Jonathan Haidt in After Babel:
Odgers recently stated the skeptics’ case 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 my recent book, The Anxious Generation. Odgers’ primary criticism is that I have 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 my 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 this response essay, I’ll present the two main problems I see 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.
More here.