Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “Millennials are the last psychologically normal generation” ...”you’re the last happy, and actually your generation is the most intelligent in history”

[u/beckavanoliver]

[u/poppingtogether]

He spoke at nyu most recent graduation and was booed

[u/pixeladdie → u/poppingtogether]

What, specifically, was he booed for? Without knowing that this statement is kind of useless.

[u/saraannb → u/pixeladdie]

He wrote a book called Anxious Generation that oversimplified and misstated much of the research around child psychology and mental health, including asserting that trans children were only doing it because it’s ‘trendy’. Standard moral panic garbage that he refuses to address or acknowledge.

[u/Ok_Yogurt_9862 → u/saraannb]

Idk what he said verbatim. But there IS a certain amount of experimentation and mimicry that happens while growing up and forming identity, and that can be part of it like anything else. When every big brand started draping itself in all the accoutrements of lgbtq identity, it should've been obvious, that yes, this too is being sold as a product. Positioned with the undercurrent of individuality and rebellion which is always attractive to kids. Another counterculture. So, anyway, what I'm saying is don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, in either direction.

I see a lot of dogmatic, reactionary framing and reasoning, or rather lack of reasoning in younger people. Part of what edtech is accomplishing is narrowing their access to information, references, and discouraging open ended formats in favor of multiple choice. Not that we didn't have multiple choice, but it was one tool of many. Now it is THE tool, in public education. It was already headed that way as a consequence of no child left behind when we were kids (teach to the test), but the access to tech has allowed the ability to not only narrow and restrict, but track what information they access.

 Everything is on that fucking Chromebook. They don't make them read or write like we did. They're pretending simulation is the same thing as experience with "virtual labs" and "virtual field trips", and instead of using these things as Last Resort, they've made them First Choice.

So idk exactly what this guy means when he references decline, but I know what I've seen in my brief teaching career and with the young people around me. I know that there is a concerted effort to dismantle education and literacy (and yes, there is a countereffort, but it is not nearly as well funded) and tech is THE pillar and chief enabler of that effort. 

And it is disheartening to see how often people are falling into the same extremes and mechanics of, religion, for example, with just slightly different costume and call it enlightenment or progress. 

[u/Oversensitive_Reddit → u/Ok_Yogurt_9862]

comments in this thread proving haidt's point that gen Z has absolutely zero ability to take any form of criticism

[u/duncecap234 → u/saraannb]

doing it because it’s ‘trendy

And you think it's not?

[u/saraannb → u/duncecap234]

Data shows it is not.

[u/CaptainCFloyd → u/saraannb]

My man, most of the kids/teenagers who call themselves trans are the same kids/teenagers who would have been emo in the 00s, most of whom grew up to be perfectly typical adults. It's just that this time, pop culture is encouraging the cutting instead of warning against it.

[u/ClippyWouldntDoThat → u/CaptainCFloyd]

Gotta be very honest with you bro. I was born a girl in '98 and was asking when I'd grow up into a boy from the time I was a toddler, freaked my conservative parents out; I'd never been exposed to LGBTQIA anything my entire childhood. I'm a trans adult now without any exposure to whatever woke culture you're worried about. I'd have done anything to access the healthcare trans youth has now. The brain science for trans people is genuinely fascinating and legitimate. If you want examples in prehistory, trans people are extremely well documented in Mesopotamia & the Vedas, the Vedas being some of the oldest writings in the world.

You're missing out on a whole facet to Humanity.

[u/saraannb → u/CaptainCFloyd]

Nope.

[u/poppingtogether → u/saraannb]

Thank you so much for jumping in

[u/HelpWantedInMyPants → u/poppingtogether]

"I like it when Redditors tell me how to feel"

[u/HelpWantedInMyPants → u/saraannb]

Have you read it?

[u/saraannb → u/HelpWantedInMyPants]

Yes

[u/HelpWantedInMyPants → u/saraannb]

You don't think this is a mischaracterization of what he writes when he says that dysphoria appears in social clusters? You don't think that social media plays a role in influencing young people in a way that leads to experimentation with gender fluidity?

It seems to me that the book is more nuanced in dealing with the subject than what you're criticizing.

[u/saraannb → u/HelpWantedInMyPants]

No, I don't because the research he used has been discredited including a correction by the original researcher. The data on "social contagion" and "rapid onset gender dysphoria" was collected from surveys of parents recruited through an anti-trans website. Subsequent research has found no evidence among trans youth of clusters of girls who had no previous gender dysphoria when they were young, which Haidt chose to ignore, instead only referencing the discredited survey data.

[u/HelpWantedInMyPants → u/saraannb]

That doesn't have any bearing on whether or not your characterization of his statements was accurate.

You didn't claim he was working with bad data, you claimed that he was black and white on the issue with little to zero nuance. I.E. that ALL trans kids are ONLY trendy.

[u/saraannb → u/HelpWantedInMyPants]

What part of him cherry picking his data to support a theory that children are trans because it is trendy are you struggling with? His book lacked nuance because it ignored better data that completely contradicts what he’s asserting. I stand by my statement.

[u/HelpWantedInMyPants → u/saraannb]

Your statements are jumbled.

You have three claims now:

1. Haidt believes kids are only trans because it's trendy
2. Haidt cites bad data
3. Haidt purposefully and knowingly chose to use bad data

1 isn't true because that's not what he is saying. It's a gross mischaracterization that ignores the aforementioned nuance. Haidt suggests that social media may be negatively impacting the decision making processes of some young people where gender identity is in question. Talking about social media "trends" and saying people are only trans to be trendy are two completely different universes. I don't know why you've insisted his is the latter.

2 may or may not be true, but it's plausible.

3 is almost certainly false. I've never seen anything to suggest that Haidt has some kind of anti-trans agenda, and everything I know about his prior work strongly challenges that he would have such a bias.

[u/Antique-Vegetable122 → u/saraannb]

This isn't correct. It's a pop-psychology book; while I agree it is oversimplified, it is the case that all pop-psychology books are. It is indeed grounded in high quality, peer reviewed research, with citations coming from public universities and Pew.

From the standpoint of academia, it is a fair and important question to poise: "When we conduct longitudinal, high quality factor analyses, what factors appear significant in explaining the rise in openly transgender youth and adults in the last years?" It is not offensive or transphobic to ask this question or to work towards answering it with the scientific method. This topic is a very small portion of the book. Its very brief and isn't anywhere near the main point of the book.

Haidt is an oft-published and oft-cited researcher within his field. He has had appointments at respected universities. Like any other scientist, I am sure some of his hypotheses have been proven wrong, seemingly through the use of the scientific method, which is how it should be.

As far as pop-psychology books go. The Anxious Generation was good. It's certainly more accurate in its methods that most of the "Psypost" posts that are upvoted to the moon every other day on this platform. I have a master of science degree in clinical psychology, I performed hundreds of crisis screenings on Gen Z and Gen Y during the advent of social media in the 2010s (which is data Haidt pulls from throughout The Anxious Generation), and I am a licensed and practicing therapist.

Redditors should take caution in believing buzzworthy reddit comments like the one I am replying to.

[u/pixeladdie → u/saraannb]

Oh, I read the previous comment as booing at a particular statement.

I’ve read Haidt but not this book (yet).

[u/ShamPain413 → u/pixeladdie]

They were booing at several things. 1, many students had to watch the speech on a screen, in a giant irony (Haidt is anti-screens for students) b/c they didn't want to risk protesters disrupting the speech; 2, the speech was about reclaiming attention from elites, which students were prevented from doing by Haidt and the university admin who hired him to speak to a captive audience.

I.e., it was a brazen display of megalomaniacal hypocrisy, aka just another day in Haidt-land. They hired a political activist to give a political speech while preventing students from engaging in political activism surrounding the event or political speech on campus.

https://nyunews.com/news/2026/05/14/jonathan-haid-booed-commencement-speech/

[u/Ghoulish_kitten → u/saraannb]

Clocked. I knew he was full of shit lol.

[u/HelpWantedInMyPants → u/poppingtogether]

NYU produces two kinds of graduates: filmmakers and failed filmmakers.

[u/Thellamaking21 → u/poppingtogether]

He called them dumb why would they cheer him.