The first guest in Yale’s Presidential Lecture Series, Haidt discussed the role that social media plays in mental health challenges among teenagers and adolescents.
Lucas Miller
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On November 12, Yale University students and professors packed into the 850-seat Battell Chapel for a lecture by social psychologist and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt. Haidt’s lecture addressed a broad range of challenges experienced by Gen Z, including mental health challenges like anxiety and depression, shortening attention spans, and political intolerance on university campuses.
The lecture was organized by Yale President Maurie McInnis as part of the Presidential Lecture Series. “I’ve designed the Presidential Lecture Series to spark intellectual exchange on issues of importance to the nation and higher education,” McInnis said.
Haidt first grew concerned with the state of America’s elite universities when he was a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. In 2015, he founded Heterodox Academy, an organization based on “dissent, curiosity, and the breaking up of intellectual orthodoxy.”
“I started to get really alarmed around 2015, when a lot of things changed on campus,” Haidt told the audience. “There were student protests, there was a set of ideas and a new moral order, and a lot of conflict and controversy, and a lot of fear, which spread across elite universities—I’ve been studying that ever since.”
The unrest in America’s highest academic institutions is rooted in the technological displacement of the mid-2010s, Haidt argued. “The major cause of this seeming explosion and culture change out of nowhere was because of the technological change that we were going through … the same sort of dynamics hit journalism, and media, and the arts … all of our epistemic institutions.”
In 2009, Facebook pioneered the “Like” button, and Twitter the “Retweet” button. By 2012, those features had spread throughout the social media industry. In a 2019 article co-authored with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Haidt argued that the success of those features “ensured the spread of headline testing, and with it emotional story-packing, through new and old media alike; outrageous, morally freighted headlines proliferated in the following years.”
In his lecture, Haidt defined “technodeterminism,” the school of thought to which he subscribes, as “the theory that technology shapes society, culture, consciousness, and history, acting as the primary driver of social, economic, and political change.” In the early 2010s, technodeterminism gave reason for optimism—but in 2012, that changed, Haidt argued. Starting around that year, rates of mental illness among United States university students increased sharply.
“The rates skyrocket. It begins right around 2012, 2013, the numbers start going up. It’s primarily anxiety and depression,” Haidt said.
Haidt presented statistics showing the same effect in other developed nations, along with “educational deterioration,” or declining educational proficiency evidenced by declining test scores, and what Haidt calls “personality deterioration,” defined by rising rates of neuroticism coupled with declines in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extroversion. Haidt then traced those effects to technological advancement, particularly the development of advanced social media algorithms that leverage features such as the “Like” and “Retweet” buttons to feed users content more likely to draw their attention.
He also traced the effects of technology’s downsides to American universities, including Yale, arguing that declining mental health among students pushed them into “defend mode,” a demotic term for the behavioral inhibition system, which increases sensitivity to perceived dangers, including groups ideologically and politically opposed to one’s own.
Haidt’s theory was tested at Yale in 2015, when then-Associate Master of Silliman College, Erika Christakis, disputed a Yale Intercultural Affairs Committee directive warning students against wearing costumes that could be construed as so-called cultural appropriation. This response sparked the “March of Resilience,” a protest that drew over 1,000 Yale students, faculty, and administrators.
Events like the skirmish between Christakis and Yale’s student body continue. In 2022, Yale Law School students disrupted a bipartisan panel on civil liberties. “Yale Law School seems to have had a lot of trouble having free speech events. They kept getting shouted down by Yale Law students,” Haidt said.
In 2025, Yale withdrew Yalies4Palestine’s registered student organization status after a gathering on Beinecke Plaza that Yale said violated its time, place, and manner policies.
Haidt spent the latter half of his lecture discussing ways for students and universities to reconcile their differences. For students, Haidt offered four suggestions.
First, students should focus on preserving their attention for important things, a goal he says is achievable by reducing distractions from notifications and short-form video content. Second, students should pursue risks and challenges. Third, students should consume content that develops them intellectually. Haidt stressed the importance of choosing university courses that represent diverse perspectives, reading long texts, and bucking reliance on artificial intelligence.
Finally, Haidt suggested that students treat one another with respect by taking and giving less offense. “If half of us do that, then the volume of hate and anger will go way, way, way, down. We all have a part to play to not get sucked into this really toxic media environment,” Haidt summarized.
The next presidential lecture, titled “Creating Equality of Opportunity: New Insights from Big Data,” is set for February 19, 2026. Raj Chetty, William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University, will deliver the lecture.