Jonathan Haidt Audiobooks

Smartphones, childhood and a case built step by step in The Anxious Generation

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Who is Jonathan Haidt?

Jonathan Haidt, born in 1963, is an American social psychologist and the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His home territory is the psychology of morality and moral emotion, and within the field he is known above all for moral foundations theory – the argument that human moral reasoning grows out of innate gut feelings rather than cool logic, and that different political orientations prioritise different moral instincts.

That research underpins a run of widely read books: The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), which set ancient philosophies against modern science; The Righteous Mind (2012), on the morality of politics; The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), on polarisation, mental health and campus culture; and The Anxious Generation (2024), which argues that smartphones and overprotective parenting have rewired childhood and driven a rise in mental illness.

Jonathan Haidt in audiobooks

Haidt is an argument-builder, and a good argument is excellent company in audio. The Anxious Generation, his title in our catalogue, lays out its case about smartphones, childhood and the rise in youth mental illness step by step, in the manner of a lecturer who intends to win the room rather than assume it.

For UK parents, teachers and anyone who grew up before the smartphone, the subject could hardly be more current – and there is a neat aptness in the format, too: a book about what screens have done to childhood, absorbed entirely without one.