Essays
Featured essays by Jonathan Haidt, in English
Featured essays in Spanish
Featured essays in languages other than English and Spanish
The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood
(March 13th, 2024)
A premise of my book, The Anxious Generation. I argue that we have been raising children in an environment that is hostile to human development and I show how we can change course.
The Case for Phone-Free Schools (originally published on the After Babel Substack)
(June 6th, 2023)
I discuss how smartphones impede learning, stunt relationships, and lessen belonging.
AI Is About To Make Social Media (Much) More Toxic (with Eric Schmidt)
(May 5th, 2023)
I lay out four imminent threats and five doable reforms of AI.
How to Defuse a Classroom Conflict: Make It More Complex (with Caroline Mehl)
(November 30th, 2022)
Offers five strategies to help students break through binary thinking, drawn from our experience with the Perspectives program, from the Constructive Dialogue Institute.
When Truth and Social Justice Collide, Choose Truth (Originally published on heterodox: the blog)
(September 23rd, 2022)
Explains why I resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology after they added a mandatory social justice statement as a requirement for presenting research at the annual conference. I explained how this was a violation of our quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth.
Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy
(July 28th, 2022)
Meta responded to my Babel essay, and I respond to Meta.
California Has an Opportunity To Shape How the World Protects Children Online (with Beeban Kidron)
(May 19th, 2022)
Why California should enact the UK’s age appropriate design code.
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
(April 11th, 2022)
Explains how social media dissolved the mortar of society and brought us into the era of fragmentation.
(February 16th, 2021)
(November 24th, 2021)
Offers advice for engaging in productive conversations with our relatives and friends.
(November 21st, 2021)
Analyzes the published evidence and shows that the preponderance of it indicates that social media is causing real damage to teen girls.
(November 1st, 2021)
Explains final-five voting, an electoral system that prioritizes healthy competition—with incentives for innovation, results, and accountability.
(October 29th, 2021)
Explains how the right’s monomania and the left’s Great Awokening feed each other
(October 1st, 2021)
Argues that educational institutions have a duty to oppose monomania and to lead students out of its stultifying embrace
(July 31st, 2021)
Examines how smartphone access and the internet may help to explain the global rise in teenage loneliness in school which began after 2012
(May 10th, 2021)
Offers guidance for parents to help their kids develop a healthy relationship with digital technologies
(April 13th, 2021)
Provides a solution to help Americans move forward together to find common ground and common purpose
The New York Times Surrendered to an Outrage Mob. Journalism Will Suffer For It (with Pamela Paresky, Nadine Strossen, and Steven Pinker)
(May 14th, 2020)
(February 10th, 2020)
A collegial debate on whether social media has adverse outcomes on adolescent mental health
Explores the many ways in which today’s social-media platforms create conditions that may be hostile to democracies success
Reviews trends in adolescent mental health and offer advice for parents on raising antifragile kids
Democracy demands teamwork, compromise, respect for rules and a willingness to engage with other opinionated, vociferous individuals. It also demands practice. This article explains why the playground may be the best place to practice
City Journal
(German translation is here) (December 17th, 2017)
This essay is an edited version of my Wriston Lecture for the Manhattan Institute, delivered on November 15th
Explores how bad policy and paranoid parenting are making kids “too safe to succeed”
Trump Breaks a Taboo—and Pays the Price (August 21st, 2017)
Makes the case that taboo and sacredness are among the most important words needed to understand Charlottesville and its aftermath
Explains why the idea that “speech is sometimes violence” on college campuses will make students more anxious and more willing to justify harm
Explains why we agree with Harvard’s President, Drew Faust, who warned in her commencement address that any effort to limit some speech “opens the dangerous possibility that the speech that is ultimately censored may be our own”
Explains why any speaker who arouses a protest may now be at risk of a beating
Written just before the 2016 election, offering ideas from moral psychology and ancient cultures for turning down hatred and living with people who hold different political beliefs.
As nationalist movements were expanding in Europe, in 2016, I wrote this to explain the psychological forces that drive voters to support nationalism, forces that more “cosmopolitan” globalists often misunderstand
Explains why some of the tactics used on college campuses to reduce racial divisions sometimes backfire
I wrote this with Australian psychologist Nick Haslam, to explain his important idea of “concept creep” and how it plays out on university campuses in the UK and USA
Moral psychology: An exchange. [Response to T. Shaw] (April 7th, 2016)
A deeper exploration of the psychology and morality of globalists and nationalists, going beyond my earlier essay on this in The American Interest
Uses Moral Foundations Theory to help explain why Americans vote for the candidates they vote for, in primary elections where they have a choice within their party
Explains why cross-partisan prejudice should become a focus of concern and research
This is the most widely read and most influential article I have ever written. It developed Greg Lukianoff’s insight that many college students were engaging in the same cognitive distortions he had learned how to stop doing when he learned how to do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Explains that the destructive dynamic between Democrats and Republicans is the result of at least 10 trends that have played out over the past half-century
Includes a brief on-line and indirect measure of political orientation
Gives my analysis of the new front line in the American culture war
With Hal Movius. Offers advice on how to negotiate when sacred values make compromise much more difficult.
Presents the “asteroids” metaphor, and the claim that each side sees some of the threats facing America but is blind to others
A response to two essays from philosophers — Michael Lynch and Gary Gutting–critiquing my claims about reason and philosophy
A condensed version of ch. 12. of The Righteous Mind
Free Inquiry
Featured profiles of Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt on the ‘National Crisis’ of Gen Z (written by Tunku Varadarajan) (December 30th, 2022)
‘All the Green Shoots Are Dead’ (written by Guy Denton) (August 6th, 2022)
Jonathan Haidt: ‘We got fooled into thinking liberal democracy is easy’ (written by Jemima Kelly) (April 29th, 2022)
