“The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” by Jonathan Haidt

Published in the Atlantic, November 21, 2021

Link to article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-dangerous-experiment-teen-girls/620767/

Article Summary

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, is best known for his pioneering work on the ways in which our view of reality is strongly shaped by what he calls “moral foundations.” Because these moral foundations lie deep within the human psyche, they tend to influence our views and attitudes without us being aware of them. One consequence of this is that people oftentimes reject the views and perspectives of others not for purely rational reasons but out of a deeply held and unreflective sense of moral value.

More recently, Haidt has turned his attention to exploring how social media affects the emotional, psychological, and social development of human beings, especially adolescents. In “The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” Haidt argues that adolescent girls have in particular been negatively impacted by social media. He provides various arguments to support his thesis.  For example, he argues that teen girls are much more “self-conscious about their changing bodies” than boys and that social media sites like Instagram “puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts.”

Haidt also provides statistical data to show the increase in rates of major depression among teens in the last fifteen years and charts how this increase closely correlates with the amount of time teen girls spend on social media. Haidt considers other factors that might possibly help to explain this increase in rates of depression but finds none of them to be as persuasive as the link to social media. Haidt argues that an aggressive approach is needed to address the harm being done to all adolescents by social media, including in-depth research and policy efforts to prevent further harm.

Key Quotes

“Rates of teen depression and anxiety have gone up and down over time, but it is rare to find an “elbow” in these data sets––a substantial and sustained change occurring within just two or three years. Yet when we look at what happened to American teens in the early 2010s, we see many such turning points, usually sharper for girls.”

“Correlation does not prove causation, but nobody has yet found an alternative explanation for the massive, sudden, gendered, multinational deterioration of teen mental health during the period in question.”

“When girls started spending hours each day on Instagram, they lost many of the benefits of play. (Boys lost less, and may even have gained, when they took up multiplayer fantasy games, especially those that put them into teams.) The wrong photo can lead to school-wide or even national infamy, cyberbullying from strangers, and a permanent scarlet letter. Performative social media also puts girls into a trap: Those who choose not to play the game are cut off from their classmates. Instagram and, more recently, TikTok have become wired into the way teens interact, much as the telephone became essential to past generations.”

Questions for Discussion and Reflection

1.     Who is Haidt’s audience for this piece? Who is he most trying to persuade? Why?

2.     Do you agree with Haidt’s argument about why girls are more dramatically influenced by social media than boys? If not, why not?

3.     What counterarguments can you think of to challenge Haidt’s take on the negative impact of social media on teen girls?

4.     Is the research that Haidt presents persuasive? What are some specific data points that you find convincing (or not)?

5.     What do you think Haidt misses in his argument? What would you be interested in learning more about?

Up for Debate

The original vision of social media was to bring people to together – to create social spaces where users could connect with friends and like-minded people. Have one group argue that social media has lived up to this promise, despite some challenges. Have another group argue that social media, despite some positives, has mostly caused social harm.

Write About It

Reflect upon your own use of social media and your attitude toward it. How has it helped you? How has is it harmed you? What is the ideal role that you think social media should play in the lives of adolescents and all human beings?