Psychologist Candice Odgers recently stated the skeptics’ case against Jonathan Haidt’s book in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness?
The essay offered a critique of Haidt’s recent book, The Anxious Generation. Odgers’ primary criticism is that Haidt has mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” She also warns that his ringing of a false alarm “might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people,” which, she suggests, are social ills such as racism, economic hardship, and the lingering impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its disparate impact on children in low SES families.
In response to this essay, Haidt presents the two main problems he sees with the skeptics’ approach, as exemplified in Odgers’ review:
- Odgers is wrong to say that I have no evidence of causation
- Odgers’ alternative explanation does not fit the available facts.
After Baber-> Read the full article by Jonathan Haidt here
