Speaking to a packed crowd at Battell Chapel on Wednesday, the social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt ’85 invoked the biblical tale of the tower of Babel as a metaphor for the harms caused by social media in contemporary society.
In that story from the book of Genesis, Haidt reminded the audience, Noah’s descendants settle on the plain of Shinar and vow to build a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens. Displeased with their hubris, God metes out a very effective punishment.
“God says, ‘Let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech,’” he said. “Everybody spoke a different language, and nobody could understand anyone else. This is the metaphor to explain what social media has done to us. This thing that was supposed to connect us is instead making any sense of shared meaning, shared stories, shared facts shatter into a million pieces.”
Haidt, author of several acclaimed books, including “The Anxious Generation,” came to Yale as part of President Maurie McInnis’ Presidential Lecture Series. Launched earlier this year, it brings leading experts to campus to share ideas and inspire critical thought on some of today’s most complex topics, particularly as they relate to higher education.
Haidt (pronounced “height”) is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research focuses on moral and political psychology. He is also the author of “The Righteous Mind” and co-author, with Greg Lukianoff, of “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
In opening remarks, McInnis said the “freedom to oppose without ostracism, and the freedom to be opposed without being ostracized,” are at the very heart of the spirit of a university and must be upheld even when it is difficult or inconvenient.
“The perils of the alternative have been laid out by this evening’s speaker,” she said.
One of the more disturbing trends Haidt attributed to social media during his address are “skyrocketing” rates of mental illness among young people, which was the subject of his 2024 book, “The Anxious Generation.”
Haidt noted that rates of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, and depression began to rise on college campuses with the arrival of students from Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012). That generation, he said, was the first to have smartphones with forward-facing cameras, Instagram, and unlimited texting and data as they reached puberty.
“Puberty is this incredibly important, sensitive period in which the brain is rewired very rapidly for locking down into an adult pattern,” he said. “Changes that happen during puberty are powerful and are likely to stick. It’s a time of enormous brain plasticity.”
The changing dynamics of social media have also had grave implications for democracies since 2010, Haidt told the audience. The “key pivot,” he said, was the introduction of the “retweet” button on Twitter, and the share button on Facebook.
Haidt’s tips for students in an era of anxiety and political polarization
Retake your attention
• Move social media apps from your phone to your computer or delete them
• Turn off most notifications, including for email
• Delete TikTok
• Read “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World,” by computer science scholar Cal Newport
Make yourself stronger
• You are “antifragile,” so do hard things
• Read “The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer and More Resilient,” by philosopher William B. Irvine
Train your LLM (large language model)
• Choose your training data carefully.
• Stop watching TikTok and other short videos
• Read whole books
• Write your own papers
• Choose courses with perspectival or viewpoint diversity
• Stay in “discover” mode and think of Yale as a candy store
“Suddenly, everything is super viral,” he said. “Facebook has all this data from ‘likes,’ and they algorithmicize everything, making things much more focused, much more predictive, much more targeted. And that draws many more eyeballs and ad dollars.
“And then the news media reacts,” he added. “People are getting their news through Facebook. So media outlets are all fighting to be maximally clickbait. Then in 2013, Facebook introduces threaded comments. And that’s when things become even more super viral.”
By 2014, the metaphorical “Tower of Babel” began to collapse, he said, and society entered an “age of rage”: across the world social media was weaponized.
Among numerous factors, Haidt linked the impact of social media to negative public perceptions of higher education. Around 2014, he said, he noticed that college students were becoming more fearful and less tolerant, a shift he attributed to the impacts of social media and smartphones on their cognitive development.
It is imperative that universities regain the public trust, Haidt said, and one way to do that is to return to their telos — their essential purpose — which, in Yale’s case, is expressed by its motto: Lux et Veritas (light and truth).
Yale President Maurie McInnis and Haidt
He praised Yale for making strides in that regard, citing the new Yale Center for Civic Thought, which is meant to encourage thoughtful public discourse and encourage free expression, as well as the university’s engagement with the Constructive Dialogue Institute, which he co-founded in 2017 with Caroline Mehl ’12.
Haidt concluded his address with advice for students on how to undo or minimize the negative effects of social media (see above). And then asked the audience to recite a pledge together: “I will give less offense. I will take less offense. I will pass on less offense.”
