Candice Odgers

Who they are

Her affiliation is the University of California, Irvine. This publication records nothing further by way of biography beyond the cited work, and her position here is built from her own publication rather than from anyone's characterisation of it, which matters for a specific reason set out below.

Her review of The Anxious Generation appeared in Nature in 2024, as an invited book review by a named researcher in the field. A note on provenance belongs at the front of any account of it, because it limits what can be claimed. This publication read the review as a text-extractable PDF footed "This article has been excerpted for PSY 532", so it is an excerpted course copy rather than certainly the complete review. The excerpt carries the standfirst, the argument and the closing section. Its numbered reference list was absent, which has consequences returned to below.

Her core charge, in her words: "the book's repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people." On the standard of proof: "Such serious claims require serious evidence."

On what the field has actually produced, and note that she includes herself inside it: "Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers."

That last clause is the sharpest disagreement in the whole dispute, and it is worth being precise about why. It is a claim about direction, not only about size. Her reading of the longitudinal evidence is that the arrow runs the other way, or at least also the other way. That is a stronger objection than "the effect is small", because a small effect is a weak version of the thesis and a reversed arrow is a different thesis.

And her reading earns the same audit as the one it answers. For prior distress to explain the pattern, distress would have to come first and raise use, and the population-level trend would have to be driven by something other than the technology. The evidence is thin in both directions: the longitudinal studies are the same observational panels whose sensitivity to analytic choices is documented on the specification curve analysis page, and the designs that fix the order of events were run on adults and undergraduates. Her reading is defensible and unestablished, which is the same verdict this publication reaches on the thesis she is criticising.

Now the two things every summary of her review drops, and both are necessary.

She does not dispute the trend. Her own sentence: "A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer."

She agrees with part of the policy programme, and disagrees with precisely the two reforms the book is best known for. In full: "Two things can be independently true about social media. First, that there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children's brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, that considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them. Many of Haidt's solutions for parents, adolescents, educators and big technology firms are reasonable, including stricter content-moderation policies and requiring companies to take user age into account when designing platforms and algorithms. Others, such as age-based restrictions and bans on mobile devices, are unlikely to be effective in practice, or worse, could backfire given what we know about adolescent behaviour."

So the disagreement is narrower and more interesting than the coverage suggests. Both parties accept that adolescent mental health has deteriorated. Both want the platforms reformed. They part on the direction of the longitudinal associations, on the mechanism, and on two specific policies. This is a methodological dispute conducted in the published literature, and reading it as a feud misdescribes it.

One further fact, stated as a fact about the book rather than as a criticism of anyone: a search of the complete text of The Anxious Generation, including notes and references, finds her name zero times. Her review is not cited or answered anywhere in it. The timing explains part of that, since the review appeared in the month of publication and the book could not have answered it, and it does not explain the absence of her earlier work. The consequence for this page is the one already noted: her position here is built entirely from her own writing, because the book supplies no characterisation of it to work from.

Key papers

She is a working scientist whose output is journal articles rather than books, so this page carries key papers rather than a books table. No book by her was located, and none is implied.

Odgers, C. L. (2024). 'The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?' Nature, 628, 29-30. doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00902-2. An invited review of The Anxious Generation, and the most prominent published criticism of it. Read by this publication as an excerpted course copy; the numbered reference list was not in the excerpt.

Two further evidence claims appear in that review and neither is cited here, because both are keyed by number to the reference list the excerpt did not carry: that an analysis across 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the global rollout of social media, and that the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital technology use. Both are high-value and both need their primary source retrieved before they can be attributed to a named study. This publication does not guess at which papers they are.

A 2020 annual research review on adolescent mental health in the digital age, co-authored with M. R. Jensen in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, was identified by title and venue but not verified at a publisher record and not read, so it is listed here as an open gap rather than as a citation. It is the natural source for her position stated at review length.

Key ideas

The evidence question and the policy question come apart, and holding both halves at once is what the evidence supports rather than fence-sitting.

Where longitudinal associations are found, her reading is that young people who already have mental-health problems use the platforms more, or differently, which is a claim about direction and not only about size.

Serious claims require serious evidence, and most of the data in this field are correlational.

A generation is in crisis. She states the trend plainly in the same review in which she rejects the rewiring explanation for it.

Age-based restrictions and device bans are, in her judgement, unlikely to work in practice and could backfire, while content moderation and age-aware design are reasonable.

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