Thread by @shovas

"Many young people had suddenly-around 2013-embraced three great untruths..."

"Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group..."

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jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-healt…

#cdnhealth #mentalhealth #psychology #polarization

https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1633811138512146435

"But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech...

"These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?"

"In [Cognitive Behavioral Therapy] you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning...

"Thinking in [cognitive distortions] ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression."

"What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from."

"Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (...basically...CBT...), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT."

"Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent..."

"The graphs also show three two-way interactions... And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition."

"Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most."

"After examining the evidence...Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.”"

"Like Michelle Goldberg, [Yglesias] briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “we’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net..."

"Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible."

"As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”

"It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control..."

"Yglesias wrote that “part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize.”"

"I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent."

"Just about everything researchers understand about [mental health] suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life...are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense [of loss of control]."

"I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control."

"Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed."

"There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse."

"The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group... In her chapter on Gen Z, she shows that liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media..."

"Twenge shows in another graph that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, liberal girls spent more time with friends than conservative girls. But after 2010 their time with friends drops so fast that by 2016 they are spending less time with friends than are conservative girls."

"So part of the story may be that social media took over the lives of liberal girls more than any other group, and it is now clear that heavy use of social media damages mental health, especially during early puberty."

nature.com/articles/s4146…

"But I think there’s more going on here than the quantity of time on social media. Like Filipovic, Yglesias, Goldberg, and Lukianoff, I think there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups."

"As you can see in Figure 3, from the 1970s until the mid-2000s, boys were a bit more likely to agree with that item, but then girls rose to match boys, and then both sexes rose continuously throughout the 2010s—the era when teen social life became far more heavily phone-based."

"We see something like the Gimbrone et al. pattern in which it’s the liberal girls who depart from everyone else, in the unhealthy (external) direction, starting in the early 2000s."

"We were excited to have found such clear evidence of the interaction, but when we plotted responses to the whole scale, we found only a hint of the predicted interaction, and only in the last few years, as you can see in Figure 5."

"...we reached the tentative conclusion that the big story about locus of control is not about liberal girls, it’s about Gen Z as a whole."

"...boys and girls, left and right—developed a more external locus of control gradually, beginning in the 1990s. I’ll come back to this finding in future posts as I explore the second strand of the After Babel Substack: the loss of “play-based childhood”...

"...which happened in the 1990s when American parents (and British, and Canadian) stopped letting their children out to play and explore, unsupervised."

"I believe that the loss of free play and self-supervised risk-taking blocked the development of a healthy, normal, internal locus of control. That is the reason I teamed up with Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and Daniel Shuchman to found LetGrow.org.)"

"We kept looking in the Monitoring the Future dataset and the Gimbrone et al. paper for other items that would allow us to test Filipovic’s hypothesis. We found an ideal second set of variables..."

"...Zach and I re-graphed the original data so that we could show a larger range of years... Once again, and as with nearly all of the mental health indicators I examined in a previous post, there’s no sign of trouble before 2010. But right around 2012..."

"In other words, we have support for Filipovic’s “captain their own ship” concern, and for Lukianoff’s disempowerment concern: Gen Z has become more external in its locus of control, and Gen Z liberals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating."

"Furthermore, most of the young people in the progressive institutions that Filipovic mentioned are women, and that has become even more true since 2014 when, according to Gallup data, young women began to move to the left while young men did not move either way."

"As Gen Z women became more progressive and more involved in political activism in the 2010s, it seems to have changed them psychologically."

"It wasn’t just that their locus of control shifted toward external... Rather, young liberals (including young men) seem to have taken into themselves the specific depressive cognitions and distorted ways of thinking that CBT is designed to expunge."

"Phelps-Roper interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main petri dish in which nascent ideas of identity, fragility, language, harm, and victimhood evolved and intermixed."

"There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self… But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique]...

"...the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity."

"Nagel described how on the other side of the political spectrum, there was “the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.”

"The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict."

"The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly...

"...saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy."

"It was out of this reciprocal dynamic...that today’s cancel culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global...producing the mess we all live with today."

"In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths..."

"Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas."

"These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups."

"Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them."

"I must also repeat that I don’t blame everything on smartphones and social media; the other strand of my story is the loss of play-based childhood, with its free play and self-governed risk-taking."

"But if this conclusion stands (along with my conclusions in previous posts), then I think there are two big policy changes that should be implemented as soon as possible..."

"1) Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students

From mandatory diversity training to bias response teams and trigger warnings, there is little evidence that these programs do what they say they do, and...some findings that they backfire."

"Brandeis urged its students to stop saying that they would “take a stab at”... For the same reason, they urged that nobody ask for a “trigger warning” because...guns. Students should ask for “content warnings” instead, to keep themselves safe from violent words like “stab.”

"The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created."

"2) The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18"

"I think that most people now understand that the age of 13, which was set back in 1998 when we didn’t know what the internet would become, is just too low, and it is not even enforced."

"We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded... The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause."

"It's time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms."

"Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up."

"...we must shut down the conveyer belt so that today’s toddlers will not suffer the same fate in twelve years. Congress should set a reasonable minimum age for minors to sign contracts and open accounts without explicit parental consent..."

"...and the age [to sign contracts and open accounts] needs to be after teens have progressed most of the way through puberty. (The harm caused by social media seems to be greatest during puberty.)"

"In conclusion: All of Gen Z got more anxious and depressed after 2012. But Lukianoff’s reverse CBT [Cognitive Behavioral Therapy] hypothesis is the best explanation I have found for Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest."

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