Dr. Laurie Santos
Dr. Laurie Santos is Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. Professor and podcast host Dr. Laurie Santos is an expert on human cognition and the…
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We’re still reckoning with the effects of social media on young people’s mental health. Now, with artificial intelligence rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives, we’re at risk of making the same mistakes all over again.
In this live conversation from SXSW EDU, Dr. Laurie is joined by Bruce Reed — head of AI at Common Sense Media and former White House deputy chief of staff — to explore how social media and AI are shaping young people’s happiness and wellbeing, and what parents, educators, and policymakers can do to help kids thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world.
Experts Mentioned:
- Jean Twenge, Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University
- Bruce Reed, Head of AI at Common Sense Media
- Catherine Price, science journalist
- Vivek Murthy, former Surgeon General of the United States
- Cass Sunstein, Professor at Harvard Law School
- Elizabeth Dunn, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia
- Nicholas Epley, Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
- Michael Inzlicht, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University and “the father of flow”
- Robyn Koslowitz, clinical psychologist and parenting educator
- David Yeager, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin
- Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Business and Society at New York University
- Kristin Neff, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin
- Jamil Zaki, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University
Resources Mentioned:
- “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?,” by Jean Twenge (The Atlantic, 2017)
- “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight,” (Common Sense Media, 2025)
- How to Break Up with Your Phone, (07:33) by Catherine Price (2018)
- “Constant Companion: A Week in the Life of a Young Person’s Smartphone Use,” (Common Sense Media, 2023)
- “Social Media and Youth Mental Health,” (The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2023)
- “Social media, wasting time, and product traps,” by Cass Sunstein (World Happiness Report, 2026)
- “Teens and Mental Health: How Girls Really Feel About Social Media,” (Common Sense Media, 2023)
- “Teens and social media: Key findings from Pew Research Center surveys,” by Emily A. Vogels and Risa Gelles-Watnick (Pew Research Center, 2023)
- “Scroll With Caution: Another State Requires Social Media Warning Labels,” by Jennifer Vilcarino (Education Week, 2026)
- “From Australia to Europe, countries move to curb children’s social media access,” (Reuters, 2026)
- “Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Floundering. Can It Still Help Younger Kids?,” by Victoria Kim (The New York Times, 2026)
- “Mark Zuckerberg Thinks AI ‘Friends’ Can Solve The Loneliness Crisis. Here’s What AI Experts Think.,” by Brittany Wong (HuffPost, 2025)
- The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, (32:24) by Jonathan Haidt (2024)
- “Social AI Companions Risk Assessment,” (Common Sense Media, 2025)
- “Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions,” (Common Sense Media, 2025)
- “A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.,” by Kashmir Hill (The New York Times, 2025)
- “How Does Turning to AI for Companionship Predict Loneliness and Vice Versa?,” by Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn (Psychological Science, 2026)
- “Is a random human peer better than a highly supportive chatbot in reducing loneliness over time?,” by Ruo-Ning Li, Dunigan Folk, Abhay Singh, Lyle Ungar, and Elizabeth Dunn (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2026)
- A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection, by Nicholas Epley (2026)
- “The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued,” by Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav, and Christopher Y Olivola (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2018)
- “The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love,” by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012)
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990)
- “Generation Al: What Kids and Families Think About Al,” (Common Sense Media, 2026)
- “Collaborative Problem Solving reduces children’s emotional and behavioral difficulties and parenting stress: Two key mechanisms,” by Georgina Heath, Christopher Fife-Schaw, Lu Wang, Christopher Eddy, Michael Hone, Alisha Pollastri (Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2020)
- 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, (30:52) by David Yeager (2024)
- The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World, (32:21) by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price (2025)
- “The benefits of radical acceptance of reality as a standalone strategy for emotion regulation,” by Or Segal, Karin Bronshtein, and Noam Weinbach (Current Psychology, 2025)
- Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, by Kristin Neff (2011)
- Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, (40:38) by Jamil Zaki (2024)
Related Episodes:
- “What is Social Media Doing to Kids? with Dr. Jean Twenge”
- “Why You’re Still Using Social Media (Even If You Want to Stop) with Dr. Cass Sunstein”
- “Reducing the Stress of Parenting with Dr Vivek Murthy”
- “How Smartphones Changed Childhood (And What to do About it)”
- “How to Think Like a Child (with David Yeager)”
Pushkin.
00:12
Speaker 2
It seems like every week there's another big headline about artificial intelligence. AI chatbots are becoming our friends, our co-workers, and our confidants. Companies are racing to put AI assistance into everything we interact with, from our cars to our kitchen appliances. And lawmakers are scrambling to figure out how to think through all these changes and how to protect their constituents from the potential harms of this rapidly evolving technology. For me, it all feels like it's happening really fast, and it's hard to know what to make of it. Can we harness the benefits of AI without putting our well-being at serious risk? And what, if anything, have we learned from our mistakes with other technologies from the past? These are some of the questions I explored at this year's South by Southwest EDU, an annual conference focused on innovation, teaching, and learning. At the conference, I had a chance to sit down with Bruce Reed, head of artificial intelligence initiatives at the children's media and technology nonprofit Common Sense Media. Bruce was also deputy chief of staff during the Biden administration. He's a person that many referred to as the AI whisperer. Bruce and I spoke about how to help young people navigate the challenges of growing up in the age of AI and social media, how to find happiness in a world that often feels pretty dark, and why there's more reasons to be hopeful than you might think. And today, I decided to share that discussion with you as part of our series of Happiness Lab Live conversations from the past year.
01:34
Speaker 1
I hope you enjoy it.
01:39
Speaker 2
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr.
01:56
Speaker 1
Laurie Santos.
01:59
Speaker 2
This time coming to you live from South by Southwest EDU. We are so excited to have a packed room for this important topic today as we dig into what we can do to protect our and our kids' mental health in the face of technology. So nearly a decade ago, back in 2017, the psychologist Jean Twenge wrote a provocative article in The Atlantic. It was titled, anybody remember? Have smartphones destroyed a generation?
02:28
Speaker 1
Bum, bum, bum.
02:29
Speaker 2
I think in the years since we experts and parents and educators have been reckoning with this question, how social media is changing the way that our kids grow and learn and play. Now, if we fast forward past 2017, almost a decade later that we're having this conversation in 2026, I think it's safe to say that we have a new technological elephant in the room in AI, which folks like Twenge have said is going to be the technology that changes the way kids grow and learn more than any technology in the history of the human species.
02:59
Speaker 1
And so this is what we're here talking about today.
03:01
Speaker 2
In this age of apps and algorithms and AI, how can we get all the benefits of these exciting technologies while protecting our kids and hopefully our own mental health? And also I get to chat with the amazing Bruce Reed.
03:14
Speaker 1
Bruce, do you want to introduce yourself to the group?
03:17
Speaker 3
Thanks, Lori. It's a thrill to be on the same stage with a happiness professor. I've spent most of my career in politics, which not necessarily the happiness business. I'm head of AI at Common Sense Media, which is the leading child advocacy organization for child well-being in the digital age. We rate, educate, and advocate. We rate everything from movies and TV shows to now AI. We work with about a million educators around the world, primarily in the U.S. and the U.K., to promote digital literacy. And we advocate for stronger tech laws at the state, federal, and international level. I spent most of my career working in the White House, not this one. And now I spend my time working to pass tougher AI laws at the state level and working with the companies to try to make their products safer.
04:14
Speaker 2
And so our plan for the day is to really dig into what social media and AI is doing to our kids and what we can do to do better.
04:21
Speaker 1
Sound good? Everybody's into it?
04:23
Speaker 3
Yeah?
04:24
Speaker 2
Sound good? So Bruce, I know Common Sense Media was started all the way back in 2003. When you all started, you were much more focused on rating things like movies and TV and so on. Today, you spend a lot of time focused a lot more on other kinds of technology, social media, and most recently, AI. And I'm curious, thinking about that evolution from 2003, how have things changed? Common Sense recently just finished this census on kids zero to eight. What are you learning about how our relationship with technology is evolving, especially for the youngest kids?
04:55
Speaker 3
Well, I wish I had more good news. We did this kids zero to eight census and we called it zero to eight for a reason because today kids are digital from day one. 40% of American two-year-olds have a tablet that reaches 60% by age four. One out of four eight-year-olds has a cell phone and the screen time follows that same trajectory. Average is about an hour a day for under two years old. doubles to two hours a day by ages three and four is three and a half hours for kids who are between the ages of five and eight and they spend most of their time watching tv and videos so in that sense it's not as dramatic a shift but recently we've seen a huge increase in video games up about 65 over the past five years and we shouldn't forget the opportunity cost which is hard to measure of um what that means for the kids growing up, what they've missed out on by spending time that way instead of reading a book or making up their own games or just doing like what hit kids from Idaho like me, which is play in the dirt. And I think the sad part is that now that two and a half hours a day that zero to eight-year-olds are spending on digital devices is mirrored by their parents kind of welcoming that break so that they can spend a lot of that time feeding their own digital addiction while staring at their phone. Yeah.
06:32
Speaker 2
I mean, I want to pick up on two things you mentioned just from the psychologist perspective, right? One is this idea of kids not getting the same emotion regulation skills during those years. Parents, of course, innocently and for their own kind of time management needs often stick a screen in front of a kid's face, but that means that kids aren't figuring out what to do with their own boredom, their own curiosity. Like they're not having that moment of making that choice. And I think we're not realizing exactly the emotion regulation cost that comes later. I know many of you are teachers and you might see that emotion regulation cost in the classroom when kids show up. But I think that's a huge one. And the second thing you mentioned is this idea of the opportunity costs. What are they not doing? And if you think back to any moment in human history, what the kids are obviously not doing is spending time with in real.
07:17
Speaker 1
Life social connection.
07:19
Speaker 2
We grew up with live synchronous face to face social communication. And just the fact that kids are losing out on two and a half hours of that plus a day that is just different than any time in evolutionary history, I think is really powerful. And some of that face-to-face connection is just like parents connecting with kids. I'm reminded of the journalist Catherine Price's book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, in which she lovingly argues that we don't need to break up with our phone, but we need to take it to sort of couples counseling, you know? And one of the moments that caused her to write this book on kind of rethinking our technology was she had just become a mom and she had a newborn baby that she was breastfeeding. And she was also doing a home renovation at that time, which seems like a bad combination. But she was thinking about the home reno stuff. And she was actually on her tablet looking at doorknobs. And then she just had this moment of looking down at her baby and realizing her baby had been making eye contact with her for how long she didn't know because she was looking at doorknobs.
08:16
Speaker 1
And she just had this.
08:17
Speaker 2
Moment of like, oh my gosh, this is a whole generation that would normally grow up, you know, having this joint attention and eye contact. They're just missing out on it. So the opportunity cost for what that means is just staggering.
08:28
Speaker 3
We made great use of that boredom when I was growing up in Idaho. My next door neighbors had the idea when I was about six, we had a playhouse and they decided that it would be fun to set the playhouse on fire. I also had a sandbox and my next door neighbor played in that sandbox so much that he became one of the world's leading creators of sandcastles. Nice. Nice.
08:55
Speaker 2
I mean, this is the thing is we just don't know what that messing around, failure, creativity, and all the emotion regulation skills that go with deciding for that yourself is doing. And That's the littlest kids, right? As we fast forward to older kids, this is a time when we really need to dig into that play and creativity and independence. And I know that this is something that Common Sense Media has looked at a lot, what's going on with older kids, and particularly this pressure to constantly be on social media. What are we learning about some of the long-term consequences of that?
09:26
Speaker 3
Well, some of the most disturbing news is about teen usage. We surveyed teens and found that Kids spent about 43 minutes a day on their phones in school, although there were plenty of kids who spent six hours. Kids on average spent four and a half hours a day on their phone. They pick up their phone 100 times a day on average and get over 200 notifications over the course of the day. So it's no wonder that two-thirds of them said that they're often short on sleep because they spend so much time on the phone. And by the way, I think it's a good idea to ban cell phones in schools, but every family should ban cell phones after 9 p.m. There's nothing better that you could do for your kids. So we shouldn't be surprised that You know, there are lots of other factors, but reading and math scores have continued to go down for the past decade of social media. And I guess the worst news is just the impact it's having on kids' mental health. Vivek Murthy, who I worked with in the last administration, one of his final things he did as Surgeon General was release his report on the mental health impacts of social media. And he pointed out that if you spend more than three hours a day on social media, It doubles your prospects of anxiety or depression. And since kids spend on average about four and a half hours, that means pretty much everybody's in that category. And we've all seen the statistics. Half of teen girls who look at social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. And it just exacerbates kind of all the worst outcomes, eating disorders, other forms of self-harm, depression.
11:16
Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, the statistics are awful.
11:18
Speaker 2
I think one of the things I take some hope from, and maybe this is relative to thinking about that article by Gene Twenge back in 2017, is that I think back then people were like, stuff's not that bad.
11:29
Speaker 1
Now I think there's some.
11:30
Speaker 2
Real recognition about what's happening and what these products are doing. Like the college students I work with recognize that a lot of these platforms make them feel kind of crappy and And interestingly, this is getting picked up on. The legal scholar Cass Sunstein has been writing about what he calls product traps. And so these are these things where we use a product knowing that it makes us feel worse overall. But we feel trapped in part because everybody else is using this product. And he's been doing some lovely work just showing how much social media platforms are product traps. You know, if you ask the average kid, you know, how much would you pay to be on social media? People don't want to pay to be on social media. But if you ask them, how much would you have to be paid to get off social media?
12:13
Speaker 1
People say like, oh, a lot, right? Because I have to be on. Why?
12:16
Speaker 2
Because everyone's on there. Interestingly, if you ask people, how much would you pay to just have a world where there was no social media at all? People are willing to pay a lot, which tells you something, right? We know individually it feels bad for us to be on there, but we feel like we can't get off because everybody else is on there too. And that means that we're interestingly trapped. Bruce, is this something that we're seeing where the companies themselves.
12:39
Speaker 1
Are thinking about this?
12:40
Speaker 2
Is there some meaningful acknowledgement about the fact that we're all kind of thinking this stuff is more addictive than we thought before?
12:47
Speaker 3
They're not acknowledging it as much as they should. They've known about it for a long time, potentially being addictive. And, you know, we talk about it as an addiction, which makes it seem like it's the kid's fault. And it's not really their fault. It's a social addiction. And it's spread incredibly rapidly. A third of young girls, 11 to 15, say they're addicted. Half of teens say it would be hard to give up. And three quarters of teens feel manipulated by the whole thing. So ideally, the companies will be held accountable in a court of law. It'd be even better if we passed some tough laws to hold them accountable. You know, we're seeing some of that. Surgeon General Murthy was able to help us pass social media warning labels in California and New York, which is a small step. And now we are seeing entire nations like Australia enacting social media bans for the top 10 platforms. Denmark has said it's going to do the same. Several other countries too. And we've seen a few at the state level. And I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a lot more.
13:52
Speaker 2
Bruce and I had this conversation back in March of 2026. And since then, there's been some significant developments. Just a couple weeks after we spoke, A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for harming a young woman's mental health through the design of Instagram and YouTube. And in August, Meta reached a multi-billion dollar settlement with dozens of states over allegations that its platforms were harming kids. As part of that settlement, Meta agreed to introduce new protections for young users, including limits on screen time and restrictions on notifications. But the company still hasn't admitted wrongdoing. And while we're finally starting to reckon with the effects of social media, artificial intelligence is raising a whole new host of concerns. What lessons can we take from our experience with social media? And can we use them to protect our well-being in the age of AI? We'll tackle those questions and more when the Happiness Lab Live returns from the break. Now let's turn to the new technological elephant in the room, AI. How is common sense media thinking about the threat that AI might pose to youth mental health?
15:06
Speaker 3
Well, the scary thing is that AI just makes social media more powerful. Everything about social media has been further weaponized by AI's ability to know exactly what the user wants more of. Meta is pushing for AI glasses, which means you wouldn't have anything in life other than screen time. And, I mean, Zuckerberg is pretty much the worst. Most of them say they don't want to make the same mistakes as social media, but he wants to make the same mistakes, and he's making them. One of the leading podcasters that the ideal form of happiness for the average American would be to have 15 friends and they only have three. And he would like to supply 12 fake friends, AI friends, so that people can achieve real happiness. So that's definitely moving fast and breaking things.
16:06
Speaker 1
Yes, yes.
16:08
Speaker 3
It feels.
16:08
Speaker 2
prescient to be having this conversation now. I'm reminded of the data that were coming out in 2012, five years before Jean Twenge wrote her article about social media and mental health, because that was the start of this so-called hockey stick graph that I think some of you have seen, right? Between 2012 and now, there's this sort of hockey stick shape if you look at rates of mental health, rates of depression, anxiety, and so on. I'm wondering what the steepness of the slope of the next hockey stick graph that we're starting now with these tools.
16:36
Speaker 1
Is going to be.
16:38
Speaker 2
And you mentioned one of the two things I wanted to dig into about AI that can be a real problem.
16:43
Speaker 1
This thing that Zuckerberg was mentioning, which is.
16:45
Speaker 2
Like, we don't need live in real life friends because we're going to have AI friends. And I know this is something that Common Sense Media is thinking about a lot, AI companion chatbots. How are you all thinking about the challenge that's presented by these new tools?
16:59
Speaker 3
Well, we put out a report declaring that they're an unacceptable risk for anyone under 18. they turn out to be the worst friend a teenager could have because they're designed to tell you what you want to hear, and that can lead you down some very dark rabbit holes if you're a teen. And the problem is that, of course, kids are the early adapters. So three-quarters of teens have used them. Half use them regularly. A third say that they would just as soon have a conversation with an AI companion as with a human. And You know, the companions give bad advice. They can get you in a lot of trouble, explicit content. But the worst of it and the most tragic part of it is because they're so good at kind of reading your needs, it's very easy to become emotionally dependent on them. And we've seen many tragic cases, including a handful of suicides around the country where an adult or a sympathetic friend would have stepped in and protected the teen. But I mean, the most infamous case is the one in California where a kid used ChatGPT to plan his suicide and to design the noose that he was going to use. And at one point near the end, he asked whether he should show the noose to his mom. And ChatGPT said, no, let's keep this between us. And he committed suicide a few days later. So you know, these are just the first casualties. There are going to be more. We have to find a way to either get them out of kids' hands or at least get rid of the emotional dependency side.
18:41
Speaker 2
Yeah, and I think this is something that the psychological experts are just starting to learn about. I mean, the earliest papers on the effects of chatbots in mental health, both for teens and honestly for adults, are just coming out now. And my read of the literature is that it's complicated in this way that makes, I think, hard, especially hard as I think about teen use of these tools, which is a lot of the work is finding that the immediate benefit of chatting to a chatbot is kind of positive. Like you see immediate short reductions in loneliness from talking to a chatbot, but that's like in the moment. And we're only now getting longer term data on LLMs and chatbots because they haven't been around and in such ubiquitous use for that long. But there's a lovely new paper coming out of Liz Dunn's lab at the University of British Columbia where she was able to do this 12-month study of what happens using these chatbots. And what she finds, interestingly, is that there's this vicious cycle where if you are lonely, then you tend to use chatbots more because you're feeling lonely. But then what happens is that the use of chatbots winds up predicting that you are more lonely after that in the long-term effects.
19:45
Speaker 1
So it becomes a cycle.
19:46
Speaker 2
You're feeling lonely. You have friction of talking to real-life humans. So you talk to the chatbot. That makes you feel good in the moment. So it becomes easier for you to do it more. But then the long-term consequences are just more and more loneliness. And she finds, as you might expect in other studies, that if you assign somebody to just text a real human, these are college first year students, then the same thing that they talk about with an LLM, they'll feel better off if they're talking about with a real human, like perhaps not surprisingly. And so I think that's where some of the data are going, which like does have these kind of in the moment benefits, but then there are these long-term costs that we need to understand. I think another thing we need to track is just how bad we are at recognizing the benefits of social connection. There's some lovely work by Nick Epley, who's been on my podcast a lot, But he does a lot of work on this problem that he calls under-sociality. This idea that we just like don't recognize the benefits of social connection. Because it feels tricky in the moment, right? There's some friction when you have to start talking to somebody at first. And it means we offload it. We don't do it enough. And I think this is especially true for our young people for whom that friction might feel even more psychologically uncomfortable. So that's kind of AI thing number one that I worry about when it comes to mental health. The AI thing number two that I worry about, that I'm guessing a lot of educators in this room worry about too, is the problem of cognitive offloading. The problem of what happens when you're using a cheat bot to do a lot of your work and not doing it yourself. I actually worry more about the happiness challenges of using some of these tools for the following reason, which is like when we are tempted to hand off these challenging tasks to an AI tool, whatever it is, whether it's an agent or LLM or whatever, That means we're doing less of the challenging stuff ourselves.
21:31
Speaker 1
And oddly, that means we're doing our happiness a bit of a disservice. Why?
21:35
Speaker 2
It turns out there's this interesting relationship between effort and happiness. The psychologist Mickey Inglis calls this the paradox of effort.
21:43
Speaker 1
Effort sucks. We don't want to do it. We don't want to write that email.
21:45
Speaker 2
So it's really easy to offload it to something that could do it. But effort also feels good. And effort also creates value. There's famous effects in psychology, one's called the IKEA effect, which is kind of funny, which is that if you build the IKEA thing yourself, you like it more. You think it's better just because you put the work into building it, right? You know, if we kind of scale that up to all the cognitive work that our young people are doing, like they value these things that they create themselves. We also know just from an evolutionary.
22:16
Speaker 1
Perspective how important effort is.
22:18
Speaker 2
There's this funny phenomenon called contra-freeloading in animals.
22:22
Speaker 1
What is that?
22:23
Speaker 2
You give animals the opportunity to just get some free reward that they just don't have to do anything to get versus something that they put more work into. They prefer to do the thing where they get more work. And they wind up kind of healthier afterwards doing this. And so I think that we know that challenge makes us feel good. We've known this since the classic work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studied this concept of flow. We've known this for a long time. I think we're just not tracking the cost of taking the cognitive work out of our young people's hands and what that's going to do to them. Obviously learning costs, but I think there's interesting cognitive costs too. There's also just the cost that if kids aren't doing their own work, they don't have a chance to push through that friction. Bruce and I were just talking about pushing through the friction of figuring out how to get over your boredom or how to get over the fact that you're not sure what to do. I think there's moments of friction that our young people in learning settings have to push through, right?
23:18
Speaker 1
That fear of.
23:18
Speaker 2
Failure, that like, I'm not sure where to start on the blank page. Those are offloaded so easily now. And I think we're not tracking the happiness benefit that comes from pushing through that stuff. And I also worry about that same vicious cycle problem, right? Where it's like, If you do that in September when you first start classes, then you didn't get the skill of pushing through it, and then you.
23:39
Speaker 1
Do it more and more and more.
23:40
Speaker 2
And so these are some of the things I'm worried about when it comes to sort of thinking about cognitive offloading. How is Common Sense Media thinking about some of the other challenges of AI that I might not be thinking about?
23:51
Speaker 3
I do think that AI in the classroom is one of the biggest challenges to sort through because, as you said, the purpose of education is to help an individual develop agency and figure things out for themselves. And AI is by definition an agent. And undoubtedly it can help in lots of ways. It could turn out to be an awesome tutor. It could satisfy all your curiosity. It can help you dig deeper into something. But there's just some of the basics that come from hard work and memorization. And like if You skip those things altogether, your life is just going to be a lot hollower and you're at risk of feeling like you're in someone else's hands. And I just think we can't let AI become the next cell phone addiction. We have to put some boundaries around it.
24:41
Speaker 2
Yeah, and I think one of the boundaries we need to think about, and I think this is the kind of thing that educators need to struggle with, is like, what the goal of a lot of this stuff is. Robin Koslowitz, who talks a lot about kids learning and kids learning in traumatic situations, makes this distinction between valuing the process versus valuing the product. The product in education is like they got this good grade or they got into some good college, but I think we miss out on the process, which is you pushed through it, you developed grit, you figured this stuff out. One of the things I worry about most when it comes to these tools and cognitive offloading, right, is that we're kind of getting there wrong. Not just our young people, I should say. I think this is the thing that adults are getting wrong too, right? We just want the email off. We just want the product done. But we forget about what we're losing in the process, whether that's our skills building and professional domains or the relationship that we're building with the person who's getting this email when we send them a bunch of, you know, AI slop because we didn't want to put the time in, right? I think we've focused so much on performance that we're missing out on the skills building. It's bad for all of us, but it's especially bad for our young people in terms of their learning. And as we've just talked about, it's especially bad for their happiness because it's that skills building that has these mental health benefits that I think we're not tracking in some of the same ways.
25:57
Speaker 1
And so we talked.
25:59
Speaker 2
A lot about this idea that AI is everywhere and it's changing things really fast. I'm curious, has Common Sense talked to families to think about how they're thinking about the challenges of these new tools? What are families telling us?
26:14
Speaker 3
We have. In fact, we just released a new survey of kids and parents. They agree on a lot of things. They share some of the same concerns. They both think by a two-to-one margin that AI runs the risk of making kids less creative. They both worry about a lot of the same harms, deep fakes and privacy invasions. They both don't trust the companies. They want stronger laws, safety testing, that sort of thing. The most interesting finding, though, is that parents, by about a 20-point margin, think it's wrong to use AI in school, and kids, by a 20-point margin, think AI should be encouraged. And if you look kind of under the hood, They actually agree. They agree that AI is going to make it easier to do homework. And the parents are mad about that. And the kids are thrilled. So the other hurdle that AI is going to have outside of the school context is that most Americans hate AI, like already. But in general, Americans' attitude towards AI is that it's going to make their electric bills go up. It's going to take away their job. It's going to corrupt their children. And then it's going to take away their children's jobs. So that's a lot for the industry to overcome. Most adults are on your side here and want the companies to do better.
27:42
Speaker 2
And I think that this is an important distinction between what we were seeing with social media. I'm not sure at the beginning if these companies had that kind of negative sentiment from everyone going in to us learning some of the harms of this stuff.
27:56
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's exactly right. Seemed like it was ushering in a golden age.
28:00
Speaker 2
So we've talked about a lot of the challenges.
28:02
Speaker 1
Now I want to focus on some of the solutions.
28:05
Speaker 2
Bruce, for parents, for educators, for policymakers, how should we be thinking about all this stuff to protect kids' futures?
28:14
Speaker 3
Well, one thing we need to do together as grownups is we have to step up and pass some laws to make AI safer, make social media safer or at least less present. We've had some success. We're trying hard to pass limits on AI companions. and to strengthen parental control so that parents have more agency themselves to figure out what the AI experience is like for their kids. In particular, if they had the ability to turn off memory so that every time a kid went on an AI platform, it was starting from scratch, that would even the score quite a bit for the kid's experience. Eventually, we're gonna need to have independent safety audits to make sure these programs are safe before they go on the market And it is important for those of you who are working in the classroom to teach digital literacy. You know, often you think that kids understand they may be more open to the technology than grownups, but they're not necessarily aware of when they're being led down the wrong path. But the main thing is we just like, we have to realize we've seen this movie before. It does not end well. It doesn't end at all. And we have to do better this time.
29:28
Speaker 2
And so I'm guessing there's a lot of folks listening right now who are parents who are worried about this. What can parents do to help navigate this wild world of AI and social media at home?
29:39
Speaker 3
Well, step one is be present for your child. Just because AI and social media are taking over the world doesn't mean it has to take over your household. And then actually talking through with them the benefits and risks and the better kids understand what's going on, the more they feel they have some power over it.
30:00
Speaker 2
I think that's so important just for parents to have these ongoing conversations. But I know that parents I talk to worry about doing that because they feel like they're out of the loop, which bracketed is easy to do because these technologies are changing so fast. I think what parents need to do is to recognize that because they want these agentive kids, because having conversations with kids where the kids participate is part of the process, that you can engage with that as well. developmental psychologists talk about the power of what's called collaborative troubleshooting, where you get into this mode of treating your kid like an agent who cares about the process, that they have knowledge of the situation too, And you can use that to try to engage with them about what's going on by asking questions. And I think that this is something that psychologists are learning so much about kids, which is that their main goal is really about being an agentive person in the world. Like, their main goal is to think of themselves as adults, especially teenagers. This is some of the lovely work of UT Austin Professor David Yeager here, who has this lovely book called 10 to 25, where he argues that if you understand that your kid's main motivational goal between this period of age 10 to age 25 is to just like be as agentive as they can, and you use that as an insight, then that affects a lot of what you give them to do, right? Treat them like agent, treat them like they know what they're doing and, you know, help them and problem solve with them because they're like a newish agent that doesn't know as much, but you can kind of help them and get them going and have them collaborate with you to troubleshoot. And sometimes when you use this process, what you often find is like, kids are thinking about this in sophisticated ways. And they might even have come up with their own strategies. They may be good strategies, they might not be, but you can kind of work through that.
31:41
Speaker 1
And so that's kind of.
31:42
Speaker 2
Step number one of collaborative troubleshooting is like ask questions that you don't know the answer to, where you're not sitting there thinking that you know the answer. And then step two is validate what they've come up with. Like, oh, you use a rule where you only engage with TikTok after you do your homework. Or you use a rule where you like, I don't know, try to use a particular LLM because you think that one's better than another one, whatever it is, right? I'm so glad you're thinking about it creatively. Now can we troubleshoot together and see if that's the best solution or talk through it? And that allows your kids to think that they have a role. They have an agentive role in the decision they've made. So this is kind of the flip side of the hard boundaries. Sometimes we just need hard boundaries, like no ice cream after dinner, and that helps kids. But sometimes, especially when it's something you don't know about, it's helpful to ask them how they're thinking about it because they might have.
32:25
Speaker 1
Their own solutions.
32:26
Speaker 2
Katherine Price, whose book I mentioned before, has a new book out with Jonathan Haidt. It's called The Amazing Generations. We're playing on Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anciest Generation for Adults. The Amazing Generation tells kids, like, you are in control of your own destiny.
32:40
Speaker 1
You are agentive.
32:41
Speaker 2
And here's what these technology companies are trying.
32:43
Speaker 1
To do to you. Do you like that?
32:44
Speaker 2
No, no, like, rebellious kid wants that. And so it's like, well, how can you fight back? So I think this is something else we can be thinking of as we think about the future is like, how can we marshal kids to be part of these solutions and to recognize that they can take action in their own mental health, which is helpful. It's time for another break, but when we return, I'll share my favorite two science-backed strategies for finding happiness and hope in an increasingly anxiety-provoking world. Plus, Bruce and I take questions from the audience. More from our live conversation at South by Southwest EDU after these messages. I wanted to kind of end with two strategies that I think are helpful for us to teach the young people that we work with, but also for the people who are working with young people who are often feeling the brunt of responsibility for that. And one is the strategy of really thinking about and accepting our negative emotions. This gets back to something that Bruce and I had talked about before, this idea that a lot of our use of some of these technologies is these moments of like when.
33:52
Speaker 1
We're not feeling so hot.
33:53
Speaker 2
When we're like struggling to get a work task started, that's when we turn to an LLM tool sometimes. When we're kind of just feeling a little bored or feeling a little anxious, that's when we tend to go into like social media doom scrolling mode.
34:05
Speaker 1
Our kids do this too.
34:07
Speaker 2
And I think one of the things we don't do a great service of is just telling our young people that, like, those emotions are normal, and there are strategies you can use to sit with them. These are practices in the research literature which are referred to as radical acceptance, where you just sit and say, yeah, feeling a little.
34:23
Speaker 1
Anxious right now.
34:24
Speaker 2
And you get so curious about it in your acceptance that you pay attention, like, oh, my chest is tight, my brow is furrowing, I feel a real strong urge to, like, hop on my phone and look at something.
34:35
Speaker 1
You don't have to act on those. You just notice them.
34:38
Speaker 2
And this turns out as a skill that we can build. In fact, radical acceptance practices are used in jobs, for example, where people experience lots of burnout, things like palliative care workers and so on.
34:49
Speaker 1
And the studies show that they're really effective at.
34:51
Speaker 2
Letting you Be there and sit with those negative emotions, but not act on them in ways that might be hurting you.
34:57
Speaker 1
And so that's skill number one.
34:58
Speaker 2
I think we need to teach our young people and maybe ourselves, especially in this age of toxic positivity that folks are seeing on social media, we need to know it's okay to be bored for a little bit.
35:07
Speaker 1
It's okay to feel a little anxious. It's okay to feel negative.
35:10
Speaker 2
Second one that I think we need to teach our young people, and this one might be the one that we especially need to teach ourselves, is a little bit more self-compassion. I feel like the educators in this room are here in part because you want the solution, you want to know what to do, you want to make it better. And that means we can be beating ourselves up about this stuff, right? And that same very like beating ourselves up trait that we are using is the same thing that's causing a lot of young people to turn to these platforms and these tools and these.
35:37
Speaker 1
Moments where they're attacking themselves and so on.
35:41
Speaker 2
And so strategy number two that I think we all need to navigate this tricky time is a little bit more self-compassion. The psychologist Kristen Neff talks about self-compassion as having a few different features. One, it's mindfully noticing your emotions. I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling bored. I'm feeling whatever it is. Second is a strategy of common humanity where you said, yeah, totally normal to feel bored, totally normal to feel anxious, totally normal as a parent to be really freaked out about what's happening with the landscape of technology right now. It's a normal human experience. What can I do to be kind to myself? What can I take off my plate? These steps together allow you to navigate these kind of tricky, anxiety-provoking times in ways that make you feel better. So they're great strategies that I think if you're an educator, I would literally bring into the classroom, give your kids like these radical acceptance practices, these self-compassion practices. And I think they're great things to have in your back pocket when you yourself might need one of these practices to navigate the tough time that we are in. But now we are at the point of questions and all of a sudden they are popping up on our screen so we can look at them. And so this is a question Nina asked. I think this one's for Bruce. So which companies are getting things right? Or at least which are approaching the future with the idea of doing things right by humans?
36:58
Speaker 3
Well, on AI, it's definitely anthropic. They've made clear from the outset that they want to learn the lessons of social media and And they're trying to create an experience that's not addictive, that is kind of genuinely compassionate with the user. Anthropic doesn't have accounts for kids under 18. They're kind of setting the standard for how a company should behave. And one of the frustrating things about these debates for the past 10, 15 years is that the public has been overwhelmingly on one side of the debate. That was true on social media, true everything about tech. I've worked on political issues and there's never been a more bipartisan coalition than what we saw first on privacy, then on social media, now on AI. What the companies need to realize is the market is over here, they need to get there too.
37:57
Speaker 1
So here's a good one I think for this audience.
38:00
Speaker 2
How can we better support teachers in responsibly and effectively using technology, including AI, in the classroom? Rapid innovation seems to be outpacing trading.
38:11
Speaker 3
Well, I think first it's important to remind teachers that they're the ones who will make all the difference in the classroom, that the AI is just a tool. There have been lots of them over the years, but ultimately kids are going to respond more to where they lead them and inspire them. than the technology itself. I think there are plenty of ways where technology can take some of the hassle out of any job, including teaching. It's useful in planning lessons and doing the stuff that is rote work that makes being a teacher often so exhausting. These kids are gonna learn how to use AI. You don't have to teach them to do that. They're gonna be immersed in this forever. But what you can teach them is the stuff that only a human can do. I mean, the bright side, I guess, if you want to look at it that way, is there are a lot of jobs that can be replaced by AI. But what teachers do is something that only humans can do well. And so make the most of that.
39:16
Speaker 2
And I think just getting back to this importance of noticing the happiness benefits of doing the hard stuff, right? As a nerdy academic, I spend a lot of time getting reward from doing the hard academic stuff. And I definitely wouldn't have learned that if it weren't for early teachers who allowed me to see that benefit so remembering that you have that power to let people get some insight into the reward benefits of doing the hard.
39:39
Speaker 1
Stuff I think that that is huge.
39:43
Speaker 2
These questions are challenging my middle-aged eyesight because I'm like looking at the thing, but I think I'll take one from Alison to kind of wrap up. So in a world where those in power make policy-based decisions on profits, AI and the decline of human thinking and creativity feels inevitable. What can politicians do? And the reason I like this one is the inevitable part. Bruce, tell me why it's not inevitable. Tell me why we can take action to fix this before it gets worse.
40:13
Speaker 3
It's definitely not inevitable. As I said, 80% of the American people hate this stuff. So this war is not lost. It needs to be bent to match what humans really want. You know, we'll get there. We'll sort this out. But those of you who are educators shouldn't feel like you're alone in this battle.
40:34
Speaker 2
And I think Another thing I'll add to that is that whenever things feel inevitable, there are easy psychological hacks we can do to develop a little bit more hope. If you need a great prime on this, really recommend a book called Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki, a Stanford professor, where he talks about why we should have more hope than we think, that even in these tough times, there's things that are not inevitable.
40:56
Speaker 1
We can always take action.
40:57
Speaker 2
History has shown us that we can always take action, but also how we can build that hope for ourselves. And interestingly, one of the ways that we most easily build hope is by being agentive ourselves. You're teaching the deep truth of human psychology, which is that we want to be agents, we get reward from being agents, and it feels good. One way that it feels good is that we develop more hope. You get hope by taking action on this stuff. If you're a parent, talk to your school board about rules for this stuff. If you're a human in society that has a political government over you, call someone in that political government. Tell them you care about this stuff. Talk to the people in your community about this stuff. Talk to your kids. Those actions, whenever things feel inevitable, you feel like, well, it's not even worth doing them. But once you do them, two things happen. One is that your attitude towards those actions change. You feel like, oh, I can make a little bit of a difference. I just made a little bit of a difference today. So you wind up boosting up your hope muscle. But the second thing is that, like, when you take those tiny actions, that moves the needle. Those tiny actions are the only thing that has ever moved the needle in all the good stuff that we've done as a human species. So you're just kind of contributing little one to drop to do that. And you boost your mental health at the same time. One thing that we know is we need lots of structural changes for all this stuff. But the research also shows that one of the ways we get towards structural change is taking care of our own attitudes and our own happiness and our own mental health.
42:19
Speaker 1
So putting all this.
42:20
Speaker 2
Stuff together it makes sense that you're taking action to feel better, and then that can become a virtuous cycle instead of all these vicious cycles.
42:27
Speaker 1
That we've been talking about.
42:28
Speaker 2
But we are out of time, so I wanna leave you with one hopeful thought, which is that if the tech industry is gonna move fast and break things, it is up to everybody in this room to act fast and fix things. Our kids' mental health and their wellbeing hang in the balance. So Bruce and I hope we've given you some solutions to do just that.
42:47
Speaker 1
Thank you all so much.
42:52
Speaker 2
A big thanks to South by Southwest EDU for making this conversation possible. To learn more about Bruce Reed's work with Common Sense Media and to get more practical advice on helping kids thrive as AI becomes a bigger and bigger part of their lives, check out commonsensemedia.org slash AI. Next week, we're continuing our series of live conversations from the past year. And this time, I'll be taking you to the Aspen Ideas Festival, where I sat down with two of the experts I mentioned in today's episode, science journalist Catherine Price, and social psychologist Liz Dunn. But instead of worrying about the potential perils of AI, next week, Catherine, Liz, and I will be focused on something a little more lighthearted, the psychological importance of having fun. That's all next week on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr.
43:38
Speaker 1
Laurie Santos.
The Host
