Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Are Kids Today Really Worse Off? About this episode We hear a lot about rising rates of anxiety, depression, and fragility among kids today. But when Harvard researcher Alexis Redding https://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/alexis-redding uncovered a forgotten trove of interviews with college students from the 1970s, she found something surprising: their emotional struggles and developmental challenges sounded nearly identical to those of students today.
Dr. Laurie also talks with psychologist Adam Mastroianni https://www.adammastroianni.com/ about why our minds are so quick to believe that young people are getting worse over time. Together, they explore what we get wrong about “kids these days,” and how historical perspective can help us respond to young people with a little more compassion.
Experts Mentioned:
Alexis Redding https://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/alexis-redding, developmental psychologist and Co-Chair of Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education William Perry https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1998/1/28/bureau-of-study-counsel-founder-dies/, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Adam Mastroianni https://www.adammastroianni.com/, writer and social psychologist Nancy Hill https://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/nancy-hill, Charles Bigelow Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Resources Mentioned:
Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Health-College-Research-Supporting/dp/B0FQ9HXNB6, by Alexis Redding (2026) Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme https://www.amazon.com/Forms-Ethical-Intellectual-Development-College/dp/0787941182, by William Perry (1968) “The Illusion of Moral Decline https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x” by Adam Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert (Nature, 2023) Related Episodes:
“How to Make America's Young People Happier Again https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/how-to-make-americas-young-people-happier-again” “What is Social Media Doing to Kids? https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/what-is-social-media-doing-to-kids-with-dr-jean-twenge” “How Smartphones Changed Childhood (And What to Do About It) https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/how-smartphones-changed-childhood-and-what-to-do-about-it” See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript 10,177 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Laurie Santos? This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. You can hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, historians, athletes, and more about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen to your shows.
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1:45 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
1:52 Laurie Santos? If you're a fan of my work or of this podcast, you've probably heard the story of how I got interested in happiness research in the first place. If not, here's a very quick version. Back in 2018, I was an Ivy League psychology professor minding my own business when I started noticing that something was changing on college campuses. The students I saw in my classes, day after day, year after year, over time, they seemed different. They were more stressed, less joyful, more overwhelmed, less happy, more depressed, way less resilient, and way more anxious. I got so worried about this generation of college students that I decided to drop everything and fully retrain in the science of happiness, just so I could help them. As I worked with students more closely,
2:35 Laurie Santos? I found myself thinking, man, the kids today, what's up with them? Why are they so different than the generations that came before them? Why are young people today so messed up? As I became more of an expert on the science of happiness, I got asked a lot of these very same questions. I gave interview after interview emphatically claiming that the kids today were different, that they were doing worse than any generation before them. Turns out that this is a crisis nationally for our young people right now. Over 50% of college students say they feel hopeless most of the time. Over 60% of college students report feeling overwhelming anxiety most days. I used strong phrases like "the mental health crisis." I saw the college student mental health crisis. College student mental health crisis. This is the mental health crisis
3:20 Laurie Santos? that our students and our young people are facing nationally. I shared study after study showing just how much young people's well-being had worsened over time. Academic stress is one of the highest we've seen kind of historically since we've been measuring this. And I wasn't alone. Even now, it feels like nearly every article you see about the kids today involves some scholar talking about how messed up they are. Some of those scholars even get pretty judgy, arguing not just that the kids today are struggling, but that they're coddled or lazy. I tell you all of this to set up just how hot of a hot take today's happiness hot take is gonna be. Because today's happiness hot take is this: I'm starting to think that the kids today are all right, or at least as all right as the kids in any generation have ever been.
4:04 Laurie Santos? Now, you may be thinking, wait, Laurie, after all those interviews, do you really think you had the youth mental health crisis wrong? Well, get ready to find out, because we're gonna go on a bit of an adventure, a deep dive into what our minds get wrong when it comes to judging the kids today and what we can do to give them a bit more compassion.
4:28 Laurie Santos? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
4:54 Laurie Santos? As a young kid growing up in the 1980s, college student mental health expert Alexis Redding had a very special connection with the action movie hero Indiana Jones.
5:03 Speaker 03 My childhood dog was named Indiana Jones. The reason why my childhood dog was named Indiana Jones is that my father was an archaeologist.
5:12 Laurie Santos? Having an archaeologist dad during the Indiana Jones era would come to define a lot of Alexis's childhood. Every afternoon after school, Alexis would head to the museum where her father worked. She'd find ways to entertain herself as her dad spent hours methodically trying to figure out stories of the past that were hidden in small bits of bone and pottery. But Alexis's real introduction to archaeology came when she turned eight years old and got a chance to travel to her father's field site at the Great Pyramid of Giza.
5:41 Speaker 03 He and his team spent several decades, actually, running the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, which was unearthing the workers' village of the human beings who raised the pyramids and telling the stories of their lives. Up until that point, what my father did was a little bit vague. I didn't understand what it meant to be in the field. I hadn't seen that up close. And it was eye-opening to see how meticulous the work was, you know, literally using paint brushes and toothbrushes to move bits of sand away. And the amount of enthusiasm he had over finding a trash dump because that was such a treasure trove of information when you're an archaeologist,
6:23 Speaker 03 of the layer after layer of human life and what is left behind.
6:28 Laurie Santos? The fictional character Indiana Jones famously fell in love with archaeology when he first visited his father's Egyptian field site. Did that visit to Giza set Alexis onto a similar path?
6:39 Speaker 03 It was fascinating and entirely not for me.
6:43 Laurie Santos? Archaeology involved dealing with a lot of dust, and Alexis was not a fan of dust. But she did inherit her father's passion for figuring out hard academic puzzles. And the hard academic puzzle Alexis took on is the subject of today's Happiness Hot Take: the mental health of kids these days.
6:59 Speaker 03 I study the experience of young adults navigating transitions, the transition from high school into college, from college into the workforce. And I specialize in mental health and well-being during those processes.
7:11 Laurie Santos? Alexis is the faculty co-chair of higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the editor of a new book entitled, "Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students." Alexis is therefore very well-versed in the way that adults typically talk about the kids today.
7:28 Speaker 03 There is a narrative that somehow this generation is so decidedly different than the generation that came before.
7:34 Laurie Santos? Alexis bought into this narrative herself when she was beginning her doctoral studies. She knew about all the data showing that rates of depression and anxiety were on the rise in modern students. She, too, wondered what was wrong with them. But Alexis's take on the kids today changed back in 2016, when she got an unexpected call from a Harvard administrator offering $3,000 for a somewhat unorthodox summer research project.
7:57 Speaker 03 As a doc student, somebody offers you $3,000 to do any sort of intellectually engaging work, you say yes.
8:05 Laurie Santos? What was this unusual project? Well, that Harvard administrator and her team had been cleaning out the attic of the university's Bureau of Study Council building when they stumbled onto something unexpected.
8:16 Speaker 03 They had found this recessed bookshelf that they had forgotten was there. It was behind an old dusty tapestry, and it was behind these locked glass doors.
8:26 Laurie Santos? On that hidden bookshelf were boxes and boxes of old research materials.
8:31 Speaker 03 And what she told me is that they had these old conversations with students, recordings of student interviews with young people who were navigating the college years. And they didn't know what to do with them, but they felt like there was something interesting there.
8:45 Laurie Santos? Alexis also thought there might be something of interest there. One of the most foundational studies in Alexis's field of college student development was published back in 1968 by famed Harvard psychologist Dr. William Perry. The project involved extensive interviews with university students from the 1950s. That sounded suspiciously similar to what the Harvard administrator had stumbled across. Could the conversations in those old boxes be Perry's original interviews from his foundational paper? Could they offer a glimpse into what college student mental health was like back in the day? And by comparison, how bad things had gotten today?
9:20 Speaker 03 You know, being the daughter of an archaeologist means that you are primed to go on a grand adventure of discovery, and that seems like a typical thing to do.
9:28 Laurie Santos? Alexis's first visit to the attic archive did indeed feel like a grand adventure. When she pulled back the tapestry, she found piles and piles and piles of old research materials.
9:40 Speaker 03 But it was a mess. It was like you ask a kid to clean their room and everything goes into the closet. Like, that had happened over maybe 20 years.
9:46 Laurie Santos? The attic space also featured the very thing Alexis most detested when visiting her dad's field site.
9:52 Speaker 03 It was dust-filled. I spent part of my three grand on, you know, Claritin and an air purifier so that I could spend time up there.
9:59 Laurie Santos? Dust. Why'd it have to be dust? But, pack of Claritin in hand, Alexis got to work trying to make sense of the mess. She began organizing all the random papers in those boxes. She discovered card catalogs of old interviews, outdated training materials, and then one day Alexis stumbled upon a sheet of paper that didn't match the others.
10:18 Speaker 03 Everything about it looked and felt different. Like, the paper felt different. It had purple mimeograph ink. The font was like a little thicker from an old-school typewriter.
10:28 Laurie Santos? The purple-inked page appeared to be a transcript of a student being interviewed about his mental health struggles. Could this be a conversation from Perry's foundational 1950s study? The only way to find out was to locate the rest of those pages. As weeks and weeks of searching passed, slowly but surely, more of those strange purple pages turned up.
10:47 Speaker 03 And then I found page 18. Right in the middle of the page said, "President Nixon and the Vietnam War." This was supposed to be from the 50s and 60s. My history's bad. But that's later, right? That's later. I had this moment in the attic of like, I'm not a presidential historian, but I feel like that's off.
11:03 Laurie Santos? Tricky Dick was president from 1969 until 1974. That was more than a decade after Perry had concluded his foundational study.
11:12 Speaker 03 Which means that I didn't have something from the original study. I had something from a replicated study from the 1970s. Now, this is my field. I know the literature. I know that this study was never published.
11:23 Laurie Santos? Had Perry conducted a second study with a new group of students from the 1970s? One that he had never published or even told other scholars about? That seemed unlikely. But Alexis needed to know for sure. So she tracked down several people who had worked at the Bureau of Study Council back in the day. And those former staff members said, oh, yeah, I remember. Dr. Perry did try to redo that original study. Oh, and it took forever, they explained. It turns out that Perry had spent 10 painstaking years collecting hundreds and hundreds of hours of student interviews from the 1970s on reel-to-reel tapes. Alexis was floored. She hadn't found the interviews behind Perry's original publication, but in some ways, she'd stumbled across something even more remarkable.
12:07 Laurie Santos? A completely forgotten follow-up study filled with unpublished student voices from the 1970s. Somewhere out there were hundreds of tape recordings of data that could provide a never-before-glimpsed peek into the mental health of her father's generation. Those lost tapes could be the key to finally understanding what was so different about the kids today.
12:28 Speaker 03 And now he just needed to find them.
12:30 Laurie Santos? The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.
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16:29 Speaker 04 Anytime people see something bad in the world, they're like, "Well, that didn't used to be there."
16:34 Laurie Santos? We'll get back to Alexis Redding's adventure in just a moment. But before we do, I want to introduce you to a different psychologist, one who also spends a lot of time thinking about how people have changed over time. His name is Adam Mastroianni.
16:47 Speaker 04 There's some horrible murder on the news. It's like, you know, they didn't use to do that. Some politician does something unethical, you know? They didn't use to do that. It seems like we have all this stuff in the present that I just don't think we used to have in the past. And I think part of it's because, like, no one really knows what the past was like, even the people who were there for it.
17:04 Laurie Santos? Adam's an expert on what our minds get wrong when we think about how people used to behave back in the day, especially when it comes to their moral goodness.
17:12 Speaker 04 I feel like I had spent my whole life hearing people say like, you know, you used to be able to leave your door unlocked at night and everything would be fine. You used to be able to trust a man's word and now you can't. You know, this fallen, sinful, evil world we live in is not the world we used to live in. I can remember a world, or at least I've been told about one, that wasn't so mean and nasty.
17:35 Laurie Santos? People love making sweeping claims like these. Back in my day, people were better. Society these days is going right downhill. Or perhaps more relevant for Alexis's work in today's Happiness Hot Take discussion, the kids today, they're so much more sensitive and fragile and depressed than my generation was. Claims like these kind of piss Adam off. He often finds himself wondering, do we have any real evidence that people are actually getting worse over time?
18:00 Speaker 04 It's like, things can get better and things can get worse. I think it's merely that the standard of evidence for things getting worse is so much lower than the standard of evidence for things getting better. It's like you don't really need to provide any proof to feel convinced or to be convincing that like something new and bad has happened.
18:20 Laurie Santos? And Adam is quick to point out that whether people think other people's behavior has changed matters a lot. Take for example, what we think about how nice the average person has become over time.
18:29 Speaker 04 If you think you used to live in a nice world and now you live in a nasty world, like what difference that must make for the way that you conduct yourself? Because for one thing, you might be a little more licensed to be nasty if you think like, well, it's kind of what we're doing now. Like, the rules are out the window, so I can't trust other people. Therefore, I don't have to be a trustworthy person either. Everybody else is cheating, so I should cheat too.
18:50 Laurie Santos? Our beliefs about people's moral decline can also have big political consequences.
18:55 Speaker 04 If someone's like, hey, man, things used to be great, now they're bad. Wouldn't it be awesome if they were good again? Just like, put me in charge and I'll do it. And like, by the way, if you could turn off all the rules and like, give me unlimited power, that'd be really helpful. But you should do that because we live in these unprecedented times where things for the first time have gotten really bad. That means we should take unprecedented measures to turn them back around. So like, this is a favorite refrain of aspiring dictators and autocrats everywhere.
19:21 Laurie Santos? But do we really believe that people today are worse than they were decades ago? Adam wanted more than just anecdotes. So he surveyed a nationally representative group of subjects and asked them to rate how kind, honest, nice, and good people are today versus in the past.
19:35 Speaker 04 In every survey we did, people were like, "Today is the worst time, and when you ask me about the past, it gets better." You can even tell the difference between today and four years ago. It just gets a step worse each time we get closer to the present.
19:48 Laurie Santos? But have we always thought that the kids were worse back in the day?
19:51 Speaker 04 Here, we had a major head start in that other people had asked other people these questions for a very long time. So we have all this archival survey data gathered for decades and around the world where people are asked questions like, "Do you think things are getting worse? Do you think people are less respectful than they used to be, less ethical, less kind, less friendly?"
20:11 Laurie Santos? Adam was able to gather lots of data from these archival surveys. He amassed more than 200,000 data points, testing people all over the world, going back as far as the 1940s. And in more than 80% of these archival surveys, most people said, "Yep, people today are worse than they were in the past."
20:29 Speaker 04 So we can see that not only do people, a majority of people, believe this in the US, majorities of people believe that morality is declining in every country that's ever been surveyed.
20:40 Laurie Santos? But, Adam wondered, who are the folks driving this effect?
20:43 Speaker 04 The suspicion that, like, it's a certain kind of person who says that people are less good than they used to be. It's probably a conservative, and it's probably an older person. And we found that neither of those things are fully true. They're somewhat true. So it is true that people who report themselves as being more conservative or more on the right side of the political spectrum do say this more, so they see a bigger change. But even if you go as far left as you can go in our survey population, they too perceive decline over the same periods of time. So it's not like being on one side of the aisle turns the effect on and off. When it comes to age, it's actually a little more complicated. So it is the case that older people say there's been more decline in their lifetimes, but they have a longer lifetime in which to witness that decline.
21:26 Speaker 04 So what we really want to know is, do they perceive a greater rate of decline? So if you just divide how much Moral decline they've seen over the number of years that they've had to see it. You get the same number if you're younger or older, and you do get the same number. So it's not just conservatives and it's not just older people who are saying this. Everybody, regardless of age and political persuasion, can agree like people are worse now than they once were.
21:47 Laurie Santos? But is everybody right? Is Adam smart to be skeptical? Or has there really been a continuous and steep decline in people's kindness, honesty and niceness over time?
21:57 Speaker 04 If that's true, like that's the biggest effect in all of social science. Like, that's the most important thing we should figure out because if people used to be nice and now they're nasty. They're like, well, how did that happen? When did it happen? Is there a way we can reverse it?
22:11 Laurie Santos? Unfortunately, figuring out if people have in fact gotten less nice over time is kind of hard.
22:16 Speaker 04 There's no like great objective measure of this, right? We can't go into the Arctic and like drill for ice cores that tell us the historical amounts of niceness in 1750. But what we can do is look again at all this archival research we have where people are asked about the state of their moral worlds at that time. So questions like, have you looked after someone's mail, plants or pets while they were away in the last month? Have you given up your seat on the bus? Did people treat you with respect all day yesterday? If it is the case that people are getting worse and worse over time, we should be able to pick it up on these questions. People like surveyed back in 1985 should say, I was treated with respect all day yesterday. And then people in 2025 should say, I wasn't treated with respect all day yesterday. Instead, we find that in all of these questions, they're flat over and over again, flat, flat, flat.
23:01 Speaker 04 People give the same answers every year.
23:02 Laurie Santos? Across more than 100 surveys, testing more than 10 million people worldwide from the 1960s until today. Adam found that people report seeing exactly the same levels of niceness, honesty and kindness over time. But those are just surveys. Is there any way to measure whether people's actual moral behavior has changed across time?
23:22 Speaker 04 So another way of looking at how people treat each other interpersonally is to look at what economists have been doing in their labs for the past 50 years. They do these economic games and games is like a strong word for what these are. I'd hate to hang out and play games with economists, but basically people come into the lab. They play like the prisoner's dilemma or a common goods game. These are games where. Essentially, you have the option of being generous or selfish with a stranger.
23:46 Laurie Santos? A team of economists put the data from all these different do you want to be nice or mean to a stranger games together into what's known as a meta-analysis. You can think of a meta-analysis as one big statistical test that mathematically combines the results of lots of studies on one topic. And the meta-analysis Adam found included more than 500 different generosity experiments, running all the way from the 1950s until today.
24:09 Speaker 04 And what they wanted to know was, are people more likely to be generous or selfish with a stranger? And the researchers themselves tell us that they went in thinking that people were going to be more selfish over time. They expected to find that finding. Instead, they found the opposite. People were 10 percentage points more likely to choose the generous option in these games than the selfish one.
24:30 Laurie Santos? Not only have people not gotten meaner over the last 70 years, they've actually gotten 10% nicer. Adam guessed that most laypeople would find these results shocking.
24:40 Speaker 04 We just took those findings and asked another sample of people to predict them. We described the games, we tell them the period of time we're looking at, and we said, we'll pay you extra money if you get this right. Like, just where did it go over time? And people say, much like the researchers, they expect that people got more selfish over time, when in fact, they got more selfless. So even when you make the question really specific, even when you pay people to get the answer right, they will tell you that people are meaner when in fact, they're nicer.
25:08 Laurie Santos? Adam calls this strange effect the illusion of moral decline. We think people are getting worse over time, that everybody is less honest and kind and nice than they used to be. But Adam's work shows, we're just wrong. But where does the illusion of moral decline come from? Adam thinks it arises because of the combination of two common cognitive biases. The first bias is one that we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab. We don't notice the good stuff in life nearly as much as we notice the bad stuff.
25:35 Speaker 04 It's just a negativity bias. We pay more attention to bad things than good things. This is why, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. You're more likely to be served a negative news story, you're more likely to click it. But that's enough to make it seem like the world's always bad. I don't think that's enough to make it seem like the world Was once good. For that, you need an additional effect. This one comes more strictly from the memory literature. It's called a fading affect bias, which is just the observation that the pleasure of good memories does not fade as fast as the pain of negative memories. So like, if you got turned down for your high school prom, like, that feels pretty bad at the time, but 20 years later, it's maybe a funny story or maybe a relieving story, right? I found my person and like, so glad I didn't end up with that one.
26:19 Speaker 04 Whereas like, if you had a great high school prom, like, probably it was fun at the time. And you remember, it's like, it's not as fun as it was to experience, but it's still pretty good. And those two tendencies are what happens in memory on average. The good things lose some of their goodness, but generally remain good. The bad things lose more of their badness, and they sometimes flip to becoming good. And so if you combine these two phenomena, the fading affect bias and the negativity bias, you can create this perception that the world is now bad, but it was once good.
26:48 Laurie Santos? Let's do a quick recap. Why do people mistakenly think that people today are worse than they were in the past? Reason number one is the negativity bias. When we look out at the world as it is today, we naturally notice people doing lots of bad stuff, but we don't tend to notice all the people doing good stuff. This starts us off on the path of thinking, hey, people today are kind of crappy. Then our minds get hit by bias number two, the fading affect bias. All the bad stuff we noticed about people in the past starts to slowly seem less bad as time goes on. The past becomes rosier and rosier. Ergo, we come to believe that people today suck more than they did back in the day. Adam says that these two biases can cause illusions of decline more often than we realize.
27:32 Laurie Santos? Take, for example, another situation in which people often say things were better in the past, with music. Think about the newest song you've heard recently. Is that song better or worse than the music that was on the radio when you were in high school? If you're like most people, you probably think that today's music is just worse than when you were a teenager. That today's music ain't like that old time rock and roll, as it were. But notice how the same two cognitive biases are at work when we evaluate how music has changed over time.
28:00 Speaker 04 You hear both good music and bad music. The bad music feels worse than the good music feels good. And then you get this feeling of like, you know, back on the radio in whenever you were growing up, we only had good stuff. It was like mainly hits. But it's because you've forgotten and now don't care about all of the bad music. You forgot about the number one hit of Disco Duck by Rick D's and his cast of idiots. That's their literal band name. Like, no one remembers that that was, in a, you know, a brief moment of hysteria, a number one hit in America. They remember The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, music that's lasted.
28:31 Laurie Santos? I've had this phenomenon. When I go on road trips sometimes, I'm, you know, listening to whatever's on the radio because my phone sucks and it doesn't talk to my car. And so I'll hear like, oh, it's Casey Kasem's, like, you know, Top Countdown. And they do these retro countdowns. And my husband and I were driving one time and it was like the 1987 Casey Kasem Countdown. I was like, oh my God, 1987 was the best. There was like the cure. Like, this is gonna be amazing.
29:04 Laurie Santos? Oh my gosh, it was terrible.
29:10 Laurie Santos? So much terrible stuff.
29:18 Laurie Santos? And I was like, oh my God, none of these exist in my memory anymore. It's just that one amazing Cure song. But actually, like, the Top 100 was just as bad in 1987 as it was today, even though my memory does not believe that at all.
29:31 Speaker 04 It's so funny. I've had the exact same experience, driving with my dad, listening to like those SiriusXM stations where they play verbatim Top 40 Countdowns. Because it's a rare peek into what the past was actually like at the time. No one today is picking these songs for you. This is like what America picked on that day in that year. And I think there's actually so few ways of really peeking into what it was like to be a person back then. But like, no, that was the radio people listened to.
29:54 Laurie Santos? I want to highlight the point. The point that Adam just made because I think it's super important. To know if people are really getting worse over time, we have to have an accurate way to peek into the past. But reliable windows into earlier eras are super rare. Adam had archival data sets, so he had the receipts to show that people were nicer in the past than we remember. I had the actual Casey Kasem countdown from 1987, so I could hear that my beloved old time rock and roll was just as bad as the songs of today. And that gets us back to today's Happiness Hot Take. For years, I and so many other scholars have assumed that kids' mental health today is more messed up than it was in previous generations. But could I and so many other scholars be falling prey to yet another illusion of decline?
30:38 Laurie Santos? The only way to find out would be to find an accurate archaeological peek into what college students were really like back when Casey Kasem did that 1987 countdown, or when our parents' parents' generation went to college. For decades, researchers like me assumed that no such accurate peek existed. But that was about to change. The idea that there might be these materials that could change the story of what it means to grow up in this pivotal moment in time, I was going to find them. The Happiness Lab will return in a moment.
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34:01 Laurie Santos? College student mental health expert Alexis Redding spent her formative years watching her Egyptologist's father piece together stories of past generations with small bits of bone and pottery. Now, she was poised to put together her own story of the past, one that could tell us something really important about the present. That is, if she could find the lost data tapes of a mysterious unpublished 1970s study.
34:24 Speaker 03 I dug through the basements. I climbed through the other things in the attic. I, at some point, pried open the drawer of a rusty file cabinet in the basement that had been sitting in water. And I was able to find meeting minutes and the old letters to funders and confirm that the study had taken place. It had been rigorous, but I couldn't find the tapes.
34:44 Laurie Santos? After smashing through all the rusty file cabinets she could, Alexis turned to her last hope: the university archive, that spot where institutions stick all the historical stuff that they're not sure what to do with.
34:55 Speaker 03 Month after month, I was sitting in the archives, opening box after box. Until one day, I lifted up the top of a box, and there was the first set of them. It took me almost a year, but I found them.
35:09 Laurie Santos? Alexis finally had her long-lost archaeological peek into what student life was like when her father was in college. She was finally ready to analyze the data.
35:18 Speaker 03 So I enlisted the help of my colleague, Dr. Nancy Hill. And as we were framing what it was that we were hoping to hear on these recordings, we started from a "kids these days" place. Our idea was, oh, this perfect time capsule of interviews from the 1970s? Obviously, it's going to help us figure out what is so different about being a college student today. And we both sat down to listen independently. And we both had the same just jarring realization that what we were actually hearing sounded no different than what our students were talking about in our office hours, in our classrooms, that there was this level of continuity that we had absolutely not expected.
35:58 Laurie Santos? Give me some examples.
35:59 Speaker 03 The loneliness that they were struggling with, the challenge of finding friends, finding their people.
36:05 Speaker 05 I remember walking through the dining hall many times, then just not seeing anyone that I felt comfortable with to sit down with. And I would just go off and sit by myself.
36:16 Speaker 03 The pressure to have life figured out by graduation and the sense of the ticking clock. You know, it just seemed really huge and sort of overwhelming. I was afraid of the courses and I was afraid I wouldn't do well and all that. Things that students come into my office to talk about today were exactly the things that those students were talking about.
36:34 Laurie Santos? Alexis wasn't able to share the students' actual recordings because the 1970s researchers didn't think to ask for podcast usage in their original consent forms, which makes sense because podcasts didn't exist in 1975. But Alexis was able to share the actual quotes from student recordings, and that's what you're hearing now.
36:52 Speaker 06 I think I compared myself to other people too much when I first came, you know? Like, a lot of kids came from money, and I started to compare that to what I had, and I worried about that. I went through a period of depression between January and February.
37:06 Laurie Santos? I'm getting to the point where I don't know what I want, and, I don't know, I'm not even sure how to deal with people. Listening to these reenactments was so shocking for me. We are all sort of pessimistic and cynical about everything when we think about our chances of getting a job. These are the same kinds of worries that my Yale students share in my happiness class today.
37:26 Speaker 06 I really collapsed one day. I just was, I felt like I was gonna cry all the time, and that had never happened to me before, because I've never been a crier, and I've never been that unhappy. I always kind of believed in myself. Now, I would sit on my bed and listen to music and feel like, what am I gonna do?
37:47 Speaker 03 It was so remarkable to hear those parallels. And then, every so often, there would be these peppered in details of like a student on the recordings asking for the ashtray or a lighter or something that was so anachronistic. But the core developmental, who am I? What do I want? How am I gonna find my place? That was so beautifully connected. It was really disorienting for us as researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis.
38:20 Laurie Santos? Alexis analyzed the results every way she could think of. Each new analysis revealed the same finding: the mental health of the 1970s students on those tapes was simply no different from the mental health of the kids in the 2020s. A last-digit attempt to confirm her original hypothesis, she enlisted the help of a new group of research collaborators, the kids today.
38:42 Speaker 03 So I set up some focus groups with current students, and I was fully transparent. These are interviews that took place in the 1970s. I need you to help me figure out what is similar and what is different. And I gave them two highlighters. Green was what you identify as similar, and pink was anything that was different. And in focus group after focus group, I just watched the transcripts turn green with highlighter ink.
39:06 Laurie Santos? The kids today could not see any difference between their own mental health problems and those faced by their grandparents' generation. The typical student's happiness struggles just hadn't seemed to change in over 50 years. I first heard about Alexis's findings at a workshop at Harvard over a year ago. For weeks, I couldn't get her results out of my head. They simply didn't fit with all the studies I'd read and all the results I'd talked about in my own interviews, all those findings showing increasing rates of depression and anxiety in kids today. I asked Alexis where she thought the discrepancy came from.
39:39 Speaker 03 I think the first thing is really to begin to decouple these two trends of what is happening simultaneously. One, to understand what is a clinical challenge and what is a typical developmental challenge. There are students who are having very real mental health crises, where they need intervention from clinical counselors. And then, the vast majority of students are those who are just struggling with typical developmental challenges of transition, of what does it mean to leave home, move to a college campus, be asked to answer these big questions about what do I want out of my life? How am I going to get there? And we conflate these two things, which means that, number one, we all panic. So the second a student comes to us and they tell us that they're lonely or that they have anxiety,
40:24 Speaker 03 we leap to this is a clinical problem. So we're really trying to have a different kind of conversation about what's really going on, what is typical, normal developmental and hard, about being a young adult, about being in college, and to recognize the clinical challenges that are happening on a separate track.
40:44 Laurie Santos? I resonated with Alexis's idea of these two tracks because research shows that there definitely are more college students on that first track today than there have ever been in the past. Students facing clinically significant levels of mental health issues that require urgent professional treatment. Students facing acute symptoms like panic attacks or suicidality, or a level of anxiety that requires medication just to function. But there are also lots of other students in track two. College students who are having a hard time because college life has always been hard. That second group is simply reacting normatively to the typical developmental stresses that come with being 19 years old, no matter what generation you're in. Alexis worries that we might be hurting this second group of students when we inadvertently
41:29 Laurie Santos? lump them in with the first.
41:30 Speaker 03 We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact.
41:38 Laurie Santos? Alexis also worries that kids today are starting to own the narrative that adults typically tell about them, that they're just so different than previous generations. And that's why she's begun a new intervention with the students in her classes, one aimed at teaching them just how similar their current generation is to previous ones.
41:55 Speaker 03 And so I give them a series of quotes and I tell them these either come from the 1970s, or these are from the 2020s. And I ask them not just to tell me which generation they think it's from, but why. And so we'll put up a quote like a student who couldn't get out of bed and it feels like he's wasting his time because he doesn't want to go to class because he doesn't know what's going on in class and he doesn't know to ask for help, so he just doesn't show up. And my students will tell me, oh, I've done this, or this is bed rot. He's probably scrolling on TikTok and will build this strong case and will even tell me there's no way that this is a student from another generation. And then I reveal, one after the next, that indeed, this is a student from another generation,
42:38 Speaker 03 from your parents' generation or from your grandparents' generation. And I think that simple activity really opens our frame to better understanding.
42:48 Laurie Santos? I couldn't help but try out Alexis's intervention with my own students at Yale. So this is for this episode that we're doing about how mental health has changed over time. And I'm going to do an exercise with you guys that Alexis Redding does with her students. She was the one that found these recordings from the 1970s. So these are Harvard students, class of 1975. And also, she was doing qualitative interviews with students from 2025. And so the game is just like, can you tell which is which? Whether this is a student from 1975 or a student from 2025? Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. Here is quote number one. "I remember walking through the dining hall many times, then just not seeing anyone that I felt comfortable to sit down with.
43:32 Laurie Santos? And I would just go off and sit by myself." This is a student talking about his first year on campus. So 2020s or 1970s? That just kind of sounds like me my freshman year. My Yale students seem to get it wrong, too.
43:46 Speaker 05 I'll say that's totally in line with the 2020s experience. Yeah, 100% 2020. That is like peak undergrad social anxiety.
43:57 Laurie Santos? Turns out, nope, it was 1975. What? They, too, were shocked by what they were hearing. Okay, next one. "I went through a period of depression between January and February. I'm getting to the point where I don't even know what I want. I don't know, I'm just not sure how to even deal with people anymore." 2025. I think there's something about the language. Of like pausing and not finishing a sentence that I'm like, oh, Gen Z-er. They were just more articulate in the 1970s. Yeah.
44:26 Speaker 03 I think the phrase, I don't know how to deal with people and talking about like, people scare me and stuff like that. That's very much like a 2020-ish type of thing to say.
44:36 Laurie Santos? They too assumed that their grandparents' generation was different.
44:39 Speaker 05 In my head, like 1970 students are all like happy and like congregating and like they know exactly what they want to do. And they're going to get jobs and whatever, and they don't have to worry about any of these things. That's my stereotype at least.
44:50 Laurie Santos? Eh, 1970s again. I lied. They're all from the 1970s, as you probably figured out. But how does it feel hearing that they're so similar? Oh, well, it gives me a sense of like common humanity that like everybody goes through the same things.
45:05 Speaker 05 The first thing to come to mind, like what this feels like to me is you know, those ancient graffiti at Pompeii or whatever, where it's like people talking about bathroom humor kind of stuff. I feel like looking at that always makes me feel like, aww, they were just like, yes. And I feel like we think of ourselves as it's like this unique, special thing where we're dealing with bad mental health or whatever. But yeah, I guess it probably was this universal experience and people in the 1970s probably were feeling the same way. I think that's like kind of cool.
45:30 Speaker 03 I mean, there's something definitely validating about it. So it's nice to hear that it really doesn't matter what time. You're probably going to go through the same sorts of questions and securities and whatnot. I think we put such a false barrier between us and current students with the kids these days narrative. Because naturally, what do they conclude from that? The grownups in my life aren't going to listen. They don't respect me. They don't understand what I'm going through. And if we can, you know, just take some of the bricks out of that wall and build that connection. It's incredibly meaningful to sort of see that generational similarity and to lead with a sense of empathy of, I was there too. And if we can tap back into that, and we can.
46:14 Speaker 03 We can have a much more humane, grounded conversation with young people that is a lot less "kids" these days and a lot more, "I know what you're feeling. I experienced it too. Now that I've sort of tapped back in, I can relate differently."
46:27 Laurie Santos? But there was a second group that Alexis realized might benefit from hearing the details of these old interviews: the 1970s participants themselves. With permission from the university, Alexis was able to track down 20 of the original participants. And her question for them was simple: "Do you remember how tough it was to be in college?" And then she offered them the chance to hear the recording of their original interviews. How did the 70-year-old participants react to hearing the struggles of their 19-year-old selves more than 50 years later?
46:57 Speaker 03 They would tell us, "I remembered the broad strokes. I remembered generally what was happening, but I didn't remember how it felt."
47:04 Laurie Santos? These former students had succumbed to the same cognitive biases that psychologist Adam Mastroianni had described earlier. They heard the same negative stuff that we all do about kids today in the news. At the same time, their memories of their own college days slowly got muddled by the fading affect bias. They simply didn't remember how bad things often felt as a college student. All those moments of loneliness and job worries and academic stress were clear as day in the recordings. But the participants couldn't remember just how bad those moments felt at the time.
47:35 Speaker 03 And that, to me, was so, so interesting. Indeed, what they started to say is that they wished they'd heard the recordings sooner, so that when they were raising their kids or teaching their students or talking to their grandkids, they could have related better.
47:49 Laurie Santos? But there's still one archaeological mystery from Alexis's adventures that we haven't solved yet. Dr. Perry spent 10 years painstakingly collecting hundreds of interviews with students from the 1970s on those reel-to-reel tapes. Why had he decided to replicate his original study 20 years later with a new group of students? And why did he choose not to publish those findings? How did all his data end up in unmarked boxes on some random attic bookshelf? The answer to this mystery was buried inside that wet, rusty file cabinet that Alexis described smashing into earlier. Sitting at the bottom was a sheet of notebook paper, covered in scribbles, of what seemed to be the minutes of a random research meeting. Only later would Alexis discover that the notes from this particular meeting were important.
48:34 Laurie Santos? They were from the conversation in which Perry's team made their fateful decision to abandon the new study. Alexis finally had her solution, not only to why the study had begun, but also why it was shelved.
48:47 Speaker 03 There was a researcher who said, in these poignant words, that they couldn't believe that they had to accept the null hypothesis, that there was no difference between generations. The study was replicated because they wanted to see what was different about kids these days. That they had done their work in the 50s and 60s, and by the 70s, with everything that had changed in society, they had decided kids these days were so different, they had to do the study again.
49:11 Laurie Santos? Perry's team had exactly the same hypothesis about their contemporary students that so many of us have about the kids today. Those adult researchers who grew up in the 1950s looked at the college students of the 1970s, walking around with their weird bell bottoms and speaking so anxiously about the Vietnam War and post-college job prospects. And they asked themselves, what the heck is up with kids today? There's got to be something that's so different about them.
49:38 Speaker 03 And the researchers in 1979 felt like they had failed after 10 years and literally thousands of hours' worth of work. And that was why the study was sent off to cold storage, because they hadn't been able to prove generational difference. And here we were, looking back to 1975, saying exactly the same thing. There's no difference.
50:00 Laurie Santos? That's a nice way to sum up this week's Happiness Hot Take. There's no difference. Gen Z college students today are going through the same sorts of struggles as college students faced in their parents' parents' generation. And again, I want to be super clear here. I'm not saying that there aren't college students today who are facing real mental health struggles. Sadly, there are far too many. And surveys show that the rate of those clinical-level mental health struggles have indeed gone up, over time and over generations. But we also have to remind ourselves to be a little skeptical whenever we start thinking that the kids today are so much worse than how kids used to be. Our lying minds are prone to seeing an illusory decline whenever we think about how things have changed over time,
50:43 Laurie Santos? whether that's what we believe about people's kindness or the kids' mental health, or the crappiness of music in the latest top 10 chart. So the next time you hear someone say something disparaging about the kids today, I hope you will ever so gently hit them with the hottest of happiness hot takes. The kids today are actually all right, or at least just as all right as the kids have ever been. And be sure to tell them that you heard that happiness hot take here on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. When it comes to taking care of their customers, Amica goes the extra mile.
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53:21 Laurie Santos? Flu season is here, and it's a great time to take a simple step to help protect yourself and your family. That's why I'm headed to CVS Pharmacy to get my flu shot. And honestly, scheduling my appointment was a breeze. With CVS, you can schedule appointments for up to four family members at once through CVS.com/flu or the CVS Health app, so you can get it done in one go. Did you know that flu shots are free with most insurance plans? Visit your local CVS Pharmacy for your flu shot and get a $5 off $20 coupon with any vaccine. Schedule today at CVS.com/flu. Flu shots are no cost with most insurance. Eligibility varies by patient and insurance plan.
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54:12 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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