Stefan Woltran invites to the next talk in the DigHum Lecture Series:

We are pleased to invite you to this talk in our Lecture Series:

Tuesday, September 30, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. (17:00) Central European Summer Time (UTC+2)

Topic: “The Mass Destruction of Human Potential and the Human Spirit Since 2010”
(scroll down for abstract and CV)

Speaker: Jonathan Haidt (New York University’s Stern School of Business, USA)
Moderator: Allison Stanger (Middlebury College, USA)

To participate in the talks via Zoom go to: https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/96389928143?pwd=UU5YRkNuRmdoWHV4MFBwMWRCcUErdz09
(Password: 0dzqxqiy)

The talk will be live streamed and recorded on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/digitalhumanism

For further announcements and information about the speakers in the Lecture Series, see https://dighum.org/#latest-news. Please note that you can access the slides and recordings of our past events via that link.

In case you missed the last lecture by Alex Pretschner you can watch the recording of “Why GenAI Won’t Replace Software Engineers”.

Next events:
07.10.25 DigHum Lecture Mathieu Guillermin: New Humanism in the Time of Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence (NHNAI)
20.-21.11 Digital Humanism – Interdisciplinary Science and Research Conference

We are looking forward to seeing you!

Stefan Woltran




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ABSTRACT “The Mass Destruction of Human Potential and the Human Spirit Since 2010”:

Something changed in the lives of children in most Western nations who were born after 1995. The first alarm to ring was their mental health, which began to drop sharply around 2012. It is now clear that compared to previous generations, they are suffering from multiple additional deficits, such as in attentional capacity, education outcomes, social development, sexual development, and even spiritual development. In this talk I lay out the only theory yet put forth that can explain why this happened in so many countries at the same time – the early 2010s. I show how a “great rewiring of childhood” occurred in which the “play-base childhood” for which humans evolved was rapidly replaced by the “phone-based childhood.”

Short Bio of Jonathan Haidt:

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 his most recent release, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness he brings to light the “great rewiring of childhood” in which play-based childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood. Jon continues to push towards the reforms to put an end to the youth mental health crisis through his public health campaign, The Anxious Generation. Overall, Haidt’s research uncovers the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His mission is 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, and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles, which have been cited nearly 100,000 times. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers.” He has given four TED talks and strives to shine a light into what makes morality with his continued work.

Short Bio of Allison Stanger:

Allison Stanger is Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College; 2021-22 Research Affiliate (co-lead, Theory of AI Practice Initiative) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; an External Professor and Science Board member at the Santa Fe Institute; and a Senior Advisor to the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. In 2020-2021, she held the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Chinese edition to appear in September 2022) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is the co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics (SFI Press). Stanger’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post. She has been called to testify before Congress on five occasions and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Stanger received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.