By Shawn Smith
Have you noticed YouTube videos getting shorter and shorter?
Psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson believes that isn’t an accident. He recently discussed with fellow psychologist Jonathan Haidt the negative effects of social media, coupled with the advent of the smartphone as tech giants “race to the bottom” in an effort to grab users’ ever shrinking attention span and keep them hooked.
“You know, my critics say, ‘Oh, this is just like television. This is just a moral panic like television. Adults said that it was rotting kids’ brains, but we turned out fine,’” Haidt said on the comparison of TV and smartphone media consumption.
Haidt argued that one difference between the two mediums is the length of each segment or episode watched in one sitting.
“So television is an effective way to present stories. Stories are good things,” he explained on Dr. Peterson’s podcast. “You and I watched tens of thousands of stories. Now, a lot of them were stupid, like GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, but they went on for 20 minutes. It was one story for 20 minutes.”
Unlike social media interaction, with TV there isn’t what psychologist call “behaviorist training” where certain actions are reinforced.
“TikTok discovered that the fastest way to train people is these short videos, and what are they training to do?” The Anxious Generation author said. “So a video comes up, you’re watching it, and you’ve been watching it for eight or nine seconds, and you become an expert in saying, this is not the most interesting. Let me try again.”
Haidt likens it to the addictive nature of slot machines.
“You pull down and then it kind of bounces. That was literally modeled on the slot machine. And so as long as it involves little bits of dopamine in response to doing a behavior. Now you’re engaged in the psychology of addiction,” he said.
“[With television] you could have a habit, but it didn’t cause addiction in the same way,” he added, referencing Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation. “So social media, video games and short videos are all based on giving kids quick dopamine, and if you don’t give them quick dopamine, they’re going to go to one of your competitors.”
As Peterson pointed out, one of TikTok’s competitors took notice of the addictive power of the short-form video.
Related: Social Psychologist Issues Dire Warning to Today’s Parents
“One of the distressing things I’ve seen [is] YouTube, for example…degenerated staggeringly in the last three years because YouTube has started to attempt to compete with TikTok…And so there’s this race to the bottom,” Peterson said.
The effect of social media on the mental health of children has become so alarming that former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy urged policy makers “to step up and help ensure that we have strong safety standards, to help protect our kids from exposure to harmful content, and to also protect them from excessive use.”
Recent studies have shown that youth are increasingly self aware of the damage caused social media as well.
In a recent Pew Research study, 48% of the teens polled (ages 13 to 17) said that social media has “a mostly negative effect on people their age.” That is up from 32% of those teens polled in 2022.
The most recent survey showed that more teens (45) admit that they spend too much time on social media, up from 36% in 2022 saying that they are on YouTube, TikTok and the like excessively.
Along with the rise of anxiety and depression linked to social media, Haidt believes the most prevalent effect of smartphones and social media use is the ability to focus and impairment of executive function — the part of the brain that is responsible for planning and setting goals.
With this, Haidt gave this sober warning “We don’t develop to a competent adult, an employable adult, an adult that someone would want to marry or hire.”
Read Next: Are Social Media Restrictions for Kids Under 13 Ineffective?
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
- Content: +3Share:
- Content: +1