Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jonathan Haidt Returns (on the Anxious Generation)
Wed, 12 Mar 2025
Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) is a social psychologist, professor, and best-selling author. Jonathan joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why his moral dumbfoundings are such tasty party tricks, if disgust contains wisdom about borders that one shouldn’t cross, and how the overprotectiveness epidemic was borne out of the safest generation yet. Jonathan and Dax talk about the fact that despite public response it’s much more dangerous for kids online than it is in the real world, the cost of gamifiying a child’s education being that their brain becomes desensitized to dopamine release, and that more serious than mental illness issues as a result of excessive screens for kids is actually attention fragmentation. Jonathan explains the four harms of increased access to smart phones and tablets, how the prevalence of a side that silences its dissidents is a reliable predictor of its wrongness, and that the key is give your kids a great and exciting social childhood.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who is Jonathan Haidt and why is he on the podcast?
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Mrs. Mouse. Hi. Today we have Jonathan Haidt returning. I don't know if you guys would remember.
I want to say that's like first year.
It was early.
It was early. Yep. And this one was really fun. I don't know about you. Were you nervous the first time we had him?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, because we had first heard him on Sam Harris's podcast.
He was our introduction to podcasts. Jedediah Jenkins recommended I listen to the Jonathan Haidt.
Wow.
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Chapter 2: What are moral dumbfoundings and why are they important?
In Britain, there's a shocking statistic. One quarter of their five-year-olds have their own smartphone because parents around the world have discovered your kid's crying, you need to make dinner, take the phone, you're happy, I'm happy, I can do my stuff. And it's like drugging your kid.
A distinction I'm coming to see, which is very, very useful, is I don't want to tell people, be afraid of screens, never let your kid on a screen. What I'm coming to see as I talk with my undergrads, especially, and I realize how serious the attention fragmentation is. This is, I think, ultimately more serious than the mental illness is the attention fragmentation.
So I'm coming to see that distinguish between story time and fragmenting time. So stories are good things. Humans are storytelling animals. We love stories. All cultures tell stories. That's part of how we socialize our kids. And that's why literature is so important and why reading novels is so important. Stories are good.
And a television screen is actually a pretty good way of portraying a story. So don't be afraid of letting your kids have story time. They're not six hours a day, but on a plane ride, let your kid watch a movie. Fantastic. But fragmenting time is I'm doing this thing, but then I get a pop up. I do this other thing. I'm watching this movie, but I'm a little bored, so I'll check out this.
Oh, and I'll go there. And so if you give a kid an iPad, that's fragmenting time. How much fragmenting time should you give your kid? As close to zero as possible forever. But don't be afraid of stories.
So you see four foundational harms from all this. One is social deprivation. Seems pretty intuitive, but go ahead and expound a little bit on that.
Kids are incredibly sociable, social. We socialize each other. We play in groups, mixed age groups. There's clear data on how much time kids were spending with friends until around 2010, 2012, about two hours a day on average. It's called the American Time Use Survey. How much time did you spend eating? How much time did you spend watching TV?
So you can see until around 2012, kids 15 to 24 is the youngest age group. They were spending about two hours a day with their friends outside of school and work.
And then you see this incredibly sharp drop around 2012 in that period, down to the point where in 2019, just before COVID, it's gone from two hours a day down to like 45 minutes a day, which is just a little bit more than older people are spending. And then COVID comes in, we get COVID restrictions and it just goes down a little further.
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Chapter 3: How has the rise of smartphones affected children?
Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. It really is.
You're just waiting through the instructions so you can be passing notes to friends.
I know. Did you pass in the hallway, too? Oh, did girls?
Oh, I'd write love letters to Randy during class, and then I'd see her in the hallway, and I'd make out with her for a second, and then I'd leave her with a note.
We used to also pass. We had, like, slam books.
I can see your handwriting in my head. Aw, that's cute. Like, immediately. You had slam books.
Yeah, we didn't call them that.
Okay.
But, like, you'd have, like, one... You'd have one with like these two girls and you'd all get together and you'd make the composition book and you like cut out all these things from magazines and you tape it on and you tape the whole book. So the whole book is covered in like a particular design that you made.
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