I went to high school in the 2010s at a very good public high school. I'm not exactly sure how I would have answered these questions when I was 18, but I do know I would have been, at the very least, unsure about whether to answer that I hung out with friends just once a week or more often than that. For me, and for many, probably even most kids at my high school, the vast majority of our free time outside of homework was taken up by extracurriculars, most of which were intrinsically social to a meaningful extent. I personally had Boy Scouts, GSA, Quiz Bowl, and various music commitments, all of which (except piano lessons) doubled as social time. Granted, my close friends were not always in every club, and the activities were not as intrinsically social as time at the mall that I imagine was frequently spent by teenagers in the 80s, but I still felt like I was spending time with friends almost every weekday and was far from lonely. Almost all my friends were in more or less the same boat.
My impression is that the time spent doing extracurriculars over the past few decades has gone up, especially at "better" high schools, in large part because college admissions have become more competitive and helicopter parents have become more common. This may affect survey answers in recent years, especially because I think it was relatively common for these extracurriculars to take up the time that would have been spent going on dates for some as well.
My high school says were in the 80's but I had the same thought. I think there is a qualitative difference between the social experience of extracurriculars and self directed but I can't put much confidence in the analysis and conclusions that doesn't include both.
Yeah, I mean, to be clear smartphones weren’t a thing in 1995, but the internet was. Video games were. (Video games largely moving online probably decreased socializing from when playing video games with your friends meant they had to physically come over to your house.)
Lots of antisocial teens are socializing, but with video gamers in Malaysia.
This was my thought, too. The digitization of socialization was progressing before the invention of the smartphone, but the smartphone accelerated that effect significantly!
Here's a different take on the data. Andrew Whitehead looked at 250K+ interviews from three waves of the National Children's Health Survey looking at the correlation between family church attendance and the presence in the home of children with different disabilities. The presence of a child with depression decreased family church attendance by 73% and a child with anxiety decreased attendance by 45% Both of those conditions significantly impact socialization. Maybe the same problems that keep kids from going on dates, socializing with friends and getting jobs get in the way of their families going to church?
No a and d are not "disabilities" but they are certainly conditions that make one disinclined, for a variety of reasons, to be around other people.
Observation: I'm seeing a lot more under 30s people with emotional support animals...and I honestly think there is a correlation between seeking emotional support from animals and not socializing with peers.
I'm in the middle of starting a company that sells a few things directly related to this:
- medium-dumb phones (maps, calendar, camera but no browser or other apps),
- high-security and highly-controllable internet routers
- a service were we can manage (blocklist, hours of use, etc...) the router for you
- software that can limit the apps that are installable on a phone as well as websites that can be visited (which we would manage for you)
It's for both kids and adults. We'll probably launch in May or June. The feedback I've received is that people (teens especially) can find workaround for anything. My goal (which testing so far supports) is to overcome any kind of workaround. I'm in IT. If I can't hack it, I'm assuming few kids can.
I'm curious what folks here think is missing in the market as a service that I might not be thinking of, or something else I might be misunderstanding?
Kudos to you for trying! I always thought the phone companies should've rolled out to market something designed for under 18s, kind of like what you described. But they won't because it's too profitable to get people hooked as early as possible.
Some parents and adults are seeing the problem. Jonathan Haidt has been writing a lot about it. I think another problem you'll run into is that many parents either don't care or don't have the mental bandwidth to care as they're too busy with life as it is. I also know that a lot of parents are still unbelievably ignorant of what goes on now on social media and the internet. It really amazes me to no end how they're not concerned about what is reaching their kids, and think only about their own experiences with online. And their approach to things online is: See no evil, hear no evil. Ergo, evil out there is other people's problems.
Nonetheless, solution has to start somewhere. Maybe your product will reach enough parents who are aware and who do care, and awareness will start from there.
Jerimiah, I think what you are doing/planning is a good idea/business model...but look out for pushback from people who will see it/complain about it as being a "big brother" response.
Maybe from free speech people. Also, now that I'm thinking about it, for every MEGATECH company on the planet that has got something like what you are doing in their pipeline: watch out for "theft of proprietary info" being thrown at you.
I'm a social historian...I barely saw ANYTHING good coming at us with the WWW...and see nothing good coming at us (at the speed of light) from AI. When a thinking machine can do most of the work/thinking/planning now done by humans, why are humans even part of the equation.
I'm suspicious that class matters a lot more than religiosity here. The upper-middle and upper classes are conscious to try to enforce socialization. The working class is more content to leave kids to their own devices (literally). And church attendance is increasingly confined to the upper-middle class. I would be curious what this looks like if you can disentangle those effects.
But the main thing that strikes me is how much dating was apparently happening when I was in HS in the late 90s / early 00s. I knew other guys went to parties and some had girlfriends, but going on *dates*? I was deeper in the loser minority than I thought.
Yet even us nerds were hanging out together constantly. Multiple times a week getting together to play N64 after school. LAN parties almost every weekend. From what I can see, nothing like this is happening now, even most of the "popular kids" are spending time in a way that would be thought of as pathologically antisocial 25 years ago, not just "nerdy".
Another thing that comes to mind is the Calhoun experiments. In his 1962 experiments, four pairs of mice were introduced into a Utopian environment. There was no shortage of food or water or nesting materials, no predators, with the only limit being limited space. The population grew rapidly, reaching 620 by day 315, after which the population growth starting decreasing rapidly. Day 600 was the last surviving birth, bringing the total population to 2,200 mice, even though the experiment setup allowed for as many as 3,840 mice in terms of nesting space. The period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and mating partners, increasing anger in both non-dominant males who didn’t mate and females who couldn’t nurse or raise pups properly. After day 600 the population declined toward extinction, where females ceased to reproduce and male counterparts withdrew completely - they ate, drank, slept and groomed themselves, all solitary pursuits. The conclusions from the experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.
I'm a social historian and/so the mouse study has me really concerned.
Also, visited Australia about 20 years ago and what I learned about their social/societal benefits system was a wake-up call for me: no one had to work there to survive....but SURVIVE is the key word.
"Between 2008 and 2011, the share of high school seniors who did not have a job of any kind rose from 29% to 38%."
I was a HS senior in that period and my parents wouldn't even allow me to apply to jobs because "you don't need the money and other people are trying to feed their kids."
I don't know if you identify as an introvert or extrovert--as a former Pastor, extrovert is a pretty good guess--but there is quite a bit of extrovert bias in the interpretation of this data. My theory is that US society is changing to be more accepting of an introvert's preferences and that comparing that to a point in the past where we had less accepting society of people with that kind of personality is factual but not something to be called good or bad.
Huge extrovert bias here. Absolutely guilty as charged. And that bias has only grown the longer I've been in academia.
If I had a choice between a child with 10/10 intellect and a 2/10 social intelligence or a 2/10 intellect and a 10/10 social intelligence - I would take the second child, every day of the week.
Going to make a semantic complaint here: anti-social != asocial. More asocial people aren't doing anything to harm society, they're just trying to participate in it less.
Here's something I think about a lot and don't have a great answer.
Were there fewer true hermits 100 years ago? Or was it the case that lots of people wanted to be hermits but just couldn't be because of the need for social interaction to just get through life?
Hermits is a loaded term, I know. But you get the point.
What happens to this line of reasoning on a long enough timeline where “anti-social” people become the mean and no one participates in society anymore?
Often the most tantalizing data is the stuff that is either not presented or you wish you had but don't. Declining social engagement has been popularized by Bowling Alone, now updated by some of Prof. Putnam's more recent work. There is also data compiled by Prof. Galloway and Prof. Haidt that suggests the withdrawal from social activity and underperformance in other ways affects the boys more than the girls.
The prime activity and source of interaction among kids remains school. So the missing data may be not church attendance but volunteer activities at school. These would include athletics, music, drama, student government, the yearbook, and a variety of interest clubs that high schools sponsor. Assuming that each HS stays constant in its number of students, it might be possible to look at the size of school newpaper staff or football team tryouts over time. Or perhaps this is even included in the composite HS surveys that provided the religious and dating figures.
You're asking how many kids go on OUT to socialize, right? My kids socialized TONS with friends hanging out at our house, in school clubs, at our neighborhood softball games, and with kids on teams for online gaming. None of them hung out at malls, or street corners, or arcades, or restaurants, or in their cars, but they seemed social to me. Also, none of my kids "dated" because they said they weren't in a rush to pair up with anyone while they were still in high school. They're all happily married now. I'm starting to see similar behavior with my young grandkids. Ryan, I'm doubting that your conclusion that high school students are becoming incredibly non-social just because they don't do so the way teens did in other generations.
Youth today have access to fewer public spaces than previous generations. They live in suburbs that are increasingly car-centric and built for isolation. The public sphere has become more heavily policed and gatekept, especially for Black and brown kids. Online socialization is not only real but often safer and more affirming (especially for marginalized groups) than in-person interaction ever was. There’s a complex story here about urban planning and how we build (or dismantle) the conditions for connection.
I'm new to this substack, so maybe this has been covered. What is the definition of "dating" being used? It seems that my 1960s experience of dating was with one person. Just the two of us. A movie or dinner. Today, groups of kids go to prom. Groups go to a football game and then the horde goes for fast food. Thanks in advance.
At first I thought it was strange that more weekly attenders than monthly attenders met your “anti-social” criteria. But then it occurred to me that many of the weekly attenders may be getting their social needs met through church and church-related activities, and they might not think to count these events as “going out for fun and recreation.” I would suggest the “anti-social” criteria should include less than weekly church attendance.
Instagram went live in 2010…I think the jumps in data are def related to social media specifically. When people are all “it’s the phones” I draw a distinct difference between having a calculator/calendar/texting/calling/emailing/camera device with you and using said device for “social media”
You write, “They’ve been asking questions of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders since the mid-1970s.” But all of the included charts start in 1995! Why did you hide the first 20 years of data?
I went to high school in the 2010s at a very good public high school. I'm not exactly sure how I would have answered these questions when I was 18, but I do know I would have been, at the very least, unsure about whether to answer that I hung out with friends just once a week or more often than that. For me, and for many, probably even most kids at my high school, the vast majority of our free time outside of homework was taken up by extracurriculars, most of which were intrinsically social to a meaningful extent. I personally had Boy Scouts, GSA, Quiz Bowl, and various music commitments, all of which (except piano lessons) doubled as social time. Granted, my close friends were not always in every club, and the activities were not as intrinsically social as time at the mall that I imagine was frequently spent by teenagers in the 80s, but I still felt like I was spending time with friends almost every weekday and was far from lonely. Almost all my friends were in more or less the same boat.
My impression is that the time spent doing extracurriculars over the past few decades has gone up, especially at "better" high schools, in large part because college admissions have become more competitive and helicopter parents have become more common. This may affect survey answers in recent years, especially because I think it was relatively common for these extracurriculars to take up the time that would have been spent going on dates for some as well.
My high school says were in the 80's but I had the same thought. I think there is a qualitative difference between the social experience of extracurriculars and self directed but I can't put much confidence in the analysis and conclusions that doesn't include both.
Yeah, I mean, to be clear smartphones weren’t a thing in 1995, but the internet was. Video games were. (Video games largely moving online probably decreased socializing from when playing video games with your friends meant they had to physically come over to your house.)
Lots of antisocial teens are socializing, but with video gamers in Malaysia.
This was my thought, too. The digitization of socialization was progressing before the invention of the smartphone, but the smartphone accelerated that effect significantly!
Here's a different take on the data. Andrew Whitehead looked at 250K+ interviews from three waves of the National Children's Health Survey looking at the correlation between family church attendance and the presence in the home of children with different disabilities. The presence of a child with depression decreased family church attendance by 73% and a child with anxiety decreased attendance by 45% Both of those conditions significantly impact socialization. Maybe the same problems that keep kids from going on dates, socializing with friends and getting jobs get in the way of their families going to church?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jssr.12521
Depression and anxiety aren’t “disabilities” though?
They’re mental disorders. You say Tomato, I say tomahto.
No a and d are not "disabilities" but they are certainly conditions that make one disinclined, for a variety of reasons, to be around other people.
Observation: I'm seeing a lot more under 30s people with emotional support animals...and I honestly think there is a correlation between seeking emotional support from animals and not socializing with peers.
Great post!
I'm in the middle of starting a company that sells a few things directly related to this:
- medium-dumb phones (maps, calendar, camera but no browser or other apps),
- high-security and highly-controllable internet routers
- a service were we can manage (blocklist, hours of use, etc...) the router for you
- software that can limit the apps that are installable on a phone as well as websites that can be visited (which we would manage for you)
It's for both kids and adults. We'll probably launch in May or June. The feedback I've received is that people (teens especially) can find workaround for anything. My goal (which testing so far supports) is to overcome any kind of workaround. I'm in IT. If I can't hack it, I'm assuming few kids can.
I'm curious what folks here think is missing in the market as a service that I might not be thinking of, or something else I might be misunderstanding?
... Or an approach to marketing this?
Thanks!
Kudos to you for trying! I always thought the phone companies should've rolled out to market something designed for under 18s, kind of like what you described. But they won't because it's too profitable to get people hooked as early as possible.
Some parents and adults are seeing the problem. Jonathan Haidt has been writing a lot about it. I think another problem you'll run into is that many parents either don't care or don't have the mental bandwidth to care as they're too busy with life as it is. I also know that a lot of parents are still unbelievably ignorant of what goes on now on social media and the internet. It really amazes me to no end how they're not concerned about what is reaching their kids, and think only about their own experiences with online. And their approach to things online is: See no evil, hear no evil. Ergo, evil out there is other people's problems.
Nonetheless, solution has to start somewhere. Maybe your product will reach enough parents who are aware and who do care, and awareness will start from there.
Thanks Alex!
The goal here is to be zero-effort (and zero technical knowledge) from parents, at least when sold in-person (or installed by us for the router).
If they purchase online, though, they'd run into the issues you're seeing.
Jerimiah, I think what you are doing/planning is a good idea/business model...but look out for pushback from people who will see it/complain about it as being a "big brother" response.
Thanks Eileen! I'm not worried about people who aren't interested - they're not my customers. Do you anticipate some other kind of pushback?
Maybe from free speech people. Also, now that I'm thinking about it, for every MEGATECH company on the planet that has got something like what you are doing in their pipeline: watch out for "theft of proprietary info" being thrown at you.
I'm a social historian...I barely saw ANYTHING good coming at us with the WWW...and see nothing good coming at us (at the speed of light) from AI. When a thinking machine can do most of the work/thinking/planning now done by humans, why are humans even part of the equation.
I'm suspicious that class matters a lot more than religiosity here. The upper-middle and upper classes are conscious to try to enforce socialization. The working class is more content to leave kids to their own devices (literally). And church attendance is increasingly confined to the upper-middle class. I would be curious what this looks like if you can disentangle those effects.
But the main thing that strikes me is how much dating was apparently happening when I was in HS in the late 90s / early 00s. I knew other guys went to parties and some had girlfriends, but going on *dates*? I was deeper in the loser minority than I thought.
Yet even us nerds were hanging out together constantly. Multiple times a week getting together to play N64 after school. LAN parties almost every weekend. From what I can see, nothing like this is happening now, even most of the "popular kids" are spending time in a way that would be thought of as pathologically antisocial 25 years ago, not just "nerdy".
Hi Ryan, you may appreciate this data-driven post about this phenomenon: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/what-the-heck-happened-in-2012
Another thing that comes to mind is the Calhoun experiments. In his 1962 experiments, four pairs of mice were introduced into a Utopian environment. There was no shortage of food or water or nesting materials, no predators, with the only limit being limited space. The population grew rapidly, reaching 620 by day 315, after which the population growth starting decreasing rapidly. Day 600 was the last surviving birth, bringing the total population to 2,200 mice, even though the experiment setup allowed for as many as 3,840 mice in terms of nesting space. The period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and mating partners, increasing anger in both non-dominant males who didn’t mate and females who couldn’t nurse or raise pups properly. After day 600 the population declined toward extinction, where females ceased to reproduce and male counterparts withdrew completely - they ate, drank, slept and groomed themselves, all solitary pursuits. The conclusions from the experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.
Very interesting info/insight....and not in a good way.
I'm a social historian and/so the mouse study has me really concerned.
Also, visited Australia about 20 years ago and what I learned about their social/societal benefits system was a wake-up call for me: no one had to work there to survive....but SURVIVE is the key word.
"Between 2008 and 2011, the share of high school seniors who did not have a job of any kind rose from 29% to 38%."
I was a HS senior in that period and my parents wouldn't even allow me to apply to jobs because "you don't need the money and other people are trying to feed their kids."
I don't know if you identify as an introvert or extrovert--as a former Pastor, extrovert is a pretty good guess--but there is quite a bit of extrovert bias in the interpretation of this data. My theory is that US society is changing to be more accepting of an introvert's preferences and that comparing that to a point in the past where we had less accepting society of people with that kind of personality is factual but not something to be called good or bad.
Huge extrovert bias here. Absolutely guilty as charged. And that bias has only grown the longer I've been in academia.
If I had a choice between a child with 10/10 intellect and a 2/10 social intelligence or a 2/10 intellect and a 10/10 social intelligence - I would take the second child, every day of the week.
Going to make a semantic complaint here: anti-social != asocial. More asocial people aren't doing anything to harm society, they're just trying to participate in it less.
Here's something I think about a lot and don't have a great answer.
Were there fewer true hermits 100 years ago? Or was it the case that lots of people wanted to be hermits but just couldn't be because of the need for social interaction to just get through life?
Hermits is a loaded term, I know. But you get the point.
I think his point is that it’s bad that more people are antisocial or asocial.
What happens to this line of reasoning on a long enough timeline where “anti-social” people become the mean and no one participates in society anymore?
What happened to the mice?
Often the most tantalizing data is the stuff that is either not presented or you wish you had but don't. Declining social engagement has been popularized by Bowling Alone, now updated by some of Prof. Putnam's more recent work. There is also data compiled by Prof. Galloway and Prof. Haidt that suggests the withdrawal from social activity and underperformance in other ways affects the boys more than the girls.
The prime activity and source of interaction among kids remains school. So the missing data may be not church attendance but volunteer activities at school. These would include athletics, music, drama, student government, the yearbook, and a variety of interest clubs that high schools sponsor. Assuming that each HS stays constant in its number of students, it might be possible to look at the size of school newpaper staff or football team tryouts over time. Or perhaps this is even included in the composite HS surveys that provided the religious and dating figures.
You're asking how many kids go on OUT to socialize, right? My kids socialized TONS with friends hanging out at our house, in school clubs, at our neighborhood softball games, and with kids on teams for online gaming. None of them hung out at malls, or street corners, or arcades, or restaurants, or in their cars, but they seemed social to me. Also, none of my kids "dated" because they said they weren't in a rush to pair up with anyone while they were still in high school. They're all happily married now. I'm starting to see similar behavior with my young grandkids. Ryan, I'm doubting that your conclusion that high school students are becoming incredibly non-social just because they don't do so the way teens did in other generations.
Youth today have access to fewer public spaces than previous generations. They live in suburbs that are increasingly car-centric and built for isolation. The public sphere has become more heavily policed and gatekept, especially for Black and brown kids. Online socialization is not only real but often safer and more affirming (especially for marginalized groups) than in-person interaction ever was. There’s a complex story here about urban planning and how we build (or dismantle) the conditions for connection.
I'm new to this substack, so maybe this has been covered. What is the definition of "dating" being used? It seems that my 1960s experience of dating was with one person. Just the two of us. A movie or dinner. Today, groups of kids go to prom. Groups go to a football game and then the horde goes for fast food. Thanks in advance.
Former teacher...and that was my observation with my urban (Cleveland and Cleveland Heights, OH) high-schoolers.
At first I thought it was strange that more weekly attenders than monthly attenders met your “anti-social” criteria. But then it occurred to me that many of the weekly attenders may be getting their social needs met through church and church-related activities, and they might not think to count these events as “going out for fun and recreation.” I would suggest the “anti-social” criteria should include less than weekly church attendance.
Can this data be broken down between genders?
Instagram went live in 2010…I think the jumps in data are def related to social media specifically. When people are all “it’s the phones” I draw a distinct difference between having a calculator/calendar/texting/calling/emailing/camera device with you and using said device for “social media”
You write, “They’ve been asking questions of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders since the mid-1970s.” But all of the included charts start in 1995! Why did you hide the first 20 years of data?
Because not all questions are asked for the entirety of the survey.
Or I'm just too stupid to figure out how to patch the disparate datasets together.