What Should We Be Worried About?

THE END OF HARDSHIP INOCULATION

ADAM ALTER

Psychologist; assistant professor of marketing, Stern School of Business, NYU; author, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

When psychologists ask people to tackle a new mental task in the laboratory, they begin with a round of practice trials. As the novelty of the experience wears off, participants develop a tentative mastery over the task, no longer wasting their limited cognitive resources on trying to remember which buttons to push, or repeatedly rehearsing the responses they’re expected to perform. Just as vaccines inoculate people against disease, a small dose of practice trials prepares participants for the rigors of the experiment proper.

The same logic explains how children come to master the mental difficulties confronting them as they grow into adulthood. Trivial hardships inure them to greater future challenges that might otherwise defeat them but for the help of these experiential scaffolds. A child who remembers his mother’s phone number is thereafter better equipped to memorize other numerical information. Another who routinely performs mental arithmetic in math class develops the skills needed to perform more complex mental algorithms. A third who sits bored at home on a rainy day is forced to devise new forms of entertainment, meanwhile learning the rudiments of critical thinking.

Unfortunately, these crucial experiences are declining with the rise of lifestyle technologies. The operation of iPhones and iPads is miraculously intuitive, but their user-friendliness means that children as young as three or four can learn to use them. Smartphones and tablets eradicate the need to remember phone numbers, perform mental calculations, and seek new forms of entertainment, so children of the 21st century never experience the minor hardships attending those tasks. They certainly derive other benefits from technology, but convenience and stimulation are double-edged swords, also heralding the decline of hardship inoculation. Today’s children might thus be poorly prepared for the more difficult tasks that will meet them as time passes.

What’s particularly worrying is not that today’s children will grow up to be cognitively unprepared but the question of what the trend portends for their children, grandchildren, and so on. The “ideal” world—the one that looks more and more like the contemporary world with each passing generation—is the same world that fails to prepare us to memorize, compute, generate, elaborate, and, more generally, to think. We don’t yet know which cognitive capacities will be usurped by machines and gadgets, but the range will widen over time, and the people who run governments, businesses, and scientific enterprises will be the poorer prepared because of this foregone vaccination.