Teenage Angst

A review of Jonathan Haidts "The Anxious Generation"

Apr 28, 2024

I just finnished Jonathan Haidts The Anxious Generation and to properly review it and explain, why this is also a somewhat personal book to me, i have to explain were i'm coming from. This is gonna be a long one, and if you want a short gist and move on: I think Haidt's book is a timely call to action, i largely agree with his analysis, but wish it was more in depth and i think he misses a big piece of the puzzle. It is this missing piece i mostly write about here.

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UPGRADE

Shine the headlight, straight into my eye
Like the roadkill, I'm paralysed
(Placebo, Teenage Angst)

Meme Magic in the Aughts

It was around 2012 when i noticed that things were off. By then, i already gained some extensive insights on virality. I'm online since the mid 90s, and contributing to the web since i started my own blog in 2005, which became a german mainstay for webculture soon. In 2008, i had a first "viral hit", with a simple phrase lifted from a political poster, which became a national sensation and inspired dozens of flashmobs disrupting political events during the election year, so much so that at one point, Angela Merkel had to adress to "young people in the back to shut up". It inspired songs and books and I went on national TV (you can see my 15 years younger self in this clip at 1:50) to explain what is happening. That was a time when politicians barely could spell the word "browser" and we were baffled and blown away by the outcomes of spontaneous online movements. Years later the fine folks at 4chan invented the word "Meme Magic" to describe such things, when things going viral "transcend the realm of cyberspace and result in real life consequences".

With the beginning of the 2010s and social media finally making it's mainstream breakthrough, things started to change. By then, Buzzfeed established a new publishing practice: Serving all kinds of identities with cheap fast fluff and listicles — a factory for identities —, and combining that with only vague, non-informative headlines: Clickbait was born, and perfected in the years that followed by media outlets like Upworthy. The ur-mainstream-viralbomb Kony 2012 showed that you can direct whole masses of digitally networked people with emotionalizing, simplistic, semi-political content that outrages them, with a big portion of those people being young adults and teens.

Virality on early Social Media had reached a tipping point, where people on social media increasingly selected for emotionality and outrage, and it became clear to me that this new media environment of personalized writing and blogging, "citizen journalism" and social media held more manipulative power than anything we've seen before. I became interested in virality itself, memetics, the dynamics of swarm behavior, and wrote about the psychological underpinnings of webculture ever since.

Then, the abomination of Gamergate blew up the internet and created the culture wars, 4chan supposedly "memed Trump into the White House", and thousands of webculture experts, including me, were scratching their heads and wrote thinkpiece after thinkpiece about what the hell is going on — all while the mental health of kids deteriorated.

The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidts book, like the title and its byline "How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness" suggest, revolves around the effects that these developments — the social media revolution in tandem with helicopter parenting focussing on safety —, had on the psychology specifically of kids. It's the first of a Haidt-socmed-doublewhammy, with the next book coming out next year revolving around the psychological effects of social media on democracy and institutions. (To be fair: That one will be much closer to my interests, but these developments have overlaps and common causes, to which we'll get in a second.)

The book is split in two parts, with the first chapters describing what is happening and laying down the evidence with tons of statistics, and a second part revolving around suggestions for solutions to the problem. This first part dives into two arguments: First, the rise of helicopter parenting and "safetyism" in the 80s and 90s took away free play from childhood, then the rise of smartphones and social media sucked the kids into the virtual world, with all those psychological effects of virality and attention economics applying to them. It was then that the numbers of mental health issues for children and adolescents started to rise, especially for girls.

Overall, the book is not so much an in depth look at the psychological and neurological effects of social media, and more of a timely wakeup call to action. I personally gained not that much new insight from it, for which i can't blame the book, simply because i follow the topic very closely for more than 10 years now. I know much of the cited research, and follow the work of Haidt since i blogged about his his brillant The Righteous Mind back in 2008, and read and wrote a lot about his work in the past. I'm not exactly the targeted audience for this book, but i liked it anyways, even when it was preaching to the choir here. I only wish he went deeper into the neuropsychological workings of social media — because I think he missed a large piece of the puzzle there.

Much of the writings about neuropsychological effects of social media revolve around how endless scrolling and likes and shares create small shots of the gratification-hormone dopamine and how that glues you to the screen. The Anxious Generation mentions related research extensively. And sure enough, this explains a good chunk of what is happening, why you can't just put your phone away, constantly check for notifications and how that makes you addicted.

But dopamine alone can't explain all the conflict we see on social media, and when we talk about the society wide effects of it, we mostly complain about the tribalism, the outrage, the aggressions. This beast is a slot machine of a different kind, and the underlying psychological mechanism is highly relevant for the psyche of kids, too, especially for girls and young women, and it is near completely absent from discourse.

The elephant in the room: Oxytocin

One of the most under-researched topics in social media psychology is how it influences the flow of oxytocin — the so-called "love hormone". Until recently, our understanding of that hormone was that it's largely responsible for social bonding and get's released from interaction with other humans, touching, or when mothers interact with their newborn babies — women have roughly 30% higher oxytocin levels than men. But that's far from the whole story: It is also related to "coordinated outgroup attacks" and even has been found to promote human ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

In an experiment done in 2011, a researcher checked the oxytocin levels of a reporter before and after using Twitter for 10 minutes: They rose by 13% — "as much as a groom at a wedding". When they repeated the experiment with three journalists using Facebook, "they all demonstrated increased levels of oxytocin", with the oxytocin levels of one of the journalists, who was writing with his girlfriends, going up "nearly 150%". This not only means that social media interaction does release oxytocin, but that it creates oxytocin levels in people who know each other at least comparable to those in real life.

Newer research has shown that Oxytocin is not just a hormone for social bonding, but an amplifyier of any important social interaction. Oxytocin is "a social-alert hormone", as one researcher put it, and it is found that even merely "anticipated social contact may result in bursts of oxytocin". Social Media and push notifications create a whole lot of "anticipated social contact", and sure enough: Average teen gets more than 230 notifications on their cell phone each day, study finds.

Arguably, most socmed notifications are not "important social situations", but here's the kicker: You can't know if they are important or not before you check, and if all your peers and friends are on social media platforms, chances are high that these social situations are important. It might be that the highschool prom queen just asked you out on a date, after all! It might also be a friend who tells you about the latest gossip spread about you in the semi-private socmed group "everyone in the class except you". (In the book, Haidt cites one kid who had to endure this especially cruel form of cybermobbing, and i asume this is a common way of cyberbullying among teens at this point.) This would mean that merely the ping from a phone, or even only the anticipation of a ping on the phone, already releases oxytocin. And the closer we are in real life to those pinging us on social media, the higher the oxytocin release -- like the couple mentioned above whose oxytocin release shot up by 150%.

Among the groups on social media who know each other in real life are highschool peers and classmates, and among them, the bullies and their victims. Interestingly, citing from The Anxious Generation: "One systematic review of studies from 1998 to 2017 found a decrease in face-to-face bullying among boys but an increase among girls, especially among younger adolescent girls", and I believe this is related to oxytocin release from social media.

The Social Media Mean Girls Club

Oxytocin is related to the release of dopamine, too, with a 2015 study finding that "oxytocin appears to impact dopaminergic activity ... which is crucial not only for reward and motivated behavior but also for the expression of affiliative behaviors", meaning that the pleasurable reward we get from likes and comments is intrinsically intertwined with the release of oxytocin, which binds us to the group and increases our tendencies to exclude others, and this is true especially for girls and young women.

If the theory about heightened oxytocin release through social media is right, it hits teenage girls, who spend much more time on social media than boys, in a vulnerable and highly critical phase of their lifes where those hormone levels are beginning to emerge. It binds together the famed "mean girls club" and the winners of the highschool popularity contest even stronger than before, and because oxytocin is also linked to social avoidance in bullied mice — Studies of hormonal flows in mamals commonly apply to human, too —, it increases social anxiety for the loosers of that popularity contest: "after negative social interactions, oxytocin promotes avoidance of unfamiliar social situations." As an amplifyer of social interaction, oxytocin goes both way: It makes the winners feel more loved, and the losers more outcast, and all of this is multiplied by social media.

Haidt spends a whole section on female aggression strategies, how girls violence is relational, social, and goes for the reputation and social bondings of other girls. But only if we take oxytocin into account, we get a full picture of what is happening on social media: Oxytocin binds us to people in our group, and bullying is not just an exclusionary, but in the form of mobbing also a group bonding activity. Thanks to the oxytocin manipulation through social media, the "mean girls club" at highschool is becoming more exclusive, more aggressive, more defensive, all while making being a member of the club highly desirable, because being a member of said club is prestigeous and it's highly visible on social media as they get more likes and shares. Teens compare themselves to those "highschool in-groups" (you know: the cool guys) on a much higher level than before. All while the losers of that oxytocin contest — which are not just the bullied kids, but also those within the "highschool in-group", who are subjected to constant peer pressure to stay in that group —, show higher levels of social anxiety.

In 2011, Scientific American in a piece about these "dark sides" of oxytocin, wrote that "oxytocin should not be used for recreational purposes". Arguably, viral social media activity is one big fat "recreational" oxytocin shot for you, and your peers, and everyone involved in whatever viral thing is doing the rounds in your group. Likely, that thing making the rounds is mockery of someone from the outgroup, and those exclusionary effects do in fact show up in viral statistics: A peer reviewed study from 2021 showed not only that out-group animosity drives engagement on social media, but that "the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language — both established predictors of social media engagement". Mocking members of the outgroup is clearly the highest driver of virality, and even if this study was done in a political context, it should also apply to the social dynamics of kids and teens, especially to mobbing and cyberbullying.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt writes: "Social Media has magnified the reach and effect of relational bullying, placing immense pressure on girls to monitor their words and actions. They are aware that any misstep can swiftly go viral and leave a permanent mark." The highschool popularity contest doesn't stay in school, it sits in your pocket 24/7 and it's with you all. the. time. Bullying in the 80s and 90s was no fun, i can tell you that from personal experience. But in the 2020s, it's a hellish nightmare following you everywhere.

Studies found that "oxytocin is ... involved in maternal aggression and territoriality" and "Psychosocial stress triggers an oxytocin response in women". "Psychosocial stress" here means not only what we commonly understand as workplace related stress, but also information overload, a rising dunbar number from social media connectivity, bloated social circles and the peer pressure to conform. Writing in the New Statesman, Freya India summed it up: "Social media's not just making girls depressed, it's making us bitchy too". Accordingly, in 2019 the New York Times wrote about Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture, and yes, i strongly believe that wokism and identity politics, peer pressure and bullying among girls are at the very least not unconnected, which can explain why the mental health numbers dropped first for liberal girls.

A paper published in January 2023 about a "3-year longitudinal cohort study of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) among sixth- and seventh-grade students recruited from 3 public middle schools in rural North Carolina" found that social media use is linked to brain changes in teens, and that "children who habitually checked their social media feeds at around age 12 showed ... sensitivity to social rewards from peers heightening over time". This heightened "sensitivity to social rewards from peers" sounds a lot like the work of oxytocin to me: As i've written above, oxytocin is a "social alert hormone", and that "even anticipated social interaction may result in bursts of oxytocin". (There are more social media induced changes to children's brains, here's an interview with neurosurgeon Marc Arginteanu talking about these.)

To me, all of this very much looks like that social media is leading to constant heightened oxytocin levels, and it makes us tribalistic, makes us aggressive towards the outgroup and increases tendencies for social exclusion — all of which are rampant on social media, and all of this detoriates the mental health of especially girls and young women on a societal level. I'm not familar with oxytocin research particular in teen girls, but presumably, women develop their already higher oxytocin levels during puberty, because it's the hormone that regulates mother-child-bonding and initiates changes in the birth-canal. If social media is manipulating oxytocin levels, this is a highly potent hormonal change, especially during the puberty of teenage girls.

This may even explain the different outcomes of various studies regarding wellbeing and social media use: as an amplifier of important social interactions, oxytocin makes us feel loved as long as we belong to the in-group, but it makes us socially anxious if we're excluded. Social Media turns the volume of all of this up to 11, and all of these neuropsychological mechanisms are now subject to the incentives created by the attention economy on social media and the design choices of platforms and their gamifications.

The Symbolic Teen

In his "philosophy of the symbolic form", Ernst Cassirer describes humans as "the symbolic animal" whose reality consists mostly from communicated language and symbols, an animal that shapes its own meaning by the creation of the symbolic world. To Cassirer, our symbolic world constitutes everything, and it’s only through our symbolic world we can truly understand humans. This makes sense if you look at the rare cases of humans who did not grow up in human groups, but were raised by animals, the so called wild childs. They are barely human at all, have tremendous problems ever integrating into society and can barely learn or speak. This clearly shows how much of our culture is ingrained into human existence itself.

This is especially true for kids, whose childhood is prolonged and extended in comparison to other mamals (who often can walk and sometimes are fully functional right after birth) precicely because they need time to adapt to human culture, or, in other words: to learn. In his book "The Disappearance of Childhood", Neil Postman wrote about how the invention of the printing press extended this learning process even further, and widened the knowledge gap between adults and kids, so they had to go to school for years and learn how to read and write — to learn how to become Cassirers "symbolic animal". It was then that modern conceptions of childhood were invented.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt writes about how kids using social media were increasingly "wandering through adult spaces, consuming adult content, and interacting with adults", and were "engaging in adult activities", such as "managing their online brand". I would add to that: They also got heavily politicized by social media from imitating highly visible and viral social media activity (which favors political outrage), which, for kids, sure must look like a prestigeous behaviour to copy from their adult social media peers.

For some years now, i follow the work of Joshua Citarella, who documents adolescent politcal online subcultures since he first published his e-book Politigram & the Post-left in 2018. His interviewees are mostly kids and adolescents, and some are heavily politically radicalized at ages like 13 years old and younger. These kids engage with fringe political movements like "MAGA Communism", with one of the latest interviews stating that the now 16 year old boy from Texas started to visit online political communities "around 2016", meaning that he was just 8 years old back then.

Cool underground kids talking about stuff like anarcho capitalism, "MAGA communism", and engaging with political communities at the age of 8 sounds very much like "adult activity" to me, and very much like an "end of childhood". It also does not sound very healthy to me. (I also put some weight to these interviews, because these are not formal interviews in a study, but these kids talk freely, without any supervision from adults. And when it comes to kids and what they do i always presume that adults actually know next to nothing about them, which is true for every generation. How much did your parents really know about your ongoings when you were 16?)

For Neil Postman, the end of childhood consisted of a diffusion process involving electronic, visual broadcast media, which made the learning of linear, sequential symbols (reading) obsolete. But these kids sound different: These teens cite philosophers like Karl Marx, Mark Fisher, Gilles Deleuze, Nick Land or Jean Baudrillard. They are highly articulate, super-informed, well read in philosophy and politics — and they are deeply cynical and nihilistic. It's a perspective learned from adults on the internet, fused with the nihilism found on the "cool internet underground" message boards. These kids learned the lessons of social media very well: Copy prestigeous political outrage, dunk on the outgroup, and earn clout and prestige by pushing the fringes.

In "The End of Childhood", Neil Postman quotes Harold Innis’s principle that "new communication technologies not only give us new things to think about, but new things to think with". This new digitally transformed "end of childhood" of our era constitutes to a cultural evolutionary adaption to social media dynamics, where we and our kids, and especially those kids immersing themselves in internet subcultures, adapt to these "new things to think with" in all consequence. I find this deeply worrying, especially if you consider that these "cool kids from the internet underground" are, well, the cool kids, those who score high in the highschool popularity contest and who are imitated by their peers.

For Cassirers "symbolic animal", social media is a giant battlefield for group acceptance, an editing machine with endless possibilities and a playground for the social world, and its unforeseen hormonal effects on the human psyche make it toxic for the whole of childhood, for kids who should not engage in "brand management", or "extremist politics", or DDoS attacks against schools at the age of nine to impress their peers and get their oxytocin shots by virtual pats on the back. Kids should not be subjected to a technology, that, by enhancing and skewing social mechanisms, manipulates their hormone levels.

This is why i agree with Haidts conclusions: Ban phones from school, rise the age for opening social media accounts to 16, end safetyism, and "bring childhood back to earth".

I wish Haidts book would've digged more into some of the effects and dynamics i described here, but the research on social media’s effects on oxytocin levels is sparse (yet), and the workings of oxytocin on social behavior is not very well understood as of now. Much of what i wrote here is speculation and "connecting the dots", coming from an amateur-researcher with some extensive experience in social media virality.

The Anxious Generation mostly revolves about the two major developments in the last 40 years or so, the rise of helicopter parenting and safetyism, and the rise of social media, but it does not go into specific details of what kids are actually doing online very much, and how that contributes. For instance, while Haidt does write about photo-filters on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and how they contribute to self perception and body image, he doesn’t mention phenomena like "Instagram face" or "Snapchat Dysmorphia", which are sometimes so severe that young women seek out plastic surgery.

I also miss some more socio-philosophical takes on why all of this happens, how these psychological effects intertwine and how the informational structure of the web creates a flattened, endless landscape of stuff in which important and unimportant things gain the same weight and create a weird atemoprality, in which narrative structures dissolve, only to spontaneously errupt into an emotionally driven hyperfocus of the swarm, or how conformity on social media flattens culture as a whole, to the effect that diners all over the world look like hipster bars in Brooklyn, simply because this look goes viral on Instagram. Sure, these things don't affect mental health of kids directly, but it is one of the strange outcomes of a digitally networked global culture, and i'd be surprised if it doesn't contribute at all.

However, for what The Anxious Generation wants to be, a call to action, it maybe is the better choice to focus on the very concrete effects directly related to kids' mental health issues, and keep it simple. The arguments laid down in the book are pressing, and even if the better of Haidts’ critics complain about some more shoddy studies in the book, the overall picture of the situation painted in the book is convincing. It is a good, timely book, a wake up call for teachers, decision makers, parents, and last but not least, the kids themselves.

As i laid down above, i was personally involved in making social media and webculture look cool in my country. My former blog had one foot in the internet underground, and my work played a tiny role in making webculture into what it is today. Looking at all the effects this tremendous cultural change had on society and mental health, a part of me regrets that involvement. This is why, at least to some extend, i feel some kind of responsibility, and this is one of the reasons why i wrote about this stuff extensively for more than ten years, and why i am thankful that a world reknowned social psychologist like Jonathan Haidt picked up the topic. I'm very much looking forward to his next book about social media psychology, coming out next year, which will focus on its effects on democracy and institutions.

Social Media and the web are arguably the biggest change in human communication and culture since forever. Some claim it is bigger than the printing press, or even the invention of writing. It is silly to even asume that its effects on our social mechanisms and on our psychology are neglectible, or can be shrugged off, and that everything is just okay.

I'm not as hopeless as this may sound though. I'm very sure we will adapt to these "new things to think with", because that's what humans always do. But the path to that adaption will be a “long and winding road”, to quote a famous teenage favorite of yore, and strange weird things will happen.

Of that, i'm sure.

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