Are Cell Phones Destroying Kids’ Mental Health?

“Social animals are smart animals,” the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explained in his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Once humans developed technologies like writing and printing, Haidt wrote, they could imagine communities beyond their immediate surroundings and thus invoke such things as a nation and even humanity. People are motivated to maintain constant, lightly mediated communication with each other, Haidt observes: “Success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”