Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious Generation (Penguin, 2025) ****

This is a hot topic of discussion among my children about the education of our grandchildren. What is allowed or not? How much screen time? Which controls? Are social media even at all allowed? 

Jonathan Haidt makes his key points from the start of the book, and you truly wonder what he will write in the next 300 pages that will interest the reader, yet he manages to be substantiated, broad in his knowledge base, and equally generous to the opinion of other perspectives, yet the data and evidence are clear enough. Children learn a lot of social skills by playing: outdoor, physical activities with changing alliances, and with the obvious insight that nobody is good at everything all the time. You win, you loose. He uses Gray's definition on the value of play: "play requires suppression of the drive to dominate and enables the formation of long-lasting cooperative bonds". Social media do the exact opposite. 

"The way young people use social media is generally not much like free play. In fact, posting and commenting on social media sites is the opposite of Gray's definition. Life on the platforms forces young people to become their own branq. managers, always thinking ahead about the social consequences of each photo, video, comment, and emoji they choose. Each action is not necessarily done for its own sake: rather, every public action is, to some degree, strategic. It is, in Peter Gray's phrase, consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself. Even for kids who never post anything, spending time on social media sites can still be harmful because of the chronic social comparison, the unachievable beauty standards, and the enormous amount of time taken away from everything else in life" (p. 57)

And the value of outdoor play is clear:  

"Unsupervised outdoor play teaches children how to handle risks and challenges of many kinds. By building physical, psy­chological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety. (...) a healthy human child­hood with a lot of autonomy and unsupervised play in the real. world se'ts- children's brains to operate mostly in ''discover mode," with a well-developed attachment system and an abil­ity to handle the risks of daily life. Conversely, when there is society-wide pressure on parents to adopt modern overpro­tective parenting, it sets children's brains to operate mostly in ''defend mode, with less secure attachment and reduced ability to evaluate or handle risk. (p. 72)

The systematic use and access to social media as of a young age, can have devastating results for future development: 

"The human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5, and it has far more neurons and synapses at that moment than it will have in its adult form. Subsequent brain development, therefore, is not about overall growth but about the selective pruning of neurons and synapses, leaving only the ones that have been frequently used. Brain researchers say, ''Neu­rons that fire together, wire together," meaning that activities that repeatedly activate a constellation of neurons cause those neurons to connect more closely. If a child goes through puberty doing a lot of archery, or painting, or video games, or social media, those activities will cause lasting structural changes in the brain, especially if they are rewarding. (p. 102)

And this also results in effects on gender activities and motivations: 

"The two motives are woven together in changing patterns across the life course, and that weaving is particularly important for adolescents who are developing their identities. Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one's value as an individual with unique skills. Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings. The fact that these gender differences have decreased over time tells us that they result in part from cultural fac­tors and forces. The fact that they emerge early in children's play and can be found in the gendered play patterns of other primates tells us that there is probably a biological contribution as well. (p. 163)

In user statistics across the globe, the impact of social media on the mental well-being, suicides and school results are confirmed again and again. 

"When everything moved onto smartphones in the early 2010s, both girls and boys experienced a gigantic increase in the number of their social ties and in the time required to service these ties (such as reading and commenting on the posts of acquaintances or maintaining dozens of Snapchat ''streaks'' with people who are not your closest friends). This explosive growth necessarily caused a decline in the number and depth of close friendships" (p. 180)

Young people become isolated instead of feeling part of a larger group, one that gives them confidence, in which they can play an active role, in which they can listen and be listened to. 

"Durkheim argued that Homo sapiens could just as well be called Homo duplex, or two-level man, for we exist on two very different levels. We spend most of our lives as individuals pursuing our own interests. He called this the realm of the ''profane,'' which means the ordinary day-to-day world where we are very concerned about our own wealth, health, and reputation. But Durkheim showed that nearly all societies have created rituals and communal prac­tices for pulling people 'up,' temporarily, into the realm of the sacred, where the self recedes and collective interests predomin­ate. Think of Christians singing hymns together every Sunday in church; think of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca; think of civil rights marchers singing as they walked. Evidence that these two levels are available to everyone, even outside a religious con­text, can be found in the ways that fans of sports teams use similar techniques to bind themselves toge.ther before a game with pep rallies, the singing of fight songs, and shared consciousness alteration (usually from alcohol), along with a variety of quasi­religious rituals, superstitions, and body markings. It is a thrill to be one of thousands of fans in a stadium, all singing and stomp­ing in unison after each goal or touchdown. Durkheim called this state of energized communion ''collective effervescence.'; 

This is one of the founding insights of sociology: Strong com­munities don't just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate. The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm. They are also happier and have lower rates of suicide. (p. 218)

He takes it a step higher when discussing the value of spiritual experience in the largest sense, better described by 'awe' for the world around us, including man-made elements:  

"Awe is triggered by two simultaneous perceptions: first, that what you are looking at is vast in some way, and, second, that you can't fit it into your existing mental structures. That combination seems to trigger a feeling in people of being small in a profoundly pleasurable - although sometimes also fearful - way. Awe opens us to changing our beliefs, allegiances, and behaviors. Dacher (...) and his students collected thousands of accounts of awe experiences from people around the world and sorted them  into the 'eight most common categories, which he calls the ''eight wonders of life": they are moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies (moments in which a new and grand under­standing dawns). 'p. 228)

"Soon before his death in 1662, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a paragraph often paraphrased as ''there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart." I believe he was right. In "The Righteous Mind" I drew on the writings of Charles Darwin and the biologist David Sloan Wilson to explain how natural selection might have carved that hole: humanity went through a long period of what is known as multilevel selection in which groups competed with groups, while at the same time individuals competed with indi­viduals within each group. The most cohesive groups won, and humans evolved - by both biological and cultural evolution - an adaptation that made their groups even more cohesive: religiosity (including both the fear and the love of gods). (p. 213)

An excellent book that I can recommend to any parent and grandparent, even if his writing is very scientific and aimed at policy-makers and educators more than to citizens, but I think we will all benefit if the monster of social media can be reigned in to create value instead of devastation. 

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber - The Enigma of Reason - A New Theory of Human Understanding (Allen Lane, 2017) * & ****

It is possible to write a brilliant book with one, major and fundamental flaw? Yes, it's possible. That is what Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have done.

Those of you who have read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast & Slow", will remember that he identified System 1 and System 2 in our thinking, with "1" being the more immediate intuitive response to thinking, and "2" the more rational side of our thinking.

Mercier and Sperber dismiss this approach, and prefer to present another way in which the brain works, primarily due to intuitive inferences of what we perceive or anticipate what other people will do or say. The evidence they present to make their case is excellent and very convincing. The use of abstract logic is indeed a rare thing. They explain how our mind has modules, little folders of knowledge, memory, expertise, that can be connected or not when confronted to a situation. And all that makes sense. They give the example of somebody walking into a doctor's waiting room, and the number of inferences made to appraise the situation in a flash moment is really spectacular.

They then explain how reasoning happens as a follow-up to inuitions, to justify our actions or to build  arguments with other people. Again, what they say makes sense.

The big issue that I have with this approach is that it totally diminishes the role of the reasoning capabilities of the individual outside of social contexts. Truly, I reason the whole time. When I drive to the hospital, I will think about which route best to take depending on the time of day. That is not just an intuition. Surely, when they wrote their book, they reasoned alone. What about the car mechanic who has to solve the engine's troubles? He does not go about this inuitively. Just like the plumber who was called in to find the leak. Or the electrician to find a problem with the electricity.

I truly believe that humans can think logically in very concrete, pragmatic contexts. If I have five keys on my key ring, I will proceed with trial and error. If one key does not work, I will move to the next, remembering that the first key is not the right one. There is some logic in that. If the lamp next to my desk stops shining, I will check whether a new light bulb will solve the issue. If not, I will not keep changing light bulbs until I find one that works. No, I will check the wire, the socket, and so forth, until I have identified the problem. Mercier and Sperber are right that in more abstract and moral contexts, our sense of logic often fails, because of confirmation bias. But this confirmation bias is not active in pragmatic concrete contexts.

When there is immediate feedback, and in a pragmatic context, the reasoning will be flawless. When somebody wants to go shopping and the baker, the butcher, the grocer and the shoe shop are geographically located on one street, the person will automatically look for efficiency and go to these shops in the right sequence. He will not move erratically from the butcher to the baker then to the shoe shop and back to the grocer. No, his plan will be rational, pre-meditated, solitary and conscious.

Even worse, the authors attack people who might question their approach: "Actually, the usual defences of the intellectualist approach to reason are themselves good examples of biased and lazy reasoning. It is an undisputed fact that individual reasoning is rarely if ever objective and impartial as it should be if the intellectualist approach were right".

Mercier and Sperber tell only half the story, namely reasoning in social contexts, and intuitive responses to moral choices, based on the theory of Jonathan Haidt. But Haidt was aware that his theory was only relevant for moral choices, not for all kinds of reasoning and intuitions. Somehow, Mercier and Sperber have missed this.

The whole success of humanity, is not only the social skill of being able to work together. Individuals have improved their hunting tactics by better reasoning (analysis of animal behavior, downwind approach, ...) as by their skills at perfecting weapons. The cleverest ones survived. The advantage of smart tools were as obvious in prehistory as they are now. Many of those are the results of clear logic, and inferences, without too much confirmation bias. There is no blow to self-esteem when one bow is not better than another bow. The hunter can identify why one type of wood is better for the bow, and why cat gut for strings are better than dog gut. There is no need for him to stick to cat gut because that happens to be his belief, just as I will not keep changing light bulbs without wondering whether the cause of the problem might not lie elsewhere.

In short, if Mercier and Sperber had written a book about social reasoning, or reasoning on a moral and abstract level, their book is fantastic. What they write is absolutely true, and much better than Kahnemann in my opinion. But their book ignores that reasoning can take place outside of social contexts, in the concrete and pragmatic environment of everyday life.

It's high time for both authors to get out of their ivory tower and do some handywork.

Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind (Penguin, 2012) ***½

American cultural and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" has become a standard in moral and political psychology. Haidt describes how - in the context of politcal thought and morality - judgments are made intuitively, with reason serving as the rationale to describe our judgment 'a posteriori', and not the other way round. We only appear to be rational beings when judging, in reality our judgment is made on the basis of a number of personal, emotional and group influences.

He gives a lot of examples of psychological tests in which the participants gave justifications for their behaviour afterwards, not based on reason. He explains that our social world is "Glauconian", named after the brother of Plato, who argued that people behave morally or just, only because they are kept in check by the social group to which they belong, by appearances and reputation.

Haidt guides us through the implications of cultural bias to assess morality, and he explains how we need to expand our typically liberal view of morality with the broader moral base that many cultures across the world have.

He breaks them down into five categories

1. the Care/Harm foundation
2. the Faith/Cheating foundation
3. the Loyalty/Betrayal foundation
4. the Authority/Subversion foundation
5. the Sanctity/Degradation foundation

... in which the first two are typically the strongest among liberal voters and the latter three more dominant among conservative voters. If you want to know where you are positioned, you can do the test yourself on his website.

Here are my test results, high scores on care and fairness, low scores on loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.

But of course that's not the point of the book, even if every participant adds new data to his survey. Haidt's insights and approach shed some light on how our world functions today. Indeed, the question of moral choices is one of everyday politics and debates. Understanding why choices are made, and understanding the dynamics behind them are critical. What he does not do in the book is to dig a level deeper, namely to assess the psychology of the people who make these moral choices. Are there any common traits among these five foundations (insecurity, fear, dominance, control, ...).

One aspect of Haidt's approach is that it predicted the chances of Trump to win the presidential election. For the simple reason that all democrats always have a discourse that is focused on care and fairness, yet it totally ignores the three other foundational elements. The Republican party has invested more in topics such as loyalty to "our country", to "our religion", to "our sexual ethics", etc.

Food for thought ...