By Yascha Mounk
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
For the last few years, experts have been fighting a
battle over the impact of social media on young Americans.
On one side of this battle, there were psychologists,
like Jonathan Haidt, who have forcefully argued that social media has terrible
impacts on young people. As Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation,
which has continuously been on the New York Times bestseller list since
its release more than a year ago, adolescents have experienced rising rates of
anxiety, depression, and self-harm over the past decade. The reason, according
to Haidt, lies in a “great rewiring” of childhood, rooted in the rise of social
media and the decline of in-person play.
On the other side of this battle are the skeptics who
point to our collective tendency to exaggerate the impact of new technologies,
and catastrophize their effects. If you go back through history, skeptics
like Tyler Cowen have pointed out, you can find people complaining that
there is “something wrong with young people these days” at every historical
juncture. And even if they were well aware of that tendency, each generation
has historically been tempted to insist that there was something about its
particular time and place which made that complaint uniquely justified.
In this battle, I have until now chosen to be a
non-combatant. While I always found Haidt’s worries to be plausible, I also
felt that we didn’t yet have enough evidence to be confident that things were
really as bad as he feared.
And then I came across a truly jaw-dropping chart.
That chart, published
by Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch and based on his
analysis of data from the extensive Understanding
America Study, shows how the traits measured by the personality test most
widely used in academic psychology have changed over the past decade. The OCEAN
test measures five things: openness to experience, conscientiousness,
extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Decades of research have
demonstrated that some of these traits are highly predictive of life outcomes;
in particular, conscientiousness
(“the tendency to be organized, responsible, and hardworking”) predicts
everything from greater professional success to a lower likelihood of getting
divorced. Extroversion (a
tendency to be “outgoing, gregarious, sociable, and openly expressive”) is
associated with better mental health, broader social networks, and greater life
satisfaction. Meanwhile, neuroticism (understood as a propensity toward
anxiety, emotional instability, and negative emotion) is strongly correlated
with negative outcomes, such as higher rates of depression, lower life
satisfaction, and poorer overall mental health.
With these facts in mind, you will quickly realize why
Burn-Murdoch’s chart demonstrates that something very, very concerning has been
happening to young people.
 |
Graphic via John Burn-Murdoch/the Financial Times. |
What Burn-Murdoch shows is that the traits most strongly
predictive of positive outcomes are in sharp decline. Young people, in
particular, have become far less conscientious and extroverted over the past
decade. Conversely, the trait most strongly associated with negative life
outcomes, neuroticism, has sharply increased. To put it bluntly, the average
20-year-old today is less conscientious and more neurotic than 70 percent of
all people were just a decade ago.
Personality tests writ large have gotten a bad rap,
sometimes for good reason. But there is a huge body of evidence
that these metrics, when reported by trustworthy experts, really are
meaningful. And if you break somewhat nebulous-sounding categories like
“conscientiousness” down into their constituent parts—which Burn-Murdoch did,
in subsequent charts following the one above—it is easy to see why. It is
hardly a stretch to imagine that young people who, by their own admission, find
it much harder than their elders did at a similar age to “make plans and follow
through on them,” or to “persevere with a task until it is finished,” may
struggle at many core tasks that life throws at them.
 |
Graphic via John Burn-Murdoch/the Financial Times. |
This data doesn’t prove that these shifts in personality
are driven by social media. But two details do point in that direction. First,
some of the most obvious alternative explanations don’t seem to hold water.
Some experts, for example, have argued that the global pandemic is to blame for
some of the alarming changes in young people. But while this is plausible, most
of the worrying changes noted by Burn-Murdoch set in well before 2020. Second,
young people spend much more time on social media; and while many of these
changes in personality are evident across generations, they turn out to be
concentrated precisely among that age group that spends the most time online.
All in all, it is hard to imagine what social transformation other than the
rise of social media could have caused these changes.
What this data shows is not just that we should be very
worried about the future of young people in America; it is that we have
fundamentally misunderstood the impact that the internet would have on our
lives. By all appearances, the very tools we built to connect us are, in
practice, turning us into the worst version of ourselves.
***
It is now hard to remember the optimism with which many
people greeted the arrival of the digital world. But back in the 1990s and
early 2000s, the evangelists of the internet confidently predicted that the
internet would, as Thomas Friedman wrote in The Lexus and the Olive Tree,
published at the cusp of the new millennium, “weave the world together.”
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to make fun of
such predictions. But the logic for these predictions was seemingly compelling.
For all of human history until recently, it had been extremely costly and
cumbersome for people in different parts of the world to communicate. As late
as 1930, Friedman pointed out, a three-minute phone call between London and New
York cost about $300. That made it hard for people to develop a greater
understanding of each other, or to recognize that they might share all kinds of
interests.
By the time Friedman was writing, such a phone call was
basically free. It was easy to imagine that, in a world of costless
communication, most people would choose to connect with people in faraway
locations who are very different from them. Society would, the hope went, grow
to be far more cosmopolitan: far more interested in the well-being of people
unlike ourselves, and far less likely to prioritize those who share our group
identities.
The truth, as we now know, turned out to be very
different. Given the opportunity to communicate with anybody they wish, most
people are spending their time on social media connecting with people they
already know, with those who share their identities, or with those who share
the exact same political views. The greater ease of communication was supposed
to help the human species transcend its traditional boundaries and expand our
collective horizons; instead, it has amplified our tribal instincts and turned
every aspect of our politics and culture into a fevered battle between the
in-group and the out-group. Early evangelists of the internet conjured up a
touching vision of universal human connection. Instead, the technology they
rhapsodized has turned us into tribalist creatures, giving ever greater
importance to our race, our gender, our sexual orientation, and our political
convictions.
***
Even as the first big predictions about the internet were
starting to prove wrong, commentators persisted in assuming that they could
foresee the effects of new developments in the digital realm. Take the case of
online dating.
The first online dating services, like Match.com, started
to appear in the 1990s, and they began
to lose their social stigma over the course of the 2000s. Even then, it
took a while for them to become dominant. It wasn’t until the early 2010s that
meeting online became the most common way in which couples formed—but the share
of couples who meet online has continued
its exponential ascent ever since.
When online dating went mainstream, many commentators
assumed that it would lead to a lot more relationships, or at least to a
greater number of hookups. One group of American psychologists argued in a 2012
assessment that online dating “offers unprecedented (and remarkably
convenient) levels of access to potential partners.” Their main worry was that
online dating might make people more likely to play the field indefinitely:
“The ready access to a large pool of potential partners can elicit an
evaluative, assessment-oriented mindset that leads online daters to objectify
potential partners and might even undermine their willingness to commit to one
of them.”
The logic that fueled this early assessment is obvious
enough. In the real world, a person’s dating pool is restricted to people they
physically encounter, and it can take considerable courage to ask somebody out.
In theory, online dating services should greatly expand the dating pool and
reduce the fear of rejection. It stands to reason that this should lead to more
couples forming, or at least to people having more sexual encounters.
But the impact of online dating has turned out very
differently. Young people today are less
likely to be in a stable relationship than they were a few decades ago.
While nearly
4 in 5 Boomers had a romantic partner for some or all of their teenage
years, for example, only about half of Gen Zers had a boyfriend or girlfriend
in high school—and there are strong indications that this decline in couple
formation persists as young people become adults. According to a
2023 Pew survey, for example, the share of 40-year-olds who have never been
married has significantly increased over the past decade.
As those psychologists pointed out during the advent of
online dating, one reason why there are so few couples forming today might be
that, with endless options, people might find it much harder to commit to one
partner. Perhaps people aren’t forming stable bonds because they are hooking up
with an endless stream of strangers?
Oddly, that doesn’t seem to be happening either. In fact,
it seems today’s young people are much less likely to be sexually active than
they were in the past. According to one
study, from 2013 to 2015, 9 percent of men aged 23 to 32 hadn’t had sex for
the past 12 months; in the latest data, from 2022 to 2023, the share of
similarly aged men who had not had a sexual partner for the past 12 months had
jumped to 24 percent.
But America isn’t just going through a romantic drought;
it’s also experiencing a social one. As Derek Thompson has
recently shown, Americans have become much less likely to spend time
socializing with friends or neighbors over the last two decades. And while this
trend holds for Americans of all ages, it is once again especially pronounced
among the young: Those aged 15 to 24, for example, now spend a staggering 69
percent less time attending or hosting a social event than similarly aged
Americans did two decades ago.
***
The internet was supposed to make us realize how much we
have in common with those who are very different from us. It was supposed to
make it easier to find romantic partners and friends. And all of that was
supposed to turn us into better versions of ourselves.
The truth has turned out to be radically, and
depressingly, different.
Despite making communication virtually costless to the
average consumer, the internet has inspired a worldwide return to identity and
tribalism. Though it presents us with an endless stream of potential romantic
partners, it has left more people single and celibate. While it makes it easy
to find people who share the same interests, it has made people far less likely
than in the past to socialize “in the real world.” And all of that has somehow
led young people to cultivate personality traits, like neuroticism, that make
them increasingly ill-equipped to face the world.
That is an astonishingly negative balance sheet. But
there is one small ray of hope. Perhaps two decades of data give us enough
information to make more accurate predictions about the long-term impact of the
internet than we could have done at the dawn of the digital age. But we would
do well to remember that we have, so far, gotten the impact of the internet
badly wrong at every stage. And we still stand at the cusp of the digital age,
with the rise of artificial intelligence likely
to transform our world as fundamentally as did the invention of social
media. Might we eventually figure out the habits, norms, and regulations needed
to soften the remarkably destructive impact that the internet has so far had on
society?
Given how badly things are going, that seems unlikely. But I don’t want to rule out that some form of deliverance may be hiding behind the next historical corner. For if there’s one thing that the brief history of the internet has taught us, it’s that we find it nearly impossible to predict the social impact of such revolutionary changes in technology.
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