Quote:
Originally Posted by WinnipegFan
|
I don't know, there's a lot of legitimate criticism of Haidt's overly simplistic pop-psychology thesis. Just a few off the top of my head:
-Teen anti-social behavior (crime rates, drug use, preganancies, etc.) are all down markedly compared to previous decades. So it's plausible that mental health issues that may have manifested as criminal or anti-social behavior in the past are now manifesting more internally in individuals. But overall well being among youth would still be the same or better than it ever was, even with smartphones and social media.
-public understanding and diagnoses of mental health disorders have increased in recent years which makes comparisons to the past difficult in terms of looking at rates. Similar to autism rates increasing dramatically over the last 4 decades due to better understanding.
-there is little direct evidence of the effect and it's mainly just a correlation. But it's possible that the causative effect is the opposite of what Haidt is arguing. That is to say, where there is a correlation between negative mental health and social media/smartphone use, it could be explained as a case of youth (and people in general) with poor mental health ending up getting addicted to it.
Not to mention he has also blamed social media on turning kids trans in the past, which seems pretty specious to me.
That's not to say that limiting smartphone or social media use among youth isn't a good thing. But treating it as the primary cause of poor mental health among youth can both result in a sort of moral panic (which could threaten many of the positive aspects of technology for youth), while also obfuscating a lot of the real societal conditions that are making youth struggle with mental health (economic conditions, environmental degradation, pandemic, rise of extremism in politics, etc.).