Jonathan Haidt: The Coddling of the American Mind

before I say anything about professor Hite who will tell us all about his area of research I want to mention that as I said earlier I was the I am the interim acting director of the center and when bob has now who's the sort of the founding director of the center approached me earlier there's summer to ask me if I would assume this role you know I sort of hemmed and hawed a little bit because I have my own research projects and and things I wanted to take care of and a bunch of deadlines that I needed to meet but I looked at the roster of speakers and I saw that Professor height was speaking you know in the middle of October and I thought okay I'll do it I was most excited of all to welcome him here and maybe even to introduce him so for me it's a great honor to introduce Professor Jonathan Hite let me just briefly tell you about him if you don't know who he is I have to assume that that's not true that you don't know who he is because you're all here for a reason but he is a professor of ethical leadership at New York University Stewart Stern School of Business his main area of study is of course moral psychology he received his BA in philosophy from Yale University in 1985 and a PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 he then went on to do a postdoc at the University of Chicago where he spent some time I don't know how long eventually then moved to in 2007-2008 to Princeton University where he was the Laurance Rockefeller visiting professor of for distinguished teaching and then in 2011 he moved to NYU the Stern School of Business there at the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership most of his current research applies to moral psychology and business ethics and in 2015 as we're gonna hear later or now he founded or co-founded the heterodox Academy which is a nonprofit organization that works to increase viewpoint diversity mutual understanding and productive disagreement we have a little chapter of that here on so you use campus and if you're interested in that we even talk to you about that as well he's written three books for a general audience the happiness hypothesis which was my first introduction to him finding modern truth in ancient wisdom he also wrote a book called the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion that came out in 2012 and in 2018 he co-authored with Greg lukianov the coddling of the American mind which is what we're hearing about today how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a future a generation of failure so without any further statements to his bona fides here is Professor height okay right well thank you so much Ben that was a really lovely introduction and I've only been on the campus for a few hours but I'm really enjoying my time here I've had some great conversations with with students and with faculty and something about being on this campus just makes you feel really alive and alert and I realize it's not the mountains it's the mountain bike screaming past you and if you don't if you're not totally alert you'll be killed I mean I you know I teach at NYU it's a really crowded campus full of cars but they move really slowly and here it's like really dangerous but anyway it's beautiful and I'm really enjoying my time here actually how many of you raise your hand if you're an undergraduate here at this University okay actually good a fair ok good a fair number because I'll be and and clearly most people are not undergrads unless you have a very major returning student program here to see you but that's great we have multiple ages because it'll be very important for part of the story that I'm going to tell so I'm going to be talking tonight about about universities but it has implications far far beyond far far beyond that and as it's no mystery that a lot of American institutions are are failing are having a lot of problems those problems are often interlinked so I'll be talking about what's happening on university campuses but we'll move off campus as well so I think it's really helpful there's this ancient Greek concept of Talos Aristotle used this word a lot it's really helpful to keep this in mind when we look at any institution think about what is its purpose and then you can figure out well what are the norms that we should have so that this institution can achieve its purpose this is especially important for speech we're having a lot of conflicts about speech words in a lot of institutions and politics everywhere but if we keep in mind what's the purpose so the Telos of a knife is to cut and so if someone says I've got this really great knife doesn't cut anything but it's a really great knife you would say well wait no you've misunderstood what a knife is and if somebody said well I have a friend who's a really amazing physician she can't heal anybody but she's a great great doc you know you say well no wait wait no you've misunderstood and so what about a university what makes a great University what is the Telos of a university we have the image in the Western tradition we trace we trace the Academy back to Plato's Academy back to ancient Athens and so we have this this wonderful rendering by Rafael I think is of the the play of the Academy at Athens and we have played on Aristotle in the center and there's a lot of activity here but what are they doing are they fighting are they playing what are they doing they're discussing debating disputing it's a certain kind of activity which when people engage in it something happens we achieve our tell us and what is the Talos it's right there on the crest of many of our top universities Veritas truth a University's Telos is to find truth and then pass it on along with habits of thinking that will allow students to find truth themselves as they after they leave the university this at least is our conception of ourselves it's so deep in our culture that even when Hollywood made up a mythical University called Faber University for those of you who are my age Animal House the motto a favored University was knowledge is good and it's even the motto here so the motto of this university let your light shine in Greek so so we have a sense of what a good university is it's one that discovers truth increases it passes it on things like that we also have a sense that this pursuit is not just noble it is brave there's something fearless about people who will pursue knowledge whatever the cost our heroes include Galileo while Socrates of course the original one people who died for the pursuit of truth Thomas Jefferson who founded UVA where I worked for 17 years for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it so this is what we think of ourselves but suddenly from out of nowhere around 2014 a wave of fearfulness came in to university culture and my friend Greg Wilkie on/off was one of the first to really diagnose it I think Gregg runs the foundation for individual rights in education it's an organization that defends students speech rights administrators are always putting on restrictions largely to protect themselves from legal liability they're telling students what they can say and where they can say it so fire has pushed back on that since the 1990s and it's almost always against the administrators well Gregg took over our 2002 he's running fire he has been prone to depression his whole life in 2007 he has the worst depressive episode of his life he makes very specific plans to kill himself and at the last moment he called 911 down calls 900 talked him into committing himself to a hospital which he does and when he's released from the hospital he learns CBT cognitive behavioral therapy a very powerful very general approach to to psychotherapy in which you learn to recognize your distorted thoughts you learn to recognize things like catastrophizing over generalizing black-and-white thinking the things that depressed people do anxious people do which they depart from reality but they talk themselves into being depressed and anxious and the discovery of Aaron Beck and others in the 1960s was if you if you if you concur eped the thoughts it actually releases people from the emotions and it's very effective at treating the depression and anxiety so Gregg learns this he goes back to his job at fire and then suddenly in 2013 to 2014 for the first time now it's the students who are asking for restrictions on speech books speakers words ideas he'd never seen this before most importantly students were asking for this were using the exact cognitive distortions that he had learned to stop doing so if this speaker comes it will be a disaster students will die from a speaker that they don't have to go to so students were thinking in these ways that Gregg recognized as distorted so he comes to me we'd met through a mutual friend he comes to me because he liked my first book which talked about CBT and he says John weird stuff is happening on campus and if if the students are thinking this way isn't that going to make them depressed and isn't this could could it be that colleges are actually making students depressed and I had just begun to see this exact thought pattern at NYU and I thought my god this is the best diagnosis I've seen so I said wow what a great idea I think you should write this up and if you want help I'd be glad to co-author it with you and he said yes he'd loved it my health and so we and so our partnership was was born so in we submitted our draft of the Atlantic in 2015 in January 2015 now the kind of stuff that was happening both before Gregg came to me and after we submitted was this suddenly we were seeing all these reports of students requesting trigger warnings so if a book is going to be assigned that might be upsetting the professor should warn the class a book of Mythology might have sexual violence in it the class should be warned before they're asked to read Greek mythology things like that there was suddenly a big upsurge in the in professors who were disinvited from campus who were protested or shouted down and for the first time we started hearing students asking for safe spaces which didn't mean a protection from physical violence it meant a protection from ideas that they thought were hurtful or hateful so Brown University there was a debate between two feminists one of whom argued that America is a rape culture one argued it is not and you might think that's a perfectly good topic for debate but some students thought that if a professor cut if someone comes to brown and says America is not a rape culture this could invalidate the experiences of some students who had been victims of rape and therefore this talk must be stopped and when the president didn't stop it they want they'd created safe spaces for the students who would be traumatized by the existence of this talk on campus even though nobody had to go to the talk so it's very puzzling and and and all the stuff was covered in New York Times and New Republic in places like that originally so this was the sort of stuff that led Gregg and me to write our article and we offered an analysis of how students are beginning to think this way we're just a few years before they didn't think this way we didn't it didn't see signs of it so the article comes out in August of 2015 and you know there's a lot to debate about it it's widely read and discussed and a lot of people said we were catastrophe we're over generalizing from you know a dozen examples on campus but a couple months later all hell broke loose beginning at Halloween at Yale nobody wore offensive costumes as far as I know but there was a debate about whether the school should offer guidance or not that debate blew up into protests demands brought to the University president for massive changes at Yale they gave him an ultimatum one week to respond he meets the ultimatum in just six days gives as much as he can 50 million dollars of for additional diversity hiring so it's a huge success for the for the students who are demanding massive changes to Yale and because of that success then right afterwards lots of cities now have this kind of protest and demands for major reorganizations of the universities and changes especially to speech codes what can be taught what what's mandatory things like that so and it and while they begin there's often a racial justice element early they quickly the protests quickly come to encompass almost anything so at Oberlin College the bond me the the Vietnamese food serve the cafeteria caused protests because it wasn't authentic enough now of course Vietnamese cuisine is French and Vietnamese so it's already a mixture but it produced protests at at northern northern Colorado here in this state a professor assigned our article and let the students pick what topic they wanted to discuss he want to see can students really handle this handle discussion and so the students pick the issue of transgender you know transgender rights and in the course the discussions someone reported the professor how dare he exposes to this hateful language in the anyway the point is even assigning the coddling the American mind became something that could produce objections and charges the professor was ultimately fired now tensions then heat up even more after the election of Donald Trump which you know political polarization is heating up all over the country it's this semester where we get the actual violence I want to be very clear there's been very little actual violence on campus what there was was mostly in the few months after the inauguration so the riots at Berkeley where a lot of people got hurt but nobody was actually killed Charles Marie speaking at Middlebury his faculty colleague interlocutor rather was they were attacked and she was injured he has permanent neck damage she's she's quit Evergreen State College in Washington State the gigantic meltdown they took the president essentially hostage didn't let him go to the bathroom he was as compliant as he could possibly be and he they still humiliated him so anyway so most of that stuff happens in spring of 2017 things in some we've gotten worse since then but the violence is largely gone there's almost no violence so the pattern what we see here is a new we're calling it a new moral culture it's a it's a comprehensive view of the world including a set of innovations that are that are requested or demanded by the students and at its heart it's that students beginning around 2014 we started seeing students who believe that they are fragile that students are fragile and that the university is a dangerous hostile place where students need protection they need Dean's and professors to provide protection not from physical violence but from words and words and ideas and books and speakers so that's what our book is about things got so much worse and more complicated after we published the article so we dug a lot deeper and the story that we that we come up with I think is really fascinating because it's not just about what happens on campus it actually goes out in all direction so I'll try to tell you a little bit of the story today in brief well actually here's the sort of this story which okay I guess I won't tell you the story I'll focus on something else but there's this this strange thing that happened in many universities we believe is actually a result of rising political polarization in the country rising anxiety and depression of Gen Z which I will tell you about paranoid parenting we began over protecting our kids in the 1990s we stopped letting them have free play there's also things happening specifically on campus and changes to attitudes about justice and social justice so there's like all these threads come together right around 2014-2015 but my talk today I'm going to do something a little different rather than telling the the historical story like how did this come to pass I'm gonna focus on three really really terrible ideas this is we found as we dove deeper to write the book that ideas are powerful and their ideas about psychology that are right and their ideas that are really wrong and if you raise kids or you structure an institution around terrible psychological ideas you'll get terrible results that I think is what has happened and many universities have done this with the best of intentions so here's how it goes so so here's a really really bad idea what doesn't kill you makes you weaker now many of you recognize that this is a the opposite of what Friedrich Nietzsche said so my first book was about ten ancient ideas and whether they're right or not and it turns out they are all right with some interesting modifications so I've got a whole chapter in there on the uses of adversity in every culture that leaves us writing leaves us a of ideas there's the there's the recognition that adversity leads to growth and strength so Friedrich Nietzsche said what doesn't kill me makes me stronger and the reason why that's true is explained best in this wonderful book by Nassim Taleb the guy who wrote the Black Swan he writes this book called anti fragile because he's trying he's trying to understand systems that need to be challenged that need adversity that need chaos in order to grow he's thinking originally the banking system the American banking system was so fragile before the financial crisis he's one of the few who predicted that it was all going to go down because it has no resilience built in what he wants isn't just resilience so the way to think about this is you know a wine glass is fragile and so if you give it to if you give it to little children they'll play with it they'll drop it and it'll break and that's bad for everybody so we don't give them glass we give them plastic plastic is resilient and so if they drop it it doesn't break but it doesn't get better right it doesn't improve the more you throw it so what's the word for things that get better the more you throw them the more you stress them and there isn't one so talib coins the term anti fragile and examples include bones your bones get as strong as they need to get given the shocks on them so if we do spaceflight for years they get week even in weeks or months they get week so you need stress on your bones the immune system is the best example peanut allergies are now three times as prevalent or more than they were in the 1990s why is that well some allergist some immunologists noticed that this is only happening in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid peanuts and so they did a very direct test they simply recruited they recruited about 600 women who had recently given birth and they there's an Israeli snack food called bomba which is like a puffed corn chip like a Cheetos type thing with peanut powder on it so it tastes like peanut butter a bit so you know a two or three month old infant can enjoy eating bomba so they recruit 640 mothers whose infants have either eczema or egg allergies which means they're at higher risk of a peanut allergy because peanut allergies are pretty rare but in this population they're more likely so they recruit them and they say okay randomly assignment half of you here's some bomba give it to your kid on a regular interval and you know and don't worry we're not just going to send you out to give your kid peanuts they monitor them but half of them they expose the kids to peanut dust from a very early age and then at age five they come in for a full immunological assay to determine their response to peanut proteins and peanuts and the other half are told standard device your kids at risk don't you eat any peanuts if you're lactating that you know the proteins can go through the milk so avoid peanuts standard advice what happens among the avoiders 17% develop a peanut allergy so for the rest of their lives they will have to fear going to restaurants yeah you know you've been with people with peanut out it's hard because sometimes the restaurant doesn't even know what they're doing or so so they have problems for the rest of their lives but what about the kids who are exposed to bomba 3% only 3% have a peanut allergy so we could largely wipe out peanut allergies by doing the opposite of what we've been doing and that's why the subtitle of our book is how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for if you have an anti fragile system and you protect it from shocks you're hurting it okay let's try that again babies are fragile if you've you know you bring a baby home from the hospital you can't believe they're entrusting you with this fragile little thing you want to protect it and when they start crawling you want to put a helmet on them you don't want them to bang their heads but here's the thing if you protect them they don't learn how to protect themselves and so once you start down that road you have to always be there for them and then you have to continue being for them in college and after college I teach in a business school and I'm now beginning to hear stories of people who from business people they gave a young employee a bad performance report and they heard from the employees mother so it never stops when you go down this road it never stops and I can show I do this demonstration all over the world let's see if it works here in Colorado to see how we've changed our child-rearing practices I want to ask you a question at what age were you allowed out at what age could you leave the home leave your house walk to a friend's house you know 500 meters away or you and your friend you go down to a store basically what age did your parents trust you to not be under their protection but you could actually go outside not your backyard beyond your backyard at what age so think about what age if it was first grade you should say six roughly so think about the age and now I'm going to ask you to answer by generation so I'm gonna say only people who are born in 1982 or before so your Gen X or Baby Boomers so only nineteen eighties you were before birth year I'm just gonna point my finger around the room when I point to your area just call out just call out the number what's your number now called I call it ages say th six color okay so there's a very strong mode here right six the norm was first grade at first grade you could go out with your friends no you know you couldn't like take the train to the city or anything but you could actually go play outside and you didn't have to have adults watching you and there was a couple of eights there was 110 but overwhelmingly it was six that was the norm first grade kids can go outside and play now let's do it only if you were born in 1996 or later so raise your hand high if you're born 1996 or later okay so you're your gen Z you are you are all gens E or most of your probably current undergrads okay so just those who raised their hand what's your number so call it out when I point to you okay so you see the difference I'm sorry Millennials you're just not interesting because you're just right in the middle there you're like totally don't worry but so this is what I find so so the norm all over America was this until you know until the 90s where as what I find for Gen Z is generally this now in rural areas it's younger and so we did hear a couple a couple of sixes some eights so I'm guessing that people from rural Colorado or other rural areas tends to be younger but even suburbs which are very safe even suburbs that have very little crime the the parents have begun vastly over protecting them so and I just did I was just in Spain it was the same thing I was I've done this in in Australia New Zealand New Zealand is the last English speaking country that lets kids go outside and play there and as you'll see they're a little later in in the problems coming to them so you know almost all childhood stories don't involve the parents the kids are going off on their own but we said no more of that in the 1990s was it no more of that you know over the places you'll go and you might get hurt so no more of that and when we stop kids from playing unsupervised that means we're supervising them we're enforcing the rules and they don't get to learn how to do this for themselves and when we decline when we deprive kids of play this has massive effects on their development so Peter gray a wonderful psychologist at Boston College has an article on this and we look at all the good things that come from play all mammals play our brains require it to wire up and that play needs to involve conflict and failure and getting hurt in all those ways play promotes mental health now one of the most important aspects of play is risk-taking and as you've seen when kids learn how to do something they then make it more dangerous they scale up the risk they've got to titrate it because they need risk and so if you they will make something more risky so that they can enjoy it and so Alison Gopnik or developments that College taught this really wonderful article in The Wall Street Journal and she says trying to eliminate all such risks might be dangerous there may be an analogue of the hygiene hypothesis which is like the peanut hypothesis I just told you and then she says in the same way by shielding children from every possible risk we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren't risky at all like a debate between two feminists at Brown University is not risky at all but some members of Gen Z saw it as dangerous and in this way we are isolating them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master so I'm not saying that we need this because there used to be consumer products that really killed kids and Nietzsche did not say that what kills you makes you stronger cuz it really doesn't okay so this is not good kids could really die this is good because kids can get hurt and that's crucial because if you can get hurt then every day you learn how to not get hurt whereas my kids probably like a lot of the gen Z students here my kids grew up with this this was designed by you know lawyers and other people who were trying to and this is too safe it's not good for kids it's too safe the motto of every parent and every teacher should be prepare the child for the road not the road for the child now yes you can fix major potholes thank God we you know where we're getting rid of sexual predators who used to roam the streets so I'm not saying don't fix the road at all but you've got to prepare kids to go out onto rough roads in Britain they understand this in Britain there's several years ahead of us they have the same problems we do but they are literally putting risk back into their playgrounds here they put out construction materials kids love construction materials and look what this little boy is learning he has actually reinvented Archimedes and the lever he's learning physics and when this goes up in the air what do we do in America we have so many lawyers that as soon as someone gets hurt we ban it because if someone gets hurt a second time the parents might sue so if someone gets hurt from a SuperSoaker we're gonna ban super soakers for college students and so it's we call it safety ISM the irrational prioritization of safety but it's not you have to realize it's not physical safety only it's also emotional safety so here's a really really terrible way to look at human beings we are all balloons filled with feelings in a world full of pins now that does Express you know we get it we understand what that means and it so it's it's interesting to say that but do we want to tell students you are in fact a balloon full of feelings and the world is so full of pins don't take any chances man that would be the worst thing you could tell to kids talib really develops the metaphor beautifully he points out the metaphor of the idea of antifragility he uses fire as an example a candle flame is fragile it will if you blow on it it will go out so you have to protect you have to put a glass cylinder around it candle flame is fragile but and he actually I don't get this from Marcus Aurelius but Marcus realized he was the exact same metaphor multiple times a fire is such that the more you blow under the stronger it gets and so Talib says you want to be the fire and for the wind this is a much better way to tell kids to look at themselves rather than balloons full of feelings so I'm I'm just gonna now focus a little timeout from our three untruths I think the effect of the over protection is in part with this and so I want to show you this this is just stunning what has happened in the last five or six years and it's really the story of Gen Z so Gen z born 1996 and later as I said they're not the Millennial Generation that's a very different generation so data on on life experiences shows this the percentage of 12th graders who have a driver's license now in when I graduate from high school when I got my license in 1979 you know you would you'd get your driver's license the day you turned 16 you were looking forward to his exciting you took your parents car out a few months before without them knowing you were so excited to do this you know and if you're I mean if your birthday was on a Sunday you'd have to wait till Monday but otherwise you'd get your license on your birthday but over time Millennials and then gen Z many never bother to get the driver's license now you might say well there's over they don't have to but you know we it's driving us fun but it's also dangerous but it's not just that they're not getting driver's licenses many have never even tried alcohol many have never gone out on a date that had any sort of romantic interaction and many have never even had a job so we used to think that these were basic things we expected that students did before they showed up at college and now increasingly many students are coming in having never had a job a driver's license a date or a drink they have not had life experiences of previous generations they're not as ready for independent living now you might say what are they doing well what are they doing with all their time bones that's right so what can we'll come back to that so it would be one thing if it's just like oh they're really safe they're not doing dangerous stuff isn't that great but that's not what it is when so this is nationally representative data on all college students in 2010 2012 all undergrads were Millennials and these were the rates you know about you know with you know 2 to 5 percent these various things as the Millennials are replaced so by 2014 2016 in 2016 they're pretty much all J and Z as they replace these things don't go out much but psychological disorder skyrockets it triples so the rate of psychological disorders on campus has tripled in just a few years but it's not all psychological disorders it's only to depression and anxiety that's it depression and anxiety so this is now nationally representative data from all teenagers when the Millennials were the teenagers those were the rates but when Gen Z comes into the data set and now there are the teenagers the rates for boys go up with the rates for girls go way up and this is the pattern that you'll see over and over again in the data and other data that I have on online so now back to college students rates of severe depression once again millenials rates were stable as soon as Gen Z comes in the male's go up the females go way up so we've been talking about this broke with a few of years it began around 2012 to 2014 is when all the lines start going up by 2016 2017 we're talking about it and there's an interesting counter-argument that well maybe it's not real maybe it's just that Gen Z is so comfortable talking about mental illness so they all say they're depressed but it's not that they're more depressed it's just it's a good thing that they're honest well in theory that could be but I believe this is wrong and I can show you the evidence that it's wrong because it shows up in behavior it's not just self-report so this is hospital admission data this is the number out of a hundred thousand in the population of teenage girls who are admitted to hospitals each year because they harmed themselves so severely that they required hospitalization and it was judged to be non-suicidal self harm so it's usually cutting themselves the data for boys is is just flat lines that are down down here they're lower but as you see there's no real trend from 2001 to 2009 and those are Millennials what happens in DLitt years after that the rate for the older teen girls goes up 62 percent this is a gigantic increase but it's nothing compared to the preteen girls preteen girls did not use to cut themselves but after 2009-2010 when it becomes Gen Z what half their rate nearly triples they now cut themselves as much as 20 year old young women do it's important to know this line here is barely up there's no no elbow this is Millennials they didn't get social media until they were in college Gen Z is defined by the fact that they got social media in middle school and that I think plus the overprotection in the 90s those two things I believe are the major causes of this gigantic spike in anxiety and depression nothing else just anxiety and depression we also see it in suicide it's not just self-harm it's actual completed suicides so girls make more attempts boys have more completed suicides because they use irreversible means but we see here for preteens is that the rate for boy so when it was so when it was Millennials here it was these numbers here but as Gen Z comes in 20 this is 2012 in 2013 14 15 16 the rate shoots up and stays up it's up a hundred fifty percent now the rates up for boys too but as a percentage it's up even more for girls so of course boys higher suicide rates is a major cause for concern but that's been constant throughout history the mystery for me the mystery I think we have to face is what is happening to girls since 2012 or so why is there life changing so so much it's showing up all over the country in collar to any this is the number one concern for college presidents is mental health surveys show and again if you look at survey data on from college mental health centers what's happening depression and anxiety up nothing else look even stress Gen Z is not more stressed than previous generations we just never taught them or let them learn how to deal with ordinary daily stress so they're not coming and saying I'm stressed they're coming in for anxiety and depression only so we have a lot more on this at the coddling calm the website for the book there's a page on international coddling because it turns out we thought originally was just America that was messing up its kids no it turns out it's in all the english-speaking countries and I was just in Spain it appears to be happening there too so very briefly self-harm in Britain boys up slightly girls way up beginning around 2012-2013 Canada boys are down they're up slightly girls are up a lot more this is also self-harm this is depression or major mental illness in Australia not as sharp and increased but again boys are up girls are up more and in New Zealand now New Zealand there's nothing happening to the last couple years now they don't over protect their kids as much and they didn't get social media as quickly as we did a couple years behind us I think on that so why why is this happening why is it happening at the same time in multiple countries with a bigger impact on girls and the biggest impact on preteen girls why well I think there's only one explanation there's only one factor that can explain this fact pattern I've said that the overprotection is a big part of it I think it is but the gender difference especially points us to social media so I have an article coming out in the Atlantic in a month on how social media has changed and what it's doing to democracy and I've learned a lot about that I didn't know until last month social media was originally a pretty nice place so in 2002 was the first one Friendster and then comes MySpace and then comes the Facebook as it was called originally the Facebook and these were basically places that you just help you connect with your friends and you put some stuff about yourself up there so there's display but there's no way to do the rating and ranking and the MV and the outrage and the and the shaming it was a pretty nice place and then everything changes between 2009 and 2012 so in 2006 Facebook opens to the world before then you had to be a college student in 2007 the iPhone comes out and up to this point very few 12 and 13 year olds have an iPhone or a Facebook account and you could always lie and just say that you're whatever age but it wasn't a thing for middle school kids in 2006-2007 in 2009 now more kids own an iPhone or not a smartphone and Facebook ads the like button which is transformative because now every kid is training every other kid with tiny little reinforcement buttons a whole generation is hooked up likes canary and pigeons in in Skinner boxes all training each other to do whatever it is that is rewarded and this is a major change in human development instead of adults teaching kid instead of kids working things out in small groups now it's all public performance in enlarged anonymous or sometimes anonymous groups furthermore Twitter adds the retweet button so now outrage can spread much more quickly there's a whole set of changes that happened between twenty nine and twenty twelve most importantly for our story in 2008-2009 most kids were not on social media every day it was around fifty percent or less it wasn't the thing that everyone had to do but as you see the slope is really steep these are the two years the principal years when teen social life just moves on mass into social media and what happens these are the two years and that's where the increased starts so the timing is perfectly explained and the sex difference is perfectly explained because of this all kids are addicted to devices but the boys are mostly playing video games and video games are not actually as bad as many people think my son plays various video games where he and his friends team up to kill other groups of boys but it's just practicing basic cooperation skills planning strategy and when the game is over when the game is over they're not kicking themselves they're not shamed they're not thinking about it the game is over it's fun now we do something else social media is very very different girls are much more affected by social comparison especially about body image thinness beauty my niece showed me how on snapchat she took a photo of herself pressed a button her face got narrower her eyes got bigger and her skin got perfectly smooth she was much more beautiful on snapchat than she was in real life or maybe was Instagram whichever one it was so so girls are always more vulnerable to social comparison than boys and social media just ramps that up and makes it much harder to be a teenage girl than it was 10 years over ten years ago girls are more affected by who's in who's out fear of missing out seeing all those amazing photos of all your beautiful friends having an amazing time without you and finally girls and boys are equally aggressive but boys aggression is traditionally physical and so when they go to video games they don't punch each other anymore so I don't know that boy's aggression is down but I suspect it probably is but girls aggression has always been relational they don't punch each other they damage other girls relationships or reputation and ideally anonymously if you can do it get away with it that's great well social media you can create an animus accounts you can do anything to anyone at any time so you're never safe as a girl you're not even safe on the weekends you can be bullied all weekend long even though school is not in session so for all these reasons I believe social media has had a devastating impact on teen girls and it has only had a small impact on teen boys I have a lot more again at the Carling calm under the solutions tab and then better mental health all right so that's the main idea I wanted to talk to you about the others will go more quickly in fact that idea number two I'll have to abbreviate because in the interest of time always trust your feelings so chapter 2 of the happiness hypothesis was basically about Buddhism and stoicism and so the Buddhists and the Stoics gave us these wonderful insights it's not things that disturb us but our interpretation of their significance this is the most widespread piece of wisdom around the world that we don't experience the world as it is we experience the world through the filters and distortions cognitive distortions that we impose on it Buddha said something similar your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded but once mastered once you learn to control your thoughts as Greg did when he learned CBT no one can help you as much not even your father or your mother Aaron Beck that one of the founders of CBT basically took these insights and taught people stoic and Buddhist practices to free themselves from distortions and the results are miraculous we have a list of common distortions on Atlantic article catastrophizing over generalizing emotional reasoning letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality many of the new practices on college campuses are based on violations of the ancient truth they are based on the idea that if you feel it is real it is true and you should respond as if it is true so we teach students very specific cognitive distortions we teach the magnification in in in we teach students be experts at finding microaggressions in what we're previously just normal conversation we teach students emotional reasoning that if they feel offended the other person should be punished and we give them phone numbers and websites to report people at NYU there's a sign in every bathroom telling students how to report me if I've said anything that offends them they can do it anonymously and fortunetelling we just guess it how people are going to respond and we say because it's not usually that I need a trigger warning it's it's you should provide a trigger warning for them not for me but for them so we're getting so is that it's the CBT distortion of fortune-telling so up to compress that one in the interest of time that idea number three life is a battle between good people and evil people and this is straight out of chapter four so it's as though it's as though somebody on college campuses read the happiness hypothesis and then just decided let's just do the opposite let's do the opposite of everything the ancients ever told us to do was just rejected and so this one is that we are in fact all prone to dichotomous thinking and tribalism this is human nature doesn't mean we have to live that way but that's our default and we should be trying to reduce it not ramp it up and so Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it so beautifully when he's describing his time in the prison camps in the gulags in the Soviet Union and he talks about how he could just as easily been a guard as he is a prisoner being marched to his probable death and he says but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being and we all know that this is true upon reflection we all know that this is true and you know there's there's wisdom in every religious tradition talking about you know how do you why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye but you do not see the plank on your we're hypocrites so and then you combine this with tribalism the Bedouin saying I against my brothers I and my brothers against my cousin's I and my brothers and cousins against the world we're tribal but the tribalism is at whatever level is the zone of conflict and it we can tone it down but it's hard it's very easy to ramp that up and get people to think us versus them we're good they're bad that's easy now when you put this together you get one of the main ingredients of callout culture so this is from this is a description of callout culture I want to read to you from a student at Smith College written in 2016 she says during my first days at Smith I witnessed countless conversations that consisted of one person telling the other that their opinion was wrong the word offensive was almost always included members of my freshman class quickly assimilated to this new way of non thinking they could soon detect a politically incorrect view and call the person out on their mistake and I want especially the undergrads here to think whether you've seen this at Colorado whether you've seen this in your in your classes or in any part of the culture here she says I began to voice my opinion less often to avoid being berated and judged by a community that claims to represent the free expression of ideas I learned along with every other student to walk on eggshells for fear that I may say something offensive that is the social norm here I've spoken at school that was asked students do you see this here and at some schools all hands go up at other schools the hands don't go up but they say well it's not over all but it's in certain departments or certain areas and I'm going to guess it's like that here I'm gonna guess that that you know you're not in the Northeast you're not you there are a lot of things about Colorado that are going to make for a less politicized environment I'm gonna guess that is this does not characterize the overall culture but that some of you have seen it in some parts of the culture so let's find out first just students only current students does this generally characterized the the speech climate the culture here at Colorado raise your hand if you say yes okay so some oh okay and current students raise your hand if you say no oh okay I'm sorry to see that it's the rate it's about maybe it was a majority said yes a healthy number said no but event so maybe 6040 of those who raised their hands 60% said yes it is here which again I'm surprised by but actually things are moving so fast that my perceptions from year or two ago might even be different at those other schools so it is moving fast secondly even those who don't think it's characteristic are there certain departments or subgroups here in which this really does care Prosser raise your hand students if yes and raise your hand for know you've just never seen this at Colorado okay so so this school is not as far gone as many schools that I've been at many schools in Northeast because look let's face it this is a terrible way to live it's terrible to have to fear that everything you say again the phrase is walking on eggshells in college you want to be able to take risks explore ideas and if your OHS feel afraid they're gonna be called out or reported it's it's just no fun okay it's not just the students it's the faculty too as I said I censor myself very heavily I don't have to worry here because there's nothing you can do to me but back at NYU I actually have be very careful what I say oh shoot this is being filmed okay I'll see if I can edit that out it's not let me be clear NYU is no worse than any place else it's not anything special at NYU it's the fact that I work there means that there are restrictions on me just as would be true at every other school and is much worse at the Ivy's in New England okay okay now a core idea I mean this is a very intellectually rich topic this is really about a lot of this about new ideas and so a key idea here that we have to talk about is called intersectionality and I want to be very clear upfront this is a very good idea the core idea of it is that identities intersect if you're social scientist you know there are main effects and interaction effects and so to be a black woman in America is not just the sum of being a black person and being a female there are interactions that are unique unique obstacles or indignities that black women experience and if you don't recognize it just you won't notice it you won't be aware of it and so kimberlé crenshaw has a really good TED talk I think the TED talk is great I don't disagree with anything she says in the TED talk it's very helpful to think this way to know about this okay but how this is taught on campus ends up greatly amplifying the tribalism and the us-versus-them because it's often taught in this way and I've seen a variety of diagrams the variations on this so so let's take 18 year-old to come into a college environment let's teach them rather than looking out and seeing all the different people teach them to see binary dimensions some people are white some people are non-white some people are cisgender some people are transgender so in this way you do you emphasize all these different binary dimensions and people's level of privilege is based on where they are so if you're if you're at the intersection of a bunch of you know if you're these things you're privileged and so the point is this is not just a way to look at different identity mentions of identity it is a moral framework because the people above the line are bad they are privileged which means they are oppressors they oppress the good people were the people down here so if you take 18 year olds who evolved for tribalism we all evolved for tribalism we love doing us versus them and you tell them look at all the people and see good and bad people see good and bad groups see constant conflict life is a zero-sum competition and some the bad people have taken most of the stuff and so your job is to innocent is to fight in this zero-sum competition to get more of this stuff now a free society is not a zero-sum game abundance opportunity possibility keep growing at least that's the tradition of a liberal society so the locus of evil the the worst people in the world are the heterosexual white males now not denying that their inequalities and structural obstacles but I think the last thing we want to do is teach people to judge others based on groups I mean I'm a product of the 20th century this is what we did in the 20th centuries we stopped doing that and now it's back judge people based on their group not as individuals and so we get things like this this essay from a student at Texas State is that your DNA is an abomination and arguing that white death would be the best thing that could happen now he didn't literally mean biological death he meant cultural death so that's at least a little better but the idea of genocide cultural genocide like this is not a way to create a welcoming inclusive campus at the new school a few blocks north of me in New York City students created a space only for everybody other than straight white people so it's only for everybody other than straight white people and this is again this happens at the most progressive anti-racist school so it's not likely that these are the most racist places they're the most anti-racist places is where you get this and it's not just at schools this way of thinking is bleeding out into the intellectual climate of adults so Harvey Weinstein is a monster and so a gender studies professor writes an essay why can't we hate men we collectively have every right to hate you collectively you collectively have done us collectively wronged us forces them good versus evil you're a man you're bad the New York Times hired Sara Jang who had all these tweets about how much she hates white people dumb ass white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants the New York Times hires her and then there's a controversy and while I'm glad they didn't fire her because I think nobody should be fired for what they tweeted I think we need to just stop firing people for things we need to have other ways to deal with it but in the contrib see Jessica Valenti writes Sarah John is good her haters are bad it's not difficult now this is the most perfect statement of great untruth number three this is exactly the last third of the book and incidentally she is the feminist at Brown who was arguing that America is a rape culture so again it's this this is binary good evil us them way of thinking now fortunately here's one of the most hopeful signs I can give you there is a counter reaction and a lot of it is coming from non-whites from non-white scholars and activists so this was just New York Times recently I'm a black feminist I think call out culture is toxic there are a lot of books recently on on how identity politics as we've been doing it is being is getting really toxic and so there and in Britain there's a whole bunch of there's a whole bunch of writers in American Britain so this is actually very encouraging because not all black people are the same or white people are the same or MIT if there's a lot of variety within every group and people have their own opinions and a lot of people in every group reject this kind of common enemy identity politics and they generally embrace as I do common humanity identity politics you have to have identity politics if the corn growers can have a lobby and if the wine enthusiasts can have a lobby why can't LGBT people or or you know we're african why can't every you know every group should be able to talk about its interests or or so I'm not against identity politics but it's when it's done in this way and I mostly see it in religious context I've got to say when identity politics is done in a secular context these days it tends to be pretty ugly and and hateful frankly but whenever it comes in a in a religious context it tends to be much more loving and so it's not a coincidence that Paula Murray who was she was ordained as an Episcopal priest she got a degree at Yale Law School she wasn't even this is before Martin Luther King she was writing like this I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods when my brother's try to draw a circle to exclude me I shall draw a larger circle to include them so this is the kind of identity politics that works it's loving it's humanizing you downplay the tribal divisions you relentlessly say we're all in this together we're all one we're all humans were all Americans whatever it is you say something to emphasize common humanity and then it softens people's hearts now it's not enough obviously political pressure was needed to in the civil rights movement but with this ideology it worked the Dalai Lama says the same thing I'm Tibetan I'm Buddhist I'm the Dalai Lama but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart what we need to do is pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people and this was Martin Luther King's approach to reducing moralism actually produces more effective and humane activism frankly so to conclude I'm gonna have a little bit more to go but I want to wrap up the main part of the talk here by saying imagine a university that was built on these three untruths imagine a university where students come in and they're told what doesn't kill you makes you weaker so we will protect you if anything goes wrong you tell us we'll fix it we'll protect you we don't want anything to frighten you we don't you upset you we'll take care of you always trust your feelings if you feel that somebody said something offensive we will punish them and life is a battle between good people and evil people we'll teach you how to see society as a zero-sum struggle between the good people imagine what it'd be like to attend such a school it would be no fun you'll be constant fighting and hatred this is no way to create diversity and inclusion this is a recipe for unending conflict conversely imagine instead that you attended a university built on the opposite of these where there's the idea that students are anti fragile and we're gonna help you become stronger we're not going to just tell you to go with your feelings we're going to actually teach you to question your assumptions and we're gonna teach you that life is morally complicated not simple which one would you rather go to which one would you would you rather send your kids to so what what can we do now so if you're with me that there is a problem if you're with me that there are some bad ideas that we've been teaching often with good intent what do we do so I'll direct comments to three different constituencies here and then we'll have time for questions so first raise your hand if you are a parent of kids younger than 23 raise your hand okay so you all have kids who are Genji or whatever it is going to come after Gen Z we don't know so I urge you especially if your kids are under 16 please visit let grow org it's a wonderful organization founded by Leonor scan Daisy who wrote the book free range kids and on the board of it and it works to push back against laws that are making us over protect our kids it works to help you give your kids more freedom in the schools to parents you're all wrestling I assume if your kids are over - you're wrestling with what to do about devices here are three simple rules that will solve most of the problem for you just keep all screens just there's a fixed time nine o'clock whatever it is sometime at night all screens come out of the bedroom you can keep an Amazon echo or whatever it is because they can read stories that's okay but a screen where you'll be checking get it out of the bedroom by a certain time no social media until high school I know this is hard to do as an individual but if we all work on changing the norms we can at least get it out of middle school it should not be in middle school don't let your kids just lie about their age realeased try to stand firm at least on wait until 13 but ideally not till high school and finally agree on a time budget I'm not going to say no in my family my son gets two hours on his phone he uses it too he goes around New York City by himself he uses it for that and other thing so he has two hours a day and two hours a day on his computer and an amazing thing happens he actually chooses carefully what he does he doesn't just mindlessly sit there for six hours he has to choose carefully and then he does other things as well so three simple rules will solve most of the problems for you I think and third if you're a resident of Colorado is almost all of you are there's some movement in your state legislature I don't know I can't say who you know who but there is Utah passed a free range parenting law which says because all over the country if your kids are caught playing in a park you can be arrested your kids can be taken away from you because it'll be referred some neighbor will call the police because nobody has seen the child outside in the park since the 1990s and so so people freaked out they'll call the police the police will call Child Protective Services to come they'll question you and they literally sometimes able strip-searched the kids literally strip-searched the kids to check for bruises if you let your kids go to the park because you're negligent parent this is insanity this is what bureaucracies do so stop it and the only way to stop it is by passing a law as Utah did saying letting your kids be independent is not evidence of neglect it's that simple so I hope you're competitive with Utah and you will let them put you to shame you can do it here in Colorado you've got that outdoorsy sort of feel to your culture so contact your state legislature and say please we need a free-range kids bill okay I want to point out these bill the the current practices are hardest on single mothers because a single mother has to work and a single mother who works can't be on her kids all the time and when her kids are eight she would like them to be able to walk home from the bus stop without her being arrested so this is if you this is a justice issue this is something that especially affects poor and working working women second constituency here raise your hand if you are a professor of at any school or an administrator at any school raise your hand a university-level okay so for all of you it's very hard we just have a conversation with the psych faculty it's because we have to give accommodations and there are moral reasons for doing it and they're legal reasons we have to accommodate when students have have psychological needs but if you talk about antifragility you can at least make the argument that like okay you're anxious about giving a talk in class okay you know legally I have to accommodate you but I'd like you to consider whether you should try it anyway now right now I would never dare say that to us - because I would be reported so fast but if the leadership said it from the start you're anti fragile you need to challenge yourself if you're anxious work through it we're here for you if it backfires but you got to work through things so if leadership is clear on antifragility then faculty can take chances and sometimes you know help students or encourage them to push themselves secondly for university audiences teaching CBT is one of the most cost effective things you can do all schools are having trouble hiring enough counselors to meet the need but for ten dollars you can buy a book and give it out to all freshmen incoming freshmen and it should help it should lower the the mental health problems on campus third a program that I and my colleagues developed called open mind is designed to help students learn from diverse helped them actually talk to people who have different values than they have it walks them through why was it good for you to talk to people of different views than you do why it maybe be a little you know the there are it's difficult to know the truth be a little intellectually humble here's how psychology messes us up here see how you can escape from your moral matrix and actually learn about other moralities so we teach all this we teach skills for conversation how do you start a conversation we have evidence that improves all the good stuff like growth mindset intellectual humility the bad stuff goes down like social distance and effective polarization so if you go to open mind platform org it's free any teacher can use it in religious congregations Jews are divided over Israel Unitarians are now divided over some some issue a lot of religious congregations are coming apart it's very useful in businesses it's we useful in all kinds of organizations and forth for faculty and administrators all to join heterodox Academy it's an organization of now 3,000 professors and administrators who think that we actually need to expose students to viewpoint diversity so I urge you to just go to heterodox academy org and I think it's the about Us tab you can join it's free and it just means that you support viewpoint diversity and finally for those of you who are gen C students the most important piece of advice I can give you is tell adults to back off one thing I've learned I'll take I'll check it with you I'll check it right now so gen Z students as far as I can tell are not at all in denial they are not at all defensive they see pretty clearly what's happening and so when I've given talks before I was asked the students at the end do you think this is largely a correct diagnosis of what's happening or do you think I've misunderstood your generation so let's just try that now so if you're if you're if your gens II any Gen Z up to 20 to 23 years old raise your hand now raise your hand high okay so just you do you think that I largely got this right or wrong raise your hand if you think I got it right raise your hand okay that's most of you and raise your opinion I largely got it wrong okay 0 and that is usually what I find so so here's my point especially professors and administrators you're making assumptions about the students you're making a sum that they're fragile and while some of them are most of them are not and even those who are fragile who are anxious who are easily discouraged even they will respond really well it if you give them a chance and if you ask them we put on all these protections without asking the students so students make yourselves known if especially if you're a student who gets accommodations just I'm not saying don't take them but consider telling we're talking to professor about how how they can best help you and it's not always to give you the accommodation offenses to help you overcome it I don't know what but my point is that if the Genji students begin speaking up the adults were making assumptions will have at least permission to stop making those assumptions that would be very very powerful one cause that you can really advocate for is to give more freedom to the next generation so that we don't repeat the same mistakes the same overprotection advocate for a free range kids law for example in colorado or for better policies at elementary schools and middle schools and finally I'll end with this wonderful wonderful quote from from Van Jones in fact could we have we just have just a couple more minutes so I will just play you the three minute clip so Van Jones democratic activist he was in the Obama administration really brilliant speaking about polarization oh he's a you know a you know left-wing activist but who really engages with conservatives in productive ways he's just he's wonderful so he was he was interviewed at the University of Chicago okay so he's interviewed by David Axelrod who ran Obama's campaign originally and they're just been an event at the University of Chicago where Corey Lewandowski who was in the Trump administration was going to speak and there were protests and so Axelrod asks asked Jones what he thinks of this so here it is it's the best statement of antifragility I've ever seen just leave that as it is don't feel like fully Frasier but I say aye I got a tough talk for my liberal colleagues on these kids and they don't tend to like it but they didn't like me so I quit so I'm going to keep Frank but that's the problem exactly I thought didn't I didn't they want to I want to push this there are two ideas about safe spaces one they very good idea and one that a terrible idea the idea of being physically safe on campus not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse or or something like that or being pregnant specifically personally because I kind of hate speech you are an N word that I but there's another view that is now I think ascendant what I think is just a horrible view which is that I need to be safe and logically anybody think emotionally I just need to feel good all the time and someone says something that I don't like that's a problem for everybody else including the administration and I think that's a terrible idea for the following reason I don't want you to be safe in Nashville I don't want you to be safe it mostly I want you to be strong that's different I'm not going to paint the jungle for you put on some boots and learn how to deal I'm gonna take all the wings out of the gym that's the whole point of the gym this is the gym you can't live on a campus where people say stop you don't like people can't fire you they can't arrest you they can't beat you up they can just say stuff you don't like and you can say stuff back okay so so in closing I'll just leave leave you with this this piece of advice if something follows from everything came before so speaking especially to the Genji students here you are the fire so go find some and thank you so so now we have set up we have we have some time for questions

Channel: Benson Center

Views: 298,454

Keywords: Jonathan Haidt, Psychology, CU Boulder, NYU Stern

Id: 3b3Ob4CK4Xs

Length: 68min 5sec (4085 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/bernardslamders]

It’s very true that I feel like public debate has died. try going to any party with liberals and just try it. Everyone becomes uncomfortable if the mainstream line is not upheld. The mere thought of debate around any hot topic is bound to make people so uncomfortable their brains break. This is coming from a leftist perspective as well. When I bring up the lack of class dynamic in hot topics or that the right is in just as sorry state as the left. People shut you down and just refuse to debate.

America has also been on this path for quite some time or maybe it was just fantasy, that there were always heated debates at taverns and other public institutions.

University class rooms at least when I was younger were full of debate and that nerd was always allowed to be “devils advocate” they weren’t shut down immediately for wrong think but allowed to express their opinions.

I think this is a massive disservice for democracy, critical thought, and childhood development. It’s extremely totalitarian in nature and building the ramparts for complete utter annihilation of diverse thoughts.

America’s certainly on the road to fascism but it’s being paved by a google doodle. There is now a complete combination of state and corporate power exerting extreme influence on the populations consciousness.

It’s pretty funny though when as an American you go to a different country and it’s just dudes chain smoking yelling about politics to each other for hours on end in cafes.

[u/Latter_Chicken_9160]

I have the book he wrote with Greg Lukianoff of the same name, I needed it for class but never read it. It seemed pretty good, there’s one really good part I remember about common identity vs. disparate identity idpol and how the former is a lot better

[u/Minimum_Cantaloupe]

Everything I've seen by Haidt seems pretty solid.