Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia
Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. In the New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) he brings to light the “great rewiring of childhood” in which play-based childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood. The Anxious Generation was named a book of the year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Town & Country, Bill Gates, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads. In 2025, Haidt co-authored The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World with Catherine Price.
Haidt continues to promote reforms that would address the youth mental health crisis through his fiscally sponsored 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, The Anxious Generation Movement (TAG). Through coordinated action across policy, behavior, and culture, TAG brings together parents, educators, and young people to dismantle the phone-based childhood and restore healthy development grounded in play, independence, and real-world connection.
Haidt’s earlier research examined the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His mission has long been to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, The Constructive Dialogue Institute, and EthicalSystems.org.
Haidt is also the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006), and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018, with Greg Lukianoff).
He has written more than 100 academic articles, which have been cited over 100,000 times. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has given four TED talks and been named a TIME100 Health leader.