Don’t Ignore Your Moral Intuition About Phones

In a recent New Yorker review of Matt Richtel’s new book, How We Grow Up, Molly Fischer effectively summarizes the current debate about the impact phones and social media are having on teens. Fischer focuses, in particular, on Jon Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, which has, to date, spent 66 weeks on the Times bestseller list.

“Haidt points to a selection of statistics across Anglophone and Nordic countries to suggest that rising rates of teen unhappiness are an international trend requiring an international explanation,” Fischer writes. “But it’s possible to choose other data points that complicate Haidt’s picture—among South Korean teens, for example, rates of depression fell between 2006 and 2018.”

Fischer also notes that American suicide rates are up among many demographics, not just teens, and that some critics attribute depression increases in adolescent girls to better screening (though Haidt has addressed this latter point by noting that hospitalizations for self-harm among this group rose alongside rates of mental health diagnoses).

The style of critique that Fischer summarizes is familiar to me as someone who frequently writes and speaks about these issues. Some of this pushback, of course, is the result of posturing and status-seeking, but most of it seems well-intentioned; the gears of science, powered by somewhat ambiguous data, grinding through claims and counterclaims, wearing down rough edges and ultimately producing something closer and closer to a polished truth.

And yet, something about this whole conversation has increasingly rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I came across Ezra Klein’s interview with Haidt, released last April (hat tip: Kate McKay).

It wasn’t the interview so much that caught my attention as it was something that Klein said in his introduction:

“I always found the conversation over [The Anxious Generation] to be a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad.”

This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.”

I think Klein does a good job of articulating the frustration I’d been feeling. In highly educated elite circles, like those in which I operate, we have become so conditioned by technical discourse that we’ve begun outsourcing our moral intuition to statistical analyses.

We hesitate to take a strong stance because we fear the data might reveal we were wrong, rendering us guilty of a humiliating sin in technocratic totalitarianism, letting the messiness of individual human emotion derail us from the optimal operating procedure. We’re desperate to do the right – read: most acceptable to our social/tribal community – thing, and need a chattering class of experts to assure us that we are. (See Neil Postman’s underrated book Technopoly for a much smarter gloss on this cultural trend.)

When it comes to children, however, we cannot and should not abdicate our moral intuition.

If you’re uncomfortable with the potential impact these devices may have on your kids, you don’t have to wait for the scientific community to reach a conclusion about depression rates in South Korea before you take action.

Data can be informative, but a lot of parenting comes from the gut. I don’t feel right, for example, offering my pre-adolescent son unrestricted access to pornography, hateful tirades, mind-numbing video games, and optimally addictive content on a device he can carry everywhere in his pocket. I know this is a bad idea for him, even if there’s lingering debate among social psychologists about statistical effect sizes when phone harms are studied under different regression models.

Our job is to help our kids “flourish” as human beings (to use Klein’s terminology), and this is as much about our lived experience as it is about studies. When it comes to phones and kids, our moral intuition matters. We should trust it.

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