On this episode we sat down with Zach Rausch, the chief researcher at the Tech and Society Lab at NYU, and the lead researcher for “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, which was published last year. We discussed how the combination of the smartphone and social media apps are affecting young people.
On this episode we sat down with Zach Rausch, the chief researcher at the Tech and Society Lab at NYU, and the lead researcher for “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, which was published last year.
The core thesis of the book is that we've been overprotecting children in the real world and underprotecting them in the online world. The book points to data about Gen Z, the generation born from the mid-’90s to about 2010 showing significant increases in anxiety, depression and suicide. The book goes further and makes the case that it is the combination of the smartphone and social media apps that are the root of the problem.
We recorded this interview on the sidelines of NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston where he appeared on a panel with other experts discussing young people, social media and public policy.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello and welcome to our American States, a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I'm your host, Ed Smith.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Kids generally used to spend about two hours a day in person with their friends, and by 2019 before COVID, it was already down to around, I think 30 minutes, give or take, and then maybe it went down another 10 minutes after that.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
That was Zach Rausch, the chief researcher at the Tech and Society Lab at NYU, and the lead researcher for “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, which was published last year. The core thesis of the book is that we've been overprotecting children in the real world and under protecting them in the online world. The book points to data about Gen Z, the generation born from the mid-’90s to about 2010 showing significant increases in anxiety, depression and suicide. The book goes further and makes the case that it is the combination of the smartphone and social media apps that are the root of the problem.
I interviewed Rausch on the sidelines of NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston where he appeared on a panel with other experts discussing young people, social media and public policy.
Here's our discussion.
Zach, great to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Thank you so much, Ed. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Now, “The Anxious Generation” is a pretty well-known book. It was published last year, but to start out, why don't you lay out the basic thesis of the book?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
The central thesis of “The Anxious Generation” is that we've been overprotecting kids in the real world and underprotecting them online. All of these problems have been going on for a while, especially the overprotection part with a backstory going back into the 1980s. But the more recent story when John and I became more concerned was about when kids moved from just having flip phones into having smartphones loaded up with apps and social media in their pockets, and we saw really skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
You are the chief researcher at the Tech and Society Lab at NYU, and I wonder if you can talk about the research itself and where all this information came from that informed the book and the ongoing work that you're doing.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
John began researching what's been going on with young people starting around 2019, and him and Jean Twenge, another researcher, put together a set of open source Google Docs where they laid out all of the available literature on one adolescent mental health trends since 2010, and another document looking at the effects of social media on adolescent depression and through those two documents and then through their own studies and research. And when I came in, we started to build the story of really seeing that one, there is a very clear, consistent finding that girls who use social media heavily are at a significantly higher risk of depression, of anxiety, of all of these issues that we saw going up. And those findings kept surfacing again and again. And so that is really where we became concerned and Jean was the first one to really bring the alarm and then we came after her.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
And what I think to your second part of your question about what do we do with all of this research, one of the most important findings in the literature that I've seen is that when you ask kids themselves how they feel about social media, they often say things like, it makes me feel connected. There are aspects that are very positive socially, but when you go a little bit deeper, what you end up finding is that a lot of that is because, well, where are all their friends? They're all on these platforms, they're all online. And what ends up happening here is that when you then ask them, do you wish that these platforms were never invented? What would happen if you got everybody off of those platforms? Well, then the answers really start to change. And what you find is that in fact, young people don't want to be on many of these social media platforms and they would actually pay people, including researchers to get them off of these platforms. And so what we're finding is that young people in particular feel trapped using products that they don't want to use. And so the core insight I think here about the research is that we need solutions that help solve problems at a group level. And this is where I think legislators really come in, which is how do we change a system that no one person individually necessarily wants to take themselves out and stop using social media? What if we create norms and legislations that make it easier for families, for kids, for parents to opt out?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
So if I understand correctly, you found some research that actually said that the amount of time kids actually spend in the physical presence of other kids has actually gone down significantly. Am I right about that?
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Kids have been social distancing long before all of us learned that term. Before COVID, if you go back to the early 2000s, we see that there was generally, this comes from the American Time Use survey that surveys Americans, I think age 15 and up. And what they found is kids generally used to spend about two hours a day in person with their friends. And by 2019 before COVID, it was already down to, I think 30 minutes, give or take, and then maybe it went down another 10 minutes after that. So what we've seen is a huge change in the way that kids are spending their time. Kids used to spend a lot of time in person socially interacting out at the park, doing things, going to the mall. By 2019, most kids are now either in their bedroom or in their basement, usually by themselves and sometimes with other people. But even when we're with other people, we're constantly having to be plugged into our devices.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Let's dig in a little bit more to this combination of the smartphone and social media apps. Let's first talk about young women, girls who, as I understand it, are spending their time mainly on Instagram and TikTok. Can you talk about why they're on those apps, what it is that particularly appeals to them about that?
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, so I think to take a step back, the average amount of time that a teenager spends on social media today, this comes from Gallup, is five hours a day, five hours a day every day. And then in terms of the amount of time on screens per day, we're talking upwards of eight to nine, sometimes more per day just on these apps. And when we look at the sex difference here, yes, girls are moving much more towards the visual facing social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram. Many boys are also spending a lot of time on these platforms, but they also tend to spend more time with online gaming. Now, why is there this interesting difference on these platforms? Part of it is we have to look to how the platforms essentially are designed, that social media is designed to be all about a kind of image-based social relationships.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
What's happening here is that one is, especially during early puberty, a lot of girls are very focused on body image, on body image issues, on comparing themselves with their friends and a lot of gossip and drama. These are all stereotypes, but in some ways they are true, and these platforms are designed to feed those insecurities and also that satisfies those needs in some way. And it's very similar with online gaming for boys, which is that it's catered to many boys need for competition for comradery and team-based activities. And so you hook people in, you hook girls and boys in on average differently into these different digital products, and then you get them stuck there. And that's the problem. It's that they design them in a way that is targeted towards basic human needs and desires, and then you include mechanisms of that platform to then addict them because the business model is all about keeping you on for longer and longer.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
It does seem to me that you're describing adolescent behavior that goes back a long way before the smartphone. Teenagers are often insecure and looking for approval from other peers and seems pretty normal. Is the problem here that the technology is sort of 10 xing those feelings?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Well, I think that's exactly right. And one of, I guess the things to think about here is again, going back to what these companies and the products are trying to do, they gain the revenue through online targeted advertising generally. And so what you need is you need more users and you need those users to spend a lot of time on those platforms. What this incentive structure enables is that whatever keeps you on, no matter how harmful we're going to keep doing it, generally for many teens, the constant short form videos that you see on your app, those are very emotionally rewarding very quickly, but they can be extremely addictive. Social comparison is a totally normal thing that we all do, but then when you're constantly feeding through thousands of different people and seeing people's perfect lives, well, you're exactly doing what you're saying. You're 10 xing normal behavior.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Things that we kind of have a motivation to want to be a part of and want to do and want to know how do I fit in with my friend group? Am I liked, am I not liked, how many likes did I get? How many likes did this other person get? Well, then you start to get compelled to stay on these apps for longer periods of time. And so in some ways, it's not necessarily an intentional choice by the companies to design their products like this, but this is what we naturally do. And so if the incentive is to spend more time, then the company is going to end up fueling our anxieties because that's how it gets what it wants.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
With that explanation in mind is that the difference between just, this isn't just modern technology, this isn't just computers, it's this particular combination of this smartphone device and the way these apps as you're just describing are designed.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Yes, that's exactly how I see the issue, which is just to give a comparison point is when you had a flip phone, one of those old flip phones that you got in the early two thousands or before you got a beeper, but the flip phone, there is no ability of a company to try to send you notifications throughout the day to see what Sally said about you. There is no ability to access PornHub in a flip. There are so many capacities that have been unleashed when we open up the smartphone. And I think that's exactly right. What changed was that millennials, the generation that came before Gen Z, they went through puberty with a flip phone in their pocket, and Gen Z is the first generation to go through puberty with a smartphone in their pocket. And that is really one of the fundamental differences between these generations because what it did was it opened up the ability of companies to specifically and personalize their content and notifications towards individual kids. And that was just not possible. Before you could have a billboard up on the wall that you had to design for all sorts of people, but now you could tailor it to Sally.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So, this is obviously not just a U.S. problem. Kids all over the world have smartphones, and I know you've looked at some other nations and talk a little bit about Australia, a country not dissimilar from the United States, and how have they responded from a policy point of view.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
What's so exciting to me is the diversity of legislation that's happening all over the world, and for any state legislators or people who are working here on listening to the podcast, I want to first thank you for the amazing work that has been done all around the country. This has really been a state led movement around phone legislation, especially in schools, but also general social media legislation and design codes in Australia. They've taken one approach, which I think is very bold and I think important, which is that they've decided to raise the minimum age of social media to 16. And what that means, and I think this is important to be clear, is that this is not restricting access to social media. It's restricting account creation to specific social media platforms. And why this matters is everything that I was just talking about before, when you have a smartphone in your pocket that knows this version of Sally that I keep bringing up, then it can feed you all sorts of content.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
It notifies you, it knows you. And what this allows is, you know what? Maybe companies shouldn't know everything about you until maybe you're a little bit older until you're 16. And yes, you can still get all of the useful information that you need from the internet because the internet is so useful, but maybe you don't need to know everything about this 13-year-old. And so that is what Australia is doing, and I think we will see down the line, all of these issues are complicated and there are lots of problems to solve, but they took an amazing bold step.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Well, I could probably make the argument that you should wait until someone's 60 before you do that. But as you suggest, our audience is mainly state legislators, others interested in public policy, legislative staff, and specifically in the states, what are the things you're seeing that are going on that you think are going the right direction?
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I'll say there are kind of three areas that I think are exciting and important to keep pushing on. The first is around what's happening in schools. And I think that schools are one of the most important places where legislation can happen on this issue. And I think that's the case because it's happening. Everything that you would advise for schools is happening on a group collective level. And so if you take phones out of school, you're changing the dynamic for everybody. And that is so powerful for both education so that teachers and students aren't constantly fighting with each other over the phones, but also so students can be in the hallways and just talk with each other. And it's not that half the kids are on their phones and it's this push pull. And what we're hearing from teachers all around the country that are in states or in places where they've implemented these new be to bell bans or restrictions is that they're hearing laughter in the hallways again, that the kids are having fun.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
The noise levels are just very high. And that is such a powerful thing through simple legislation. So, No. 1 is the phone free school policies. The second is our age appropriate design codes. And these have shown up in different states in the UK, they've done some work on this as well. But this is how do we reform the technologies? How do we set certain design principles that the companies need to follow in order for it to be safe? And honestly, not just for kids, but for many of us, which is why are the defaults always set in the way that we probably wouldn't choose ourselves? So if we choose, for example, to have our account to be public so anybody in the world can see what we're doing rather than just setting it to default by private, let's start there and then we change it.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
So there are just basic things that can be done to just make the online world safer for kids and also for adults. And then the third thing is around age minimums and also trying to do better age verification because the biggest issue with the online world constantly is that you just check a box, you say you're 18 while you're 13, and you get into whatever you want. Companies have repeatedly said, what can we do? This is too complicated, it's too invasive of privacy. These are multi-billion, trillion dollar companies that have been able to create the most sophisticated online networking systems in human history. They can figure out how old you are. And one thing I want to just mention, it's not your job to tell them exactly how to do this. They can figure it out. They just need the incentives to actually need to have to figure out to age gate. And right now they're all in a competition to get younger users and to get those younger users to spend more time. And so we just need to change those incentives.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I have done several podcasts about aspects of the behavioral health, mental health crisis in this country, and I've used that word advisedly because I've been told by a number of experts that exactly is what we're dealing with. And it's certainly with adolescents, it's also with lots of other people, older people. Is this a U.S. problem, particularly with the adolescents? It is this something we see in this country more than we see in Europe or Australia or wherever.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
When we're talking about the youth mental health crisis, what is particularly astounding as part of the reason that we wrote “The Anxious Generation” is that the trends that we're seeing among teens in particular is not just happening here. We're seeing the same exact patterns and increases of anxiety, depression, self-harm, particularly among girls all across the English speaking world. So from the UK to Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada. And we're also seeing it throughout Scandinavia, throughout Europe. The data in more of the developing world than in other parts of the world is not as great. So it's a little bit hard to fully understand and to feel really confident to say what's happening in those other countries. But what we're seeing is an international phenomenon of the collapse of youth mental health where young people used to be generally the happiest kids and now they're not. It's no longer the time of your life that you look back to as one of the more positive, joyful periods that even though of course many kids have had difficult childhoods in the past, but on net being a young person was generally one of the periods of life that people look back with the most fondness, and that's starting to change.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Well, Zach, that's a very sobering and a very sad change that you're describing. And speaking of sobering, I wanted to ask you about a recent British streaming limited series called “Adolescence” that had, at its core the effect of social media on teens. It was surprisingly difficult to even watch, and I'm wondering if you think that sort of dramatization of this issue is a good thing?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
I think it's a great point. I think that there are two things for us to always hold in our heads, which is one is that this is still media, dramatized media, and we have to always keep that in mind is that what we're seeing on the TV screen is often not necessarily a reflection totally of reality. This was the problem back in the day when we started to hear stories of kidnappings happening to kids all the time in the 1980s, and then we got scared and we locked them up. So we need to be wary of letting media overtake ourselves and become too fearful. But at the same time, these programs like adolescents showcase something that's really essential, which is that what's happening online is often invisible to most of us, unlike other epidemics or issues that we need, things cultural, things like these shows to help give us an insight into a child's mind.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
And I think that's what that show really did, was to illustrate not just the child, but also the family dynamic of just how these platforms are interacting with schools, parents, children, and just how little we know about what's going on in our children's lives. And that's what we really want to change. And what I think they got exactly right, which was we don't know most of the things that are happening, and that's typically okay, we don't need to know everything our child is doing all the time, but the scale at which this has gotten to is totally out of left field.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
As we wrap up here, Zach, I want to ask you about the “After Babel” Substack that you're working on with Jonathan Haidt. I spent quite a bit of time looking through that. It was really quite interesting, and both because of the subject matter, but also because you make so much of the material available to people if they do want to dive into it. And I wonder if you could just talk about that and the second book “After Babel,” where that project is going.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Thanks for asking about “After Babel.” That's a great pitch for me. “After Babel” is our Substack newsletter after babbel.com where John and I write our own pieces but also feature other experts and guest writers to talk about what technology is doing to us, to kids, but also to adults and how it's changing society, liberal democracy. But right now we're really focused on three general themes, which we've been talking about on this show so far, which is the changing nature of what we call the play-based childhood of why that has deteriorated the harms of this new phone-based childhood and then what we can do about it. And so we have advice for legislators, for parents, for young people, voices of Gen Z themselves. And so you can find all of that there. And where we're going with the Substack is trying to continue to press the drumbeat on this issue, and especially as we're moving from, our first contact with AI essentially was with social media, and now we're moving into our second contact, which is with generative ai character, ai, new social chatbots, and all of the ways that that's going to change childhood and also change living in society.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
And so that's where we're going. We're going to have a lot of interesting new pieces on all of this, so I hope you check it out.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Well, I would urge people to check it out. I think this issue is so important for society generally, and I know so many parents and grandparents who want to understand this better and get some notion of what can be done. I'd certainly urge them to read the book and check out the “After Babel” Substack, and thanks, Zach. Take care.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Thank you so much, Ed.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
I've been talking with Zach Rausch about what he learned during research on adolescence and social media as lead researcher for “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. Thanks for listening.
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast, “Our American States,” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle,” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also, check out our special series, “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.