The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

Much of the adolescent mental illness epidemic may be the direct result of the anxiety variant spreading by two distinct psychological processes. First, there is simple emotional contagion, as described by Fowler and Christakis. People pick up emotions from others, and emotional contagion is especially strong among girls. Second, there is “prestige bias,” which is the social learning rule I described in chapter 2: Don’t just copy anyone; first find out who the most prestigious people are, then copy them. But on social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning. This process is sometimes known as audience capture—a process in which people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.[59] And if one finds oneself in a network in which most others have adopted some behavior, then the other social learning process kicks in too: conformity bias.