and fog patches around, a few spots of drizzle, but it is an improving picture for the majority. cloud will thin and break up, with sunny spells becoming widespread into the afternoon. 0utside chance of a shower? yeah, it's possible, perhaps across the hills of wales and south west england, one or two elsewhere, but not as many as we've seen over recent days. the vast majority of you will have a dry day and it will feel warmer

when the sunshine comes out. the high pressure continues to build in for wednesday, but we do have weather fronts that will try to sneak in from the northwest. so wednesday, again, it should be a fine day for the vast majority of the country. certainly england, wales, most of northern ireland looking dry with spells of warm sunshine, probably quite hazy sunshine. there will be some high cloud in the sky. but across the hebrides, highlands, 0rkney and shetland, it will turn cloudy, quite windy with outbreaks of rain moving in. in the sunshine, though, temperatures more widely climbing into the low 20s, so feeling progressively warmer. thursday, you've still got a risk of a few showers, this time for scotland. 0therwise, some broken cloud and sunny spells. should be another dry day for most areas of northern ireland, england and wales. and again, those temperatures continue to climb. we're up to 19 in belfast. the warmest weather probably across eastern england, where temperatures will reach around 22, possibly 23 degrees celsius. that is going to feel warm in the sunshine, and there is more of that sunshine as we finish the week and head into the weekend, albeit probably with an increasing risk of seeing some showers moving in. that's your latest weather. bye— bye.

live from washington, this is bbc news. hamas agrees to a gaza ceasefire proposal, while israel says the terms don't meet its demands. high—stakes negotiations are set to continue. french president macron welcomes new assurances from xi jinping that china will not provide russia with weapons to use against ukraine. and a judge in new york threatens donald trump with jail if he continues to defy a gag order in his hush money trial.

hello. i'm caitriona perry. you're very welcome. the israeli defense forces continued with what they call "targeted strikes" into the southern gaza city of rafah, just hours after hamas leaders announced they had accepted a ceasefire proposalfrom egyptian and qatari mediators. the multi—stage deal could involve the initial exchange of palestinian prisoners for 33 israeli hostages held since the 7 october attacks, though the full details have not yet been made public. israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu said the agreement is farfrom meeting israel's demands but that he would send a delegation to cairo to negotiate further on tuesday. qatar, which is facilitating the negotiations, says it will also send a delegation to the egyptian capital. israel's latest attack on rafah has left at least five people dead. armed factions in gaza responded to the israeli strikes by firing rockets into southern israel. celebrations broke out in gaza as news of the potential

breakthrough reached palestinians.