Why are boys failing? | Philip Zimbardo | TEDxRawaRiverSalon

In March 2011, Philip Zimbardo gave 5 minutes TED talk about demise of guys. Now he presents more research on the subjects and encourages us to help them for our common better future.

Philip Zimbardo was the leader of the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Now he is talking about young men from neighborhood who are losing their lives.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

I'm here to sound an alarm.

(Bell tolls)

It is a problem in every country
around the world,

and today I'm going to argue
it's only going to get worse

unless we begin to do
some important, remedial changes.

Boys are failing in school;
they're failing in business;

they're failing socially,
and even failing sexually.

They're becoming obese -
in America, we call it "fat-ass nation" -

and the point is
they are creating nothing;

they are consuming.

If you play video games
and you watch porn,

you are a consumer in the worst sense,
and you end up creating nothing.

And so, where is the next generation
of young men coming

that are going to help our society?

And for every woman in the audience,
Where will you find a good man?

And that's the title of your Polish book.

But it's not a phase.

People say, "Well, boys
have always gone through changes."

This is not temporary; this is permanent.

Here are some of the individual factors.

Political correctness -

men have a set of rules
about what they should not do,

but we don't really tell them clearly
what they should do

in order to be "a man" in our society.

So the old traditional roles
no longer fit.

The old role was to be a warrior
or a breadwinner.

What's interesting now,
most societies are in transition.

As women excel, as women
are doing better and better,

there's a whole set of new gender roles

that we need to discuss
and put into action.

Girls and women, I said, are excelling

at levels that we have never imagined.

The younger generation of women
are the legacy, the pride

of women's liberation
from the 70s and 80s,

and they create a new problem for boys

because girls are doing better and better,
while boys are doing worse and worse.

So the boys are opting out,
opting out of a confusing world.

They are isolating themselves
in a safer and simpler place.

Janusz is in his room.

They are going into virtual worlds.

What's good about
the virtual world for them

is that the objectives are clear;
they have control over the outcomes;

they have no fear, you never get rejected
as long as you practice,

because practice will make perfect.

Young men are trapped
in what we call present hedonistic mode.

As some of you know,
I've done lots of research

on the psychology of time perspective,

and there are many different time zones
that each of us live in.

Some of us live in the past,
some in the present, some in the future.

Young men in general
are more present-oriented

than older people in this society,

but when you get trapped
in a present hedonistic mode,

all you want is pleasure and avoid pain.

You never plan;
you never have contingencies;

you never set an agenda.

You cannot succeed in any society
if you are present hedonistic.

You must become future oriented,

and we'll see later that is one
of the goals of our program.

Young men are 25% more likely

to live at home with their parents
permanently now.

There used to be empty nest syndrome:
parents were sad when their children left.

The boys are not leaving;
they are staying in their room.

The problem is they don't do anything:
they don't help with chores;

they say, "I am entitled to it
because I'm a boy, I'm a man."

The most amazing thing
I discovered in our research

is that single mothers are on the rise
everywhere in the world.

Forty-one percent of all women
in America who have children

are single mothers, no husband.

This gets worse if you look at women
who are 30 years old or younger,

that figure goes to 50%.

That means one
of every two boys in America

whose mother is 30 years old

has no father, and sometimes,
almost from the time they are babies.

It's better in the UK and Poland;
it's only 25 percent.

But translate 25 percent
of the Polish population into numbers:

it's millions of young boys;

your young boys are
growing up without a father.

And I'll say girls need fathers
as much as boys do,

but boys need fathers in special ways.

Also we now know that single mothers
will often have one or two jobs;

if they have several children,
they are always on high levels of stress.

High levels of stress gets transmitted
to the boys in various ways,

and we see these boys
having not only poor social development -

they are probably many of the boys
that Agnieszka talked about -

they are likely to have
attention deficit disorder,

which I'll talk about in a minute,

and finally, they have
many behavioral problems

in school and in society.

If you have no father in a family,
socioeconomic status drops significantly

because you don't have two salaries,
you only have one.

Even for young men who have a father,
the father is psychologically absent.

Our research in America says
that on average a boy talks to his father

or a father talks to a boy
30 minutes a week.

That same boy sits in front of a screen,
computer screen or TV screen, 44 hours.

So again, here's a major problem:

boys don't have a father
physically present,

and even when he's physically present,

he's not emotionally and psychologically
present in too many cases.

Again, a big problem in America is -
it may not be the same here -

fewer and fewer families have
regular sit-down-with-family dinners.

Again, I come from a Sicilian background,

and having family dinners
is the most important thing,

lunch and dinner,
because you share values.

What we see here

are the consequences for boys
who don't have regular family dinners.

They are four times more likely to smoke,

and we know smoking kills,
smoking causes lung cancer.

They are two and a half times
more likely to use marijuana.

They are two times
more likely to use alcohol,

and even more important is

that they are four times more likely
to engage in hard-drug use later in life.

There was a Harvard study
of Harvard graduates;

they followed these men
throughout their life.

When they were older,
they wanted to know -

and these are men who are successful -

what was important in their success.

It had nothing to do
with how rich your family was,

had nothing to do with how rich you were,

the only issue that mattered
was the warmth of their childhood.

When they remembered back their childhood,

the ones who were successful
always remembered having a warm childhood

and specifically was related
to how close you felt to your father.

So here, men who were successful
had a childhood where they think back -

we call it past positive -

and I was close to my father,
he was close to me.

A main difference between men and women,
between mothers and fathers:

mothers, in general,
give love unconditionally.

If a boy comes home with bad grades,

mother hugs him and says,
"I love you anyway."

Father says, "No, you got to perform.
You got to get my respect.

You have to perform in school;
you have to perform athletically."

So fathers give love conditionally.

That means when you don't have a father,

you lose this extrinsic
motivation to perform,

and boys need that more than girls.

Boys now are escaping.

Escaping to the internet,
virtual worlds of video games

and now, for the first
time ever, pornography,

which is available all the time.

Pornography is available now 24/7
in every country in the world.

It never was that way before.

If men wanted to see pornography,
they had to go to pornography gallery,

or they were always embarrassed to go in
because somebody might see them.

Anybody, anytime, anywhere,
any age, without control

has before them an endless
array of pornography,

which we will look at
a little in a moment.

The pornography is ready to turn boys on.

But their brains
are becoming digitally rewired

because they are spending so much time
in this new digital world.

So the average boy plays video games
13 hours a week, much more than girls.

We'll say why girls don't play
as much as boys.

That's the average.

That means somebody
is playing 26 hours a week

and, we'll see in a moment, even more.

That adds up to the whole month
of February, 24 hours a day.

Jane McGonigal, who's the author
of a whole book on gaming,

says that by the time
a boy is 21 years old,

he has spent 10,000 hours playing
video games - that's the average boy.

During that time, he could have gotten
two Bachelor's degrees from university.

Again, video games
are designed by men for men,

and they are captivating.

They are enchanting.

The reason why it's so excessive -
boys have few outlets for expression.

Society is telling boys
that they're in a world

where their personal narrative
is not interesting or not acceptable.

These games are designed by men for men,
and they have male values:

domination, competition,
aggression, violence.

Women reject those kind of values.

There are some games,
which are more socially oriented,

which women are beginning to play.

There are clear and simple goals.

The rewards are guaranteed
once you reach a certain skill level,

and nothing else in life
is equally true for boys.

Gaming and porning
are part of living online now.

They are part of the whole
internet revolution.

These boys are spending time
not only doing this,

they're watching videos on YouTube,
they're searching, they have Facebook ...

The problem is they are sacrificing
being in the real world -

real world with us,
real world with flesh and blood.

And they don't know
they're sacrificing it,

because they have given up on us.

The reason I said earlier
is that it's here to stay.

The video game industry
is a multi-million dollar industry,

there're many different corporations
who are competing with each other,

and they're competing for the minds
and eyes and fingers of young men.

And the pornography industry,
which is a little newer as an industry,

is equally a multi-million
dollar business.

Those businesses make
more money, for example,

than all the Hollywood movies

and almost any other major business.

Warning.

Warning for children: audience, there
will be a few brief pornography scenes.

As I said, it's really accessible,
and the key is it's anonymous.

Porn audience is 75% male,

and on some of these sites
you have to pay,

and 98% of men are the ones
who pay with their credit card.

But we learned, at least in America,

the average boy is now watching
porn two hours a week.

That's the average; that means some
are watching four or more hours a week.

And usually, it's the break.

You're playing video games
three or four hours,

you get a little tired,
you switch to pornography.

And then you go back to the game.

In the United Kingdom, Pornhub, this site,

was the 31st most visited website
for children ages 6 to 14.

I mean, other websites
are doing Google searches

or Wikipedia, other things.

So, six-year-old children
are visiting this website,

not once, but regularly.

The problem is in many cases
it becomes addictive.

It's both the number of hours you play,
but it's also an arousal addiction.

Once you start playing,
you need it more and more.

Psychological addiction
is when I'm not playing the game,

I'm thinking about it.

When I'm in class,
I wish I was playing the game.

When we're having a family dinner,
I wish I was playing the game.

And pornography is the same.

Addiction is a preference for this
over everything else in the world,

and everything else
in the world gets boring.

School gets boring,

and now even girls get boring
compared to what they see in pornography.

And the arousal addiction,
as I mentioned -

in drug addiction,
you want more of the same.

You want more heroin;
you want more cocaine.

Here what you want is novelty,
you want change.

And the video industry
is going to give you change,

and the pornography industry
has infinite variety.

But the interesting thing now
is the brain quickly adapts

to this high level of stimulation.

Initially, it's rewarding,

but over time, you fail to be able
to get sexually, physically aroused.

There's a new phenomena called PIED -
porn-induced erectile dysfunction.

So now you have this paradox -

a boy is watching
this really exciting stuff,

and he no longer can get an erection.

He can no longer enjoy even masturbating.

The problem with [pornography]
is that size is everything.

Men in [pornography]
have enormous penises,

the women are incredibly
beautiful and stunning,

but the women are almost always degraded.

Young men everywhere have developed
performance anxiety about sex -

young men and old men.

Because it's not always possible
to get an erection and to sustain it,

and in these videos, men appear to have
unlimited non-stop sex for 30 minutes.

And all this physical performance -

again, in the older pornography,
there was a story, a narrative.

No story.

As soon as it begins,
people are either already undressed,

or they're undressing each other.

And it's all about physical performance.

For me, what's terrible,
what's missing is romance.

There's no kissing, there's no touching.

There's no talking.

There's no communicating boundaries.

An it's never ever a hint of safe sex.

Let me shift quickly out of that.

Boys, for the first time in history,

are getting less education
than their fathers.

Boys are more likely
to drop out of school,

repeat a grade, get more Ds and Fs
on their report card.

They are three times more likely
than girls to be diagnosed

with attention deficit disorder,

and in America, once you get diagnosed,
then, in many cases,

they persuade your parents
to allow them to give you Ritalin,

which allows the boy to focus,
but it's an addictive drug.

Once you start, you might have to take it
for the rest of your life.

We see that boys are a year and a half
behind girls in performance.

Again, partly because girls
are doing better than ever;

they're working harder,
and boys are working less hard.

The interesting thing
is school has become a girl thing.

In America, eight of nine teachers
at all levels except at the university

are women.

Many boys never have a male instructor.

Especially boys without a father -
there's no men in their life.

And we know that early experiences
frame interest in learning.

In kindergarten, boys' brains
are one year behind in their development

than girls' brains.

We need to readjust how we teach them
because it's not that they're dumber,

it's just that their brains
are developing more slowly.

And interestingly,
there's an unconscious bias

that female teachers have against boys.

This is shown in a recent study

where teachers graded papers
of boys and girls,

and when you took the names off,
the boys' grades went up 30%.

Again, we don't understand that,
we're following this up,

but female teachers have an implicit bias
for girls against boys.

In America, 70% of men are overweight.

One -third of all Americans
are clinically obese.

In Poland, it's much better,
it's only 25%.

But again, it's millions of Polish,
more men and boys, are obese.

The problems with obesity are many.

It increases the likelihood
of getting type 2 diabetes;

it increases the likelihood

of reduction in testosterone,
reduction in libido.

Young gamers are definitely
going in that direction

because they're sitting all day,
they're eating junk food,

they're sucking up sugar drinks,

and they get less sleep,

and they're making terrible choices,
and they're not exercising.

They're always sitting there.

So they've given up reading, writing,
communicating, exercising, playing sports,

and they're becoming not only obese,
but physically inactive and inept.

There are solutions -
I'm going to run through very quickly.

What can the government do,
what can schools do, what can parents do,

what can media do, men and women,

and then, what can
the Heroic Imagination Project do.

The government - we have to support
the father role more in legislation.

We have to get more men
teaching in school,

and the way you're going to do that -

teachers should be a more honored
profession in every country.

Teachers should be getting
higher salaries,

and if they were, more men
would go into teaching.

We got to get junk food out of schools.

We have to officially not allow
junk food in the cafeteria.

Schools have to begin
to teach life skills,

have to teach kids personal finance,
to teach them job skills,

how to do job interviews,

and teach them things we know
they're going to need as adults.

Sex education is nowhere.

Parents don't talk to kids about sex ed.

Especially if you're a single mother,
you're not going to talk to boys.

Very few schools in any place
in the world have sex ed

which includes biology and psychology.

Because sex is not just
the physical being,

but also the psychological.

Teachers have to now compete
with those video games.

You cannot get up
and talk to your students

without Keynote, PowerPoint, Prezi,
without dynamic visuals.

So now we have to have teacher education
that certifies teachers

to be able to use these new design
and presentation tools effectively.

Again, we have to encourage
teachers in school,

ranging from work groups
with a girl and a boy.

They can choose together,
because you just say to work together.

The girls work together,
the boys work together. No, no.

Boys have to learn from girls

many of these basic skills
that girls have been learning.

Parents have to teach
responsibility and resiliency.

Again, most parents have no idea
about the number of hours

kids are playing video games.

So an exercise is -

everybody in the family
for one week keeps an activity journal.

How much time you exercise,
how much time you watch TV,

how much time do you do homework,
how much time are you on your cell phone,

and how much time
are you playing video games?

We can leave out the pornography,
that would be awkward.

At the end of the week,
you compare these records,

and now you begin to say, "We have
to put more balance in our lives."

Take technology out of the boy's bedroom
or at least set limits,

and regular family dinners
are so important,

without anybody having a cell phone,
or you put it on mute.

Okay, very quickly now - Men.

Men have to turn off games
and have to turn off porn.

Men have to turn on people,
they have to make female friends.

They have to chat more, text less,
and they have to learn how to dance.

(Laughter)

They have to become
more future-oriented, set goals in life.

What are you going to do
next week, next month?

And they have to become more educated.

The important thing for young men
is they need a mentor.

Older men - you're an uncle,
you're a cousin, you're a neighbor.

Be a mentor.

Also, we can develop
mentoring programs online.

The critical thing, we now know,

the single most important thing
for physical and mental health

is daily physical exercise.

It's even more so when you exercise
outdoors, in nature.

Women - mothers and sisters have to offer
compassion, constructive criticism,

and support for young men.

They have to show boys and men
how to communicate feelings and values

without being a sissy.

They have to engage in as many activities
with men as possible.

They have to be flexible.

Women are now becoming
completely independent.

They have to figure out,

"How am I going to share my independence
so I don't simply turn men off?"

Media - we need more positive,
realistic images of men in TV and movies.

We have to change the gender bias -

either they're superheroes,

or they're fools when
they're around women in movies.

And we need more pro-social video games.

As I said before, they can be developed.

And games can be developed

which involve women
as well as men player simultaneously.

The conclusion is we are sounding
an alarm, me and Nikita, loud and clear.

We need to show men that they're lovable,
desirable, and not disposable,

and they are essential
for creating the next generation.

We have to encourage boys, men,
girls, women to become everyday heroes.

We have to promote the heroic
imagination in all schools,

and we want them to be HIP.

HIP is Heroic Imagination Project.

We teach -

the Heroic Imagination Project
in San Francisco,

which I developed some years ago -

we teach people, especially
young people everywhere,

how to stand up, speak up and take action
in challenging situations in your life.

Those challenging situations
can be in your family, in your school,

in your community,
and in your organization.

We teach people how to have
courageous conversations,

how to challenge unjust authority.

I was in London recently,
in Trafalgar Square,

there's all these generals
and admirals on horses, who won battles.

The thing that struck my eye
was this wonderful gold statue

of a golden boy on a golden horse.

Essentially, below it said,

"The youth of today
are our heroes of the future."

So this is what we're trying to do
in my Heroic Imagination Project,

is create a whole new generation

of young men and young women,
boys and girls,

who think of themselves
as heroes in training.

That everyday you do some act of kindness,
of caring, of compassion,

to make the world better
for the people around you.

As I said, in your family, in your school.

And of course, in this set,
no child is excluded.

Because one of your jobs
as a hero in training

is to make everyone feel
worthwhile and respected.

HIP USA is now combined with HIP Poland.

We can make our youth
real everyday heroes.

Together, they and we can make
the world better for everyone.

(Applause)