PERSON
Jonathan Haidt
American social psychologist (b. 1963), Skenazy's principal intellectual ally and Let Grow co-founder, whose research on moral psychology, the cultural origins of fragility, and the effects of digital technology on adolescent mental health has extended the free-range framework into the domains of AI policy and smartphone regulation.
Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU Stern School of Business, author of The Righteous Mind (2012), co-author with Greg Lukianoff of The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), author of The Anxious Generation (2024), and co-founder with Skenazy and Peter Gray of Let Grow. His intellectual trajectory — from moral psychology to safetyism to the smartphone-driven adolescent mental health crisis — has converged with Skenazy's free-range framework into the most influential contemporary critique of overprotective parenting and institutional fragility. In the AI age, Haidt has extended the analysis to artificial intelligence, writing with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt that AI will make social media "much more harmful" and describing AI on his After Babel Substack as "an even greater threat — one to our very humanity."
In The You On AI Field Guide
Haidt's early career was in moral psychology,