Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt (born 1963) is a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business, known for “The Righteous Mind” (2012), “The Coddling of the American Mind” (2018), and “The Anxious Generation” (2024), which blamed the phone-based childhood for the surge in adolescent anxiety and depression and became a cultural phenomenon behind phone-free-school laws.

AI as social media’s accelerant

In May 2023 Haidt and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt published “AI Is About to Make Social Media (Much) More Toxic” in The Atlantic. They forecast four threats: torrents of AI-generated garbage in public discourse, personalized “super-influencers” manipulating users at scale, far more addictive platforms accelerating the teen mental-illness epidemic, and an advantage for authoritarian regimes over polarized democracies. The pair proposed remedies — user authentication, age verification at 16, data transparency, and platform liability — rather than a halt to AI research.

Haidt has since extended the warning to AI companions for minors on his Substack, After Babel, arguing that chatbots optimized for engagement will colonize childhood the way social media did. His causal claims about phones and teen depression remain contested among researchers — critics say the correlational evidence is thinner than his bestsellers suggest — but his policy agenda has moved legislatures on several continents.