Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. You’ll have to forgive the cliche, because it’s literally true. The author of The Anxious Generation, an urgent warning about the effect of digital tech on young minds, is based at New York University’s business school: “I’m around all these corporate types and we’re always talking about companies and their mission statements,” he tells me. So, he decided to make one for himself. “It was very simple: ‘My mission is to use my research in moral psychology and that of others to help people better understand each other, and to help important social institutions work well.’”
This is characteristic of Haidt: there’s the risk that writing your own brand manifesto might seem a bit, well, pompous. What comes across instead is the nerd’s desire to be as effective as possible, combined with the positive psychologist’s love of self-improvement (one of his signature undergraduate courses is called Flourishing, which sets students homework such as “catch and analyse 10 automatic thoughts”).
He is in London for a week or so and we meet in the deserted cocktail bar of a grand hotel off Whitehall at 8am (the early start makes me feel as if I’m being dragged into the orbit of a fearsome productivity routine). He speaks softly as a result of a vocal cord injury, which adds to an impression of scholarly courtesy – punctuated by bursts of excitement when he talks about, say, Socrates or the US constitution.
