How leaders can fix focus and happiness in an AI Era: Psychologist Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: So we don't have 10 years, we have maybe one year. We've got to fix this, we've got raise consciousness, we’ve got to understand: Yes, AI is going to help adults do things more easily, but children have to do hard things thousands of times. And AI is saying, hey, take a shortcut, don't write that paper, don't read that book, I'll summarize it, I’ll write it for you. That is a recipe for the absolute destruction of human capital and the destruction of future human flourishing.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet The Leader. I'm Linda Lacina and I'm very excited to introduce Jonathan Haidt, who is a Social Psychologist and a Professor at the New York Stern School of Business.

He is also a best-selling author, and you might know him from his work, The Anxious Generation. But he's also done a fair amount of research on civil discourse and how we can find happiness.

Well, today we're going to pull all of that together and look at how we can find happiness in an ever-changing, fragmented, digital age. How are you, Jon?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: Fine, Linda. Thanks for having me on.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Very good. So why don't we get started here, and you can kind of set the scene for all of us. Why don't you get started, for those who aren't familiar with you and your work, can you just give us a sense of your area of study and why it interests you?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: Sure. So, I'm a social psychologist, which means I look at how we influence each other, how there's all kinds of emergent properties in society. And I, early in my career I studied moral psychology and then political psychology, and then why are we so divided, especially in the US, but many other countries too. We're seeing rising political polarization which causes political dysfunction.

So that was the main track of my research, until 2015, because I began to notice, as many of us did in higher education in the United States, that all of a sudden the students who were born after 1995, we now call them Gen Z, were doing very, very badly. Very anxious, depressed, increasing rates of suicide and self-harm.

So, I've been studying that since 2015. And while there are many causes of it, I now believe that the biggest cause is the massive technological transformation that we all went through between, really, 2010 and 2015, when we moved everything onto smartphones and social media. That, I believe, is causing democratic dysfunction, it's causing mental health declines, especially when we're young, and it's causing educational declines, test scores are dropping as well.

So that's what I'm studying now. What is happening to us and what do we do about it?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Well, and so with all of that, we have this AI age where all of this new technology is freeing us from rote work and supposedly making it easier for us to do all the things that only humans can do, the things we can do best. In that world, do you think that we'll finally crack happiness?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: Crack it in the sense of destroy it, yes. I think if we don't take care, if we go on the path we're going on, it will be extremely hard for anyone, for most people to have a flourishing life.

So, here's what I mean by that. The causes of happiness, we know, come not from material prosperity, although that helps, it comes from getting the right relationships, healthy relationships, between yourself and your work. Yourself and other people, that is strong, supportive human relationships. And yourself and something larger than yourself. The sense that you're embedded in a meaning system in which you can find coherence and purpose. Those are the foundations of human happiness in any age.

What is AI doing? It's going to make it extremely good for a few people who will be coordinating many AIs. We're going to have extraordinary income inequality as a few people use the technology. But since AI will soon be able to do almost everything better than humans, especially once we get it put in robots, it's going to be very hard, I think, in the future for people to find meaningful work. I'm especially fearful for young people, my children's generation, teenagers now. What entry-level jobs will there be for them in a few years when they're on the job market?

AI is going to make it extremely difficult to have meaningful relationships. From now on, children will be growing up with chatbots as their best friends. They're not going to learn the skills of human interaction. Those are already declining. And AI will decline them much further.

Young people will have sexual relationships with AIs. They will not learn how to have sexual relationship with humans. And ultimately, I believe those relationships will be unsatisfying.

And finally, your relationship to something larger than yourself. Social media has already ripped to shreds any shared sense of coherence, meaning, facts, truth. Whatever happens, we will not be able to understand it collectively again. In the United States, there will be a left reading and a right reading and never the twain shall meet. And even within that, it's fragmentation all the way down.

So, I suspect that AI will crack happiness. It will break it so that it would be much harder for people to obtain.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: In your mind, what do people get wrong about happiness when we talk about this, that might even fuel this gap?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: So, in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, I explored three hypotheses about happiness. The first, the most obvious, the simple-minded, is happiness comes from getting what you want. And if we can just give, if people can get what they want, material prosperity, cars, good clothing, food, entertainment, they'll be happy. No. Entertainment and pleasure are valuable parts of life. But they do not bring happiness. We adapt to them very quickly and then we feel empty.

One of my great fears about what people are thinking about AI is, oh don't worry about it, there's going to be so much prosperity that we'll just give UBI, Universal Basic Income, we'll give everyone so much money. That guarantees mass meaninglessness. That means that our young men, in particular, are just going to be hooked up to porn and video games and whatever comes next. And if they are not able to be productive, to do something useful, they will be mired in the depression and sense of meaninglessness that they're already in.

So, let's put that aside. Material prosperity is not going to make us happier. In fact, I believe it's going to now, for the first time, begin to make less happy. Although, of course, it has helped the increase until now.

The second happiness hypothesis: happiness comes from within. This is what the ancients said, this is what the Buddhists said, this is what the Stoics said. And there's a lot of truth to that one. That one's a very good hypothesis psychologically. And that's true as far as it goes. People will need to work on themselves. But what I found in my research is that, ultimately, it's not even from within, it's actually from between. It's from getting the right relationships between yourself and your work, yourself and others, yourself and something larger than yourself.

And if AI and technology were to help those three relationships, then it would help us be happier. But I believe AI is going to block each of those three relationships leaving each of us in our own individual pod consuming mass quantities of entertainment, which will be so much more gripping and beautiful than it is today so people will never leave and Aldous Huxley's vision in A Brave New World will come true.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: If we did everything right, right, and we'll get to some of the changes we can make, but if we did everything right what would the world look like? How would it be different, a different version of the future?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: Yeah. So, if we were to do everything right, what would that look like?

Well, first, let's start with what needs to be done. So, there are several really basic things. The first and most basic is that these industries, social media is what I focused on – I try not to say tech because tech does so many wonderful things – but social media and now AI, which is so much richer and more powerful than social media, and it's actually the same companies to some extent. Those companies have operated with no restraints, no legislation in the United States, nothing, zero ever to restrict them.

There is no other consumer product that is used by almost all children, that already has a body count, a death count in the thousands at minimum, that is causing mass destruction of human capital. There's never been a consumer product in which there was no regulation. No lawsuits. They have never faced a jury. They've never lost a case against all these parents whose children are dead. So there is zero accountability for these companies that are transforming our society, hurting millions of people, and doing whatever they want.

So that's the first thing. Governments are going to have to say, you know what, you break it, you fix it, you're responsible for the people you're damaging. That's the most basic thing is accountability.

Another is that we're going to have to protect childhood, especially through puberty. Right now we let, what happened 10, 15 years ago, we let Silicon Valley run an experiment on our children. They said how about we give all our toddlers iPads so that they go through their early years swiping instead of interacting. That's not working out well. Kids have tremendous developmental delays, language delays, behavioural problems, attentional problems. So, we've already disrupted early childhood, mid-childhood.

And then, when I started this, it was teenagers who were on social media, but now it's seven- and eight year-olds are on TikTok. So now children go through puberty, not going through the experiences that they need to develop themselves socially, sexually and intellectually, but prisoners to engagement loops, addictive algorithms. So we are completely messing up the most fragile and important periods of brain development.

We did it with social media. It's been a complete disaster around the world. And we're about to do it again with AI, only it's going to be much more powerful and much faster. So we don't have 10 years, we have maybe one year. We've got to fix this, we've got raise consciousness, we’ve got to understand: Yes, AI is going to help adults do things more easily, but children have to do hard things thousands of times. And AI is saying, hey, take a shortcut, don't write that paper, don't read that book, I'll summarize it, I’ll write it for you. That is a recipe for the absolute destruction of human capital and the destruction of future human flourishing.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And what impacts are these also having on adults being able to focus, to pay attention, to do hard things?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: What effects will this have on adults? When I was doing the research for The Anxious Generation, which I published in 2024, I was totally focused on young people. That's where we'll get the biggest bang for the buck. That's where the most damage is happening. We're changing brain development during puberty. We've got to stop that.

And I didn't really look at adults, because A, we didn't have the evidence very clearly, and B, it's really hard to pass legislation to tell adults what to do. I don't want to do that. But boy, do we have to pass the legislation to protect minors, children, okay? But since the book came out, wherever I go, wherever I speak, I'm talking about the children and whatever adults I'm talking to, they say, you know, it is happening to me too. I can't focus. I'm distracted. I'm more anxious. When I'm on social media, it makes me self-conscious.

So, it's really clear the rewiring of social relationships to pull them away from direct one-to-one communication, private communication, a telephone call, face-to face, when we've pushed all of that down and pushed it all onto public interactions mediated by companies that we know are mercenary, that we know hide the research they've done, which finds harm, that that has been a disaster for human relationships. And we're all feeling it.

I now believe that while I focused on mental health as the primary locus of destruction from social media, I now believe that I got that wrong. That actually it's the attention fragmentation, it's disruption of cognition, attention, it's the difficulty reading books. I can't read a book anymore. There's so much going on, so many things to click. I'm distracted, it's very hard for me to pay attention for a long time. And so many adults are having the same thing. There's even research showing that people are less able to read a paragraph, adults now, less able read a paragraph and answer simple questions about it afterwards. We can't focus.

So, in the age of AI, as our machines are getting smarter than us very, very quickly, we're helping it along by making ourselves stupider. This does not bode well for the human future.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Some of these technologies that are driving fragmentation, they're also sort of driving these problems within the discourse, how we're able to relate to one another. You've actually co-founded a thing called the Constructive Dialogue Institute in 2017. What is that and what kind of resources is it developing?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: So, how does all of this relate to civil discourse, civil dialogue and political polarization? My early work was on how our differences in morality, especially left versus right, are driving us to an increasingly polarized world in which we each have our own informational system, our own facts. And democratic politics, a liberal democracy, which is the greatest way to live together ever found by human beings. It's the achievement of the Enlightenment era, to find ways of living together with diversity, with immigration, granting people the freedom to live the lives they want. This was the great flowering, especially in the second half of the 20th century.

But what's happening now? Since social media took over in the early 2010s, what we're seeing is increasingly fragmented worlds of facts or belief. Increasingly tribal politics, maybe not in every country, but certainly in the United States, we're seeing it in many European countries. We're seeing the left become increasingly extreme, focused on identity, identitarianism. We're seeing the right getting increasingly extreme, focusing again on identity, identitarianism. You know, the people who were here 100 years ago are the real Americans, we're told. So, this is a recipe for disaster in liberal societies, and this is what's happening in many places.

So, what I've been trying to do since 2016 and 17, since Donald Trump was elected and our splits became more magnified, is to use moral psychology to help people develop skills to talk across the divide and to understand people on the other side. This has been my mission since 2012 when I wrote a book called The Righteous Mind.

The Constructive Dialogue Institute offers a program that you can use – it's ideally in classes and universities, but it'll work in high schools, it'll work in companies, it will work in church congregations – that teaches people the basics of moral psychology, why do we hold the views we have? And it teaches them the skills of understanding, first listen, first ask questions, first understand which moral foundations they're using, why they feel that their view is morally imperative. Once you understand that, you can speak to them with respect, you can learn yourself, and you're better able to persuade them, if you still want to persuade them.

So, the technology is amplifying our divisions and increasing rage, and what we're trying to do at CDI is teach interpersonal skills that will make young people better equipped to go out into the jungle, the political trench warfare that is American society and many other societies and be prepared to navigate it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: People who are maybe experiencing some of the resources that you guys put together through the CDI, what's maybe a habit or a change that they might make after kind of going through one of your programmes? What’s something that they would be doing?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: Well, the first thing, if you're going to talk to someone, so let's suppose, a lot of the times, you have a disagreement with your own parents, that's what we often see. Or your grandparents, or your cousins, or friends. And we're seeing people nowadays, especially more on the left, cutting off people that they disagree with.

And this is a shame because, again, human relationships, close connections, are the most important foundation of human happiness and flourishing. And as our technology is fragmenting us, we don't want to amplify that by having people cutting each other off. And so, if you're having a conflict with someone let's say you're on the left and they're on the right or vice versa, the first thing you would want to do is learn about their view. You can either read about it or you can ask them.

So, start with curiosity and ... If you start with curiosity, it's not charity, it's nothing you're trying to be nice to them. Ultimately, it will make you smarter, better connected and more effective. So start with curiousity, ask questions first.

The next step, I believe, is acknowledge something that they're right about. They're always right about something. There's something you can say, you know, you guys, your side, you really care about ... You know family or marriage or social stability or you really care about inequality or the environment, and you're right! You know you're right that those things are declining and we're in trouble.

If you start by acknowledging that they're right about something it works magic. It tells the person this is not a war you're not just out to attack me and prove me you actually respect me. And that is the key that opens their hearts and now you can actually talk.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Amazing. And what about happiness in general? Are there things that you recommend, changes that people can have in their habits and their daily routines that can maybe get them out of bad cycles?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: So, what can people do to be happier? I've taught a course, actually since 2006 at the University of Virginia and since 2014 at New York University. I’ve taught a class called Flourishing. And I used to go through, and I still do, I go through the foundations, like let's get these things right. You've got to have exercise and movement, your body needs movement. Talk briefly about nutrition, not too much junk food and sugar. Sleep is an important foundation. If you're not sleeping, seven hours a day.

So, there's all kinds of things that you need to do, and that's been true for decades. All right. But what I've discovered in the last five years is that if we don't start with digital habits then all is lost. Now this is especially true for the younger people, for my undergraduates because so many of them are on social media four to seven hours a day. Four to seven hours a day. Imagine you're a college student, you move to New York City to go to NYU and what do you do? You go to classes and you sit on your bed and scroll and that's it. What a waste of a college education, what a waste of your mind.

And so what I've discovered Is that anyone who is on social media for three or more hours a day or who's on their phone for seven hours a day or more – and that's a lot of them – I won't let them work on anything else until they work on that.

And the simplest trick if you're on social media or video games or investing sites, anything that you go to habitually, anything that operates like a slot machine which gives you variable ratio reinforcement, get it off your phone. If you have to be on Instagram for some reason, do it only on your computer. It's when you have these addictive apps on your phone that the phone may move to the centre of your life, take it, everything over. And at that point, that's your biggest problem. If you don't work on that, I can't help.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Once I interviewed a man who changed the first thing he did in the morning, the first thing he touched. And so he stopped picking up his phone, and he made a rule that the first thing that he touched had to be another person, so he had to either pick up his baby or it had to have to be alive, or he had touch his dog, or he had to hug his wife or something. People don't even realize sometimes that they're reaching for the phone. Are there these, is there a question they should ask themselves to maybe recognize that they're even doing it?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: So, what habits can you develop with your phone to increase your chances of flourishing? One thing that I've learned from teaching undergraduates and MBA students who are in their late 20s is that almost all young people, and a lot of older people, the very first thing they do when they wake up in the morning is check their phone for notifications. They don't get out of bed, they don't go to the bathroom, they don’t make coffee, it's the phone.

And what's the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night? Same thing, it's the phone. And what do they do in between? For a lot of them, mostly it's the phone. That is not a life. That is not a life with relationships. That means you are never fully present in human interactions.

So one of the things that I strongly encourage all of my students to do, and I encourage all adults to do, make a list of the first five things you do after you open your eyes. And look at it and say, is that really what I want? And find ways to change it. Make a list of the last five things you do before you close your eyes and look at it. Is that really what you want?

And what everyone finds is when they do that, when they give themselves space to wake up and to set the day and to choose what they want to happen that day, set your intentions, you have a much better day. If you don't do that, you open your eyes, you look at your phone, your phone will now control your thinking, your cognition, your thoughts, your priorities and your actions for the rest of the day. You'll constantly be interrupted, you'll never have deep work and you won't really amount to anything.

So, willpower is overmatched. Willpower is not enough. You can't just say, I'm going to look at my phone less. You can just say I'm going to be present in my social, no, that's not enough. The phones, the apps, are designed by people who study behaviourism, they study gambling and gaming addiction, they used techniques from Las Vegas in designing these apps, and they are too strong for our willpower.

As Angela Duckworth writes, she wrote the book Grit, you have to do behavioural change, change your environment and then you can change your thinking and your mental habits.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Where can people go for more information?

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: The central hub is Anxious Generation.com. That links out to all other sites. Also, if there are children in your life between 8 and 13 years old we have a brand new book out called The Amazing Generation which brings the kids on board. They're very excited to read it, to learn what's happening to them. You can go to ConstructiveDialogue.org for information on civil discourse programming and you can go to letgrow.org for information on how to give your children more freedom and independence in the real world.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That is all the time that we have today, Jon. Thank you so much. This was amazing.

Jonathan Haidt, Author, The Anxious Generation: My pleasure. I hope it's helpful. This is a global problem.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Absolutely. And thanks so much for you for listening and watching. For more World Economic Forum video podcasts, please go to our YouTube page. And for more podcasts and podcast transcripts, go to wef.ch/podcasts.