Professor Jonathan Haidt speaks at UCCS

[Applause] okay okay well good evening everyone good evening colorado springs it's it's wonderful to be here you have a beautiful campus and a really beautiful part of the country um i had some really great talks today um with with students i think a bunch of them are here are here tonight in which we basically figured out the solutions to all the problems that i'll be talking about tonight i had a had a great talk with with chancellor reddy and i think you know i'm talking about some problems that are common on campuses i think things are better here my guess is i'll poll the students later my guess is that they'll recognize the problems but that it'll be not as bad as it is in some other places in other words i think things are really hopeful here i think there's a lot of good will among the students among the administrators so i think this campus in particular is going to do well and i think it's going to come through this difficult period and i'll be talking about universities but it turns out the problem is is much bigger than that it's connected to many other institutions and so even if you don't care about universities if you care about children education democracy uh or business this talk should be relevant to you how many of you care about any of those things raise your hand okay all right so i think i'll have something for everyone here tonight so uh i find that in thinking about any institution if you specify up front what it's it's telos is uh tls is the greek word that aristotle and others used to define the end or purpose of something and if you keep that in mind then you it really helps you understand where it's going wrong and how to set it right so for example the the telos of a knife is to cut and if someone says i have a knife here it's a really great knife can't cut anything but it's a really really good knife you might say well you've misunderstood what a knife is it's not a really good knife or if someone says i have a friend who's a doctor and she's a fantastic doctor she can't heal anybody but she's great okay you'd say well no you know the telos of a doctor is is to heal its health so what is the telos of university um well we have this this image of ourselves this is raphael's famous painting the school of athens with plato and aristotle in the center and there's a lot of activity there right are they fighting are they playing they're disputing they're talking they're presenting arguments and then receiving counter arguments that's how we do our work in the academy and it's all in service of what what is our telos just call it out if you guess what's the telos of university okay great truth um it's right there on the it's right there on the crest of many of our top universities truth veritas or light which is a sort of a stand-in for for truth many of you from my generation remember the fictional faber college what was its motto from animal house knowledge is good so we have this idea of universities that they produce knowledge they find truth and then they pass it on along with the skills to find truth yourself as a student and this university is no exception the motto of the whole university of colorado system is let your light shine so again this metaphor of light truth discovery there's also along with this a self-image of fearlessness our heroes are fearless they will follow the truth whatever it may lead as thomas jefferson said about the university of virginia where i taught for 17 years we'll follow wherever it may lead and we will tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it this is our image of ourselves we are fearless we are bold well that all began to change in 2014 and so here's the story of how it changed my friend greg lukianov is the president of the foundation for individual rights in education and he's always been subject to depression he's prone to depression and in 2007 he had his most serious episode ever he made very specific plans to kill himself and at the last second before he was going to do it he he lost his nerve or whatever he would say about that and he called 9-1-1 and they talked him into calling a hospital they sent a car for him and they got him to check himself into a hospital when he was in the hospital or rather after he was discharged i should say he he learned cognitive behavioral therapy it's a very powerful easy technique you learn to retrain your thoughts and the key to it is that you learn to recognize the distortions the cognitive distortions that we all do sometimes but that depressed and anxious people do a lot so uh catastrophizing everything is going to go terribly and it's going to be a disaster black and white thinking over generalizing these are basically bad thinking the sorts of errors we'd want to weed out of anybody and so greg learned how to weed it out of his own thinking that's what cbt is he goes back to his job at fire now all of his work has been pushing back against administrators it was always administrators who were restricting student speech rights never the students it was always administrators who said you know we you can't say that shut down this publication we could get in trouble for it but suddenly from out of nowhere around 2013 2014 greg starts seeing episodes in which the students themselves are trying to censor speech or protect themselves as they said from speakers or books or ideas and so this is something new under the sun he'd never seen it so greg invites me to lunch in may of 2014 because my first book the happiness hypothesis had talked about cbt and so he wanted to talk to me about and he he told me his idea which is this weird stuff is happening somehow colleges are teaching students to think in this distorted way and if we're teaching them to think in this distorted way aren't we going to make them depressed well i thought this was a brilliant idea because i had just begun to see this at nyu among students there and so some strange things had been happening on campus and i was reading about other things all around the country and i thought this was just a brilliant diagnosis so i said it was a great idea you should write it up and i volunteered myself as a co-author and he accepted my self-volunteering and we wrote it up as an article that was eventually published in the atlantic uh in 2015. now the kinds of things that greg was seeing and that i began to see once i talked with him were that from out of nowhere students in 2014 began asking for trigger warnings uh if if a book is going to be a sign that has some upsetting content students wanted to be warned before a book like greek mythology or something would be assigned students were shutting down shouting down speakers disinviting speakers who didn't fit their their ideas of of a certain kind of political view and they were asking for safe spaces this was a term that of course many of us remember from bosnia in the 1990s but a safe space would be a place where you wouldn't be criticized ideas wouldn't be criticized you could speak without having people challenge you also it was a place where if a disturbing speaker was coming to campus has happened at brown university it wasn't really a disturbing speaker it was a debate between two feminists one of whom argued that america is a rape culture the other argued that america is not a rape culture perfectly good thing to debate but some students thought that we shouldn't allow someone to come onto campus and say that it's not a rape culture because this could be invalidating to some women who had been victims of sexual assault and who believed that america is a rape culture so they shouldn't have to suffer someone challenging their belief and when the university president would not shut down the talk the students went and created a space for these students who would be upset by this that had various ways to comfort and soothe them from their upset now again they don't have to go to the talk but it was thought to be dangerous to them this was the kind of distortion that greg was seeing so our article comes out in august of 2015. there's a lot of discussion around it a lot of people say that we're catastrophizing that we're over generalizing from a few incidents uh you know a dozen famous episodes on campus in the previous year and so you know we have this interesting discussion about it and then uh at halloween that year at yale all hell breaks loose there was a conflict over halloween costumes now nobody actually wore an offensive costume but there was a big argument over whether the university can tell students what to wear it escalated to gigantic protests students marched to the president's office they gave him a list of many many demands he had to remake yale they gave him one week they give him an ultimatum make give us your response in one week or else and so he meets the ultimatum and he gives them as much as he can he tries to to meet as many of the demands as he possibly can and this is a smashing success such a big success that now the protests go national and at more than 80 universities within the next few months similar marches similar demands to remake the university including many mandatory courses in certain ways of thinking uh restrictions on speech all sorts of changes that would make it very difficult to do our work the episodes begin often with with racial protests and and demands about racial justice but they quickly morphed into just all kinds of demands so at oberlin for example there was a protest over bond me the vietnamese food in the cafeteria it wasn't authentic enough uh it was you know so so it becomes almost anything a professor here at the university of northern colorado assigned our article to his class to test out is it really true that students can't talk about controversial things anymore so he signs our article and lets the student students pick the topic the topic they pick is transgender so they have a discussion about transgender issues one student's offended reports the professor the professor's investigated his contract is not renewed so it's just like things are really just going hayward just because it's becoming very very strange in 2016 and into 2017. uh once the the unexpected election of donald trump takes place passions on campus escalate even further um and it's in this semester that all the violence happens so i want to be very clear things have been very unsettled but the violence was really limited to a few months in 2017. so the protests at berkeley which a lot of people were injured badly but nobody was actually killed and this it was students were involved but they weren't the main instigators at middlebury when charles murray was invited to speak not about the bell curve but about his book coming apart students shouted down the talk when they moved the talk students found out where the talk was they attacked murray and a professor who was interviewing him they attacked them injured the professor she has permanent neck damage she's retired from teaching so at evergreen college a complete meltdown they took the president essentially hostage uh wouldn't let him go to the bathroom humiliated him he never challenged their narrative he never objected he again tried to give the students everything he could possibly give them so all this was really confined to a few months things have settled down since then in that there's no actual violence but the trends keep moving towards this new regiment around speech and constant conflicts over words not not ideas over words is what a lot of the conflict is over so um this is the the overall thing that we're seeing uh the overall thing we're seeing is um a complex of ideas when you see when you see or hear students asking for or asking about um let's see that but yeah safe spaces trigger warnings microaggressions bias response teams saying that speech is violence this is the whole pattern at the heart of it is the belief that students are fragile and therefore because they're in a dangerous environment the university is a dangerous place for them they need to remake it to be a safe place for them they need protection so this is what greg was was seeing this is what we diagnosed and then it got so much worse after our article came out and that's why we decided to write it up into a book and we didn't just take an article and expand it you know to fill a book we really dug deeply into what was happening and why it was a really fascinating social science mystery and the diagnosis that we make in the book we have six chapters in the middle that go into six causal threads there's no easy explanation it's like six fuses were lit and they all came together around 2014 2015 and boom we get the implosion of of some universities we get rapid cultural change on many universities i won't go into this except that the three in red i will talk about um what i'm going to do instead of tracing out all the threads is tonight i'm going to focus on three really really bad ideas three ideas that are so terrible that if if young people come to believe all three we can almost guarantee that they will live unhappy and unsuccessful lives so be really bad to teach this in college but unfortunately in many universities in many parts of the universities we do teach these ideas so let me go through them so the first what doesn't kill you makes you weaker now most of you recognize this is the opposite of friedrich nietzsche's famous dictum what doesn't kill me makes me stronger right you've all heard that phrase in some form and the reason why nietzsche is correct the reason why this dictum is true is is the psychological concept of anti-fragility so this is a wonderful word this is the most important word i can teach you tonight you'll you'll find a use for this all over the place nasim telev the guy who wrote the book the black swan he's trying to understand systems like the american banking system which had collapsed in 2008 and he's one of the few people who predicted it because he said this whole thing has not been tested and so if there's any challenge it's not strong it's going to collapse and he was right so after the financial crisis he's thinking about this more generally what's the word for systems that are not fragile systems that get stronger the more you test them the more you push them the more you challenge them what's the word and there is no word in the english language so uh the word fragility so like glass is fragile that's why we don't give it to kids to play with we didn't don't give kids a wine glass to play with because it'll break we give them plastic because plastic is resilient if a kid drops a sippy cup on the ground it bounces it doesn't break but it doesn't get better so what's the word for a material where the more you drop it the stronger it gets and there is no word it's not resilient it's and so tuleb coins the term anti-fragile so examples of anti-fragility are bones and the immune system so bones get stronger to the extent that you use them if you take it easy on your bones you know you don't exercise or you you stay in weightlessness for months your bones will get weak but the more you bang them around the more you use them the stronger they get the immune system is the best example peanut allergies were very rare when i was a kid the incidence in america has tripled more than tripled since the 1990s why well it turns out it's only going up in countries that tell women to not eat peanuts while they're lactating avoid peanuts because some kids have peanut allergies well it turns out this was exactly the wrong thing to do and this was proven by a really clever experiment it's just so straightforward a group of immunologists recruited about 600 women who had recently given birth and whose kids were at risk of peanut allergy and there happens to be an israeli snack food called bamba which is like a puffed corn uh like a like a cheeto type thing but with peanut dust around it so it tastes like peanut butter so it's a very easy way to give even a two or three month old can eat it and enjoy it and get peanut powder into his mouth so what they did was they recruited these women and their babies and these were only women who'd given birth to a kid with eczema or egg allergies or some reason to think that they had an immune issue an allergy issue and therefore they were more likely to have peanut allergy and they told half of them random assignment half of them here here's here's a you know five year supply of bomba go feed it to your kid every week you know and if the kid doesn't die come back and no i mean they you know they you know obviously they had irb approval they were careful uh they monitored the kids uh but half were told follow standard advice your kid might have a peanut allergy so don't you go eating any peanuts because it'll come the proteins will come through in the milk so what happens in the standard condition where women followed standard medical advice to test it at the age of five the k they do a full immunological assay they look at the immune response 17 percent of the kids had a peanut allergy so for the rest of their lives every time they go to a restaurant you've been with people at peanut it's hard they because you know people can slip in you they have to go to the hospital so it's it's it's it's really bad seventeen percent will have to live with that what happened in the group of kids that ate peanut dust three percent only three percent had a peanut allergy so we could largely eliminate peanut allergies by doing the opposite of what we've been doing because the immune system is not fragile it's anti-fragile and if you treat a fr if you treat an anti-fragile system as though it's fragile you defeat its developmental plan and you it which is what we've been doing to our kids immune systems all right let's rerun that experiment oh just so this is why the subtitle of our book is how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure so that's a clear example in a biological domain now let's look at a psychological domain so kids are fragile right i mean in some sense they are but actually kids are anti-fragile that's the developmental plan that evolution worked out for mammal babies in particular that have to do a lot of brain growth kids are anti-fragile but they sure look fragile when you bring them home from the hospital and so we protect them we're afraid for their welfare where we're afraid they're going to bang their heads we're so careful with them but if you're always there to protect them if you protect them then they don't learn how to protect themselves and you have to always be there for them and if you get into this habit in middle childhood when they forget their backpack you run to school and you bring the backpack and they don't learn to remember the backpack the next day because you're always there picking up for them and if you are this kind of parent then it never stops and you have to be doing it when they're in college and when they graduate and when they get their first job and when they get their first job evaluation so i teach in a business school and i now sometimes hear stories of of business people who gave a tough evaluation to a young employee and they got a call from the mother because it never stops um so this is a really really bad way to raise kids and the evidence that we're doing this the evidence that we're over protecting our kids and that we didn't always do it that this is new can be demonstrated in a very simple way so clearly we have a bunch of different ages here we have all different ages here so i'd like to ask you all think back to your childhood and and i want to ask you all at what age were you let out and that means that you could go out without any adult watching you you could go to a friend's house you know a couple hundred yards away you and your friend could maybe go down and you know buy candy or ice cream or you know if no sugar is allowed pizza whatever you had some degree of independence you could play outside not the backyard further away so at what age so just think of your number so if if that was first grade you should say six okay so what number now here's how we're going to do it if you were born before 1982 please raise your hand high all right so you are all gen x or baby boomers okay put your hands down so just just those of you who just raised your hand i'm going to ask you to yell out your number how old were you i'm going to sweep my finger around when i point to your section just yell out the age what's what age yell it out okay so as you see there is almost no variance almost everybody here said six seven or eight there were a couple of fives i didn't hear anybody say 10. okay because before because even in the 1980s even the 1980s at the peak of the crime wave us older folks we grew up doing a gigantic crime wave to say nothing of the threat of nuclear annihilation but we were allowed out to play that's what was always done and this is what was always done in most other countries that i've been to okay now i want to ask just those of you who were born after 1995. so if you're gen z born after 1995 raise your hand if you were born after 1995 raise your hand high okay so just you i presume most of you are current students here at uccs okay same thing i'm going to sweep my finger just yell out your number what's your number okay so so i hope you heard it there's a lot more variance right so the mode was 10. that's what i always find so fifth grade sixth grade the mode was now ten not six and i did hear a couple of sixes and eights um and i heard a couple of sixteens but mostly but mostly this is the norm we wait until mostly mostly fifth to seventh grade is when we first let kids out this is tragic this is really terrible because it's in those years of middle childhood so roughly ages seven to twelve when kids all over the world take on adventures the whole point of providing a secure base for your kid is that the kid can now go off and explore and challenge herself and extend her capabilities and if something goes wrong she can come back to the secure base this is the basis of attachment theory if you keep the kid on a secure base the kid has no chance to learn kids are anti-fragile and we don't let them develop it if we keep them under our watch so all the stories we used to tell about childhood no more because oh the places you'll go you might get hurt therefore don't go um and uh peter gray is a wonderful psychologist at boston college he's one of the country's experts on the psychology of play all mammals play it's necessary to wire up the brain the bigger your brain the more play you need humans need a huge amount of play and we continue to play into adulthood what happens then when we deprive kids of free play what happens and gray argues psychopathology mental illness because here all the things that play does when kids decide what game to play decide what the rules be get into conflicts and work out the conflicts what happens they develop their intrinsic interests learn how to make decisions solve problems regulate emotions make friends and it sure is fun they have a lot of joy and pleasure one of the most important things you learn in unsupervised play is how to how to take intelligent risks and you see this when kids learn how to say skateboard they don't just skateboard safely they then start going down the stairs because they want just the right amount of risk that's how they grow it's built into them to take risks to get stronger to get smarter to extend their capabilities so an interesting article in the wall street journal should we allow kids to play with saws and knives alison gopnik argues well actually maybe yes and so she says trying to eliminate all risks from kids lives you know we want to do that but it's a really bad idea and she says it may be like the hygiene hypothesis which is what i just told you about peanuts it may be that kids need risk just as they need dirt and germs to develop their immune system 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 two feminists coming to your campus to have a debate that you don't have to go to that is actually not risky at all but if you have not if you've not been able to develop your understanding of risk you might perceive it as risky and in this way we isolate young people from the adult skills that they will one day have to master so i'm not saying that we need this much risk because nietzsche nietzsche did not say that what kills you makes you stronger there's definite evidence against that so we don't want situations where kids can physically die what we want what we want i think are playgrounds like this where you can get hurt it's very very important that kids can get hurt on playgrounds because if they can get hurt then every day they learn how to not get hurt but if we take that away from them if we give them only playgrounds like this which is what my kids grow up on then they don't learn anything it's just not that much fun because there's not enough risk the basic dictum of child rearing should be prepare the child for the road not the road for the child in britain they're ahead of us by a couple of years they have all the same problems but they've wisened up to this a couple of years ago they realized with their rising rates of depression and anxiety they've realized we've got to give kids more risk now they have many fewer lawyers than we do so they can actually do it but so they started they started putting construction materials out on playgrounds and let the kids play with it and yes you can hurt your fingers on the bricks but look what this kid is learning he is discovering independently archimedes principle of the lever and he is going to jump on that board and the bricks are going to fly up and teach him a lesson he will always remember unless he has amnesia in america where we have too many lawyers we do the opposite if anyone gets hurt using a consumer product we want to ban the consumer product and yes college students sometimes play with super soakers and snowballs and yes they sometimes get hurt the american impulse is well let's ban super smokers and snowballs and i really want to emphasize we talk a lot in the book about safety and safety ism the worship of safety we don't mean physical safety the students nowadays are gen z often talks about emotional safety and so here's a meme that i found online we are all balloons filled with feelings in a world full of pins okay we can understand what that means but do you really want to teach your kids that they are balloons full of feelings do you really want to teach them that the world is full of pins what a way to them what a way to make them fearful telev has wonderful advice it's a really great book and he he points out that a candle flame is fragile and so if you have a candle flame you need to put like a you know hurricane lamp a glass tube around it to protect it from wind but a fire once it reaches a certain size a fire the more you blow on it the stronger it gets and so teleps says you want to be the fire and wish for the wind that's what a college experience should be all about now uh so this is the first grade on truth what doesn't kill you makes you weaker that is wrong i want to now go into this issue of rising anxiety and depression which i think is related to what i just showed you so it's really important for everybody to understand that there was a change of generations with birth year 1996 plus or minus a couple years kids born in 1996 are very different from the millennials and so this is national uh nationally representative data on how teenagers use their time and what's been found is that the percentage of 12th graders who have a driver's license has been declining this this began with the millennials but it's accelerating with gen z um the percentage who have ever had a drink is declining which you might think is a good thing from a safety point of view but it's related to a broader pattern of simply not having adult experiences for example the percent that have ever gone out on a date or had any sort of romantic interaction plummeting the percentage who have ever worked for pay plummeting now we used to expect when a student shows up on campus they have learned to drive have had some interaction some some romantic or sexual interaction they've at least tried alcohol once and they've maybe worked and that's not generally true anymore students in fact gene twenge who organized this data says 18 year olds today have the life experience of a 15 year old from 30 or 40 years ago so we should really rethink should we be sending 18 year olds from high school to college in the book greg and i recommend everybody should take a gap year the whole country would be so much better off if students left home worked if you take kids from red zones of the country have them work in a blue zone or vice versa boy would that do a lot for democracy for the kids and for universities [Applause] so so gen z is having a lot less experience what are they doing instead with all this time saved instead of drinking and dating and driving and working what are they doing they're on their phones now you can see the difference between gen z and the millennials in this graph this is again nationally representative data on college students and what you see is that in 2010 and 2012 all students on campus were millennials and those were their rates of those issues over the next four years they're replaced by gen z so today almost all students unless they're late returners are gen z and look what happens most things are only up a little but psychological disorders are up a lot they've tripled the rate has tripled and you heard chancellor reddy talk about that this is the top concern for university presidents across the country mental health but it's not all psychological disorders it's only two depression and anxiety that's it nothing else not schizophrenia not bipolar disorder not even substance use depression and anxiety so this is again national data what happens the rates are steady for major depression girls have higher rates than boys that's always been the case at puberty the gap opens up but as soon as gen z comes into the picture the rate for boys goes up but the rate for girls goes way up and this is the pattern you'll see over and over again in the next few slides college student data different different data source again millennials are stable rates but when gen z comes to campus males are up females are way up so we've all been talking about this for the last few years and there are some skeptics so dr richard friedman writing in the new york times says oh come on it's not real it's just a moral panic in fact gen z is just more open they're they're really good at talking about their feelings admitting that they're depressed this is a good thing that they're so honest so those graphs that's just self-report data it's nothing to be worried it's not a real epidemic i believe he's wrong and i can show you the data in two graphs so this is um let's look at behavior not self-report behavior now there's nothing to see in this graph this is the boys uh this is the rates this is the number out of a hundred thousand teenage boys who are admitted to the hospital every year because they cut themselves or otherwise harm themselves to the point where they had to be hospitalized and what you see is that the rates are around two to you know 200 250 per 100 000 and that there's no change at all flat line from 2001 to 2015. okay now let's look at the girls first thing to note is that the rates are a lot higher but and that's always been the case again girls have more uh internalizing disorders that is girls have more rates of diseases that make themselves miserable boys have higher rates of what are called externalizing disorders where they make other people miserable so so it's alcoholism drug use crime violence okay so there are big sex differences uh but what we're talking about here is especially hitting hitting the girls so but no real trend up to 2009 what happens after 2009 is this so the older teen girls their rate is up 62 percent this is not a small increase this is a gigantic increase in hospital admissions this is not self-report this is hard data most stunningly look at the young girls look at the 10 to 14 year olds their rate has nearly tripled 189 increase in just a few years it's important to note that the oldest these young women here these are millennials uh if you were if you were 20 in 2015 you're not gen z you're millennial so whatever was happening in this period wasn't affecting the millennials it was only affecting gen z what could it be um well it's not just self-harm it's also suicide so the suicide rate so boys have higher rates of completed suicides they tend to use irreversible methods guns and tall buildings and they have higher rates that's a cause for concern but it's not a change what changed around 2010-2011 is that the boys rate went up but actually about the same as older men the girls rates however went way up much more than older women so for uh for pre-teens the rates have risen to the highest level they've ever been and they've risen spectacularly quickly so uh 10 to 14 year old boys these are the rates going back to the 70s during the crime wave there was lead poisoning there was more violence but in modern times so millennials uh the millennials are in this section here once gen z comes into the picture the rate for boys goes up but the increase for girls is as a percentage much much larger in fact it's 150 percent increase in the rate of suicide for 10 to 14 year old girls so this is not self-report this is actual completed suicides so yes we have an epidemic of depression and anxiety and self-harm and suicide it began around 2010 2011 and it's not just in the united states so every at every university there's a flood of demand we can't hire therapists fast enough to meet the demand oh here this is interesting um when you at penn state they have an office that surveys mental health clinics from all over the country at universities what's happening why are students coming in for into the clinic only depression and anxiety is rising now note here's stress only six percent of students are coming in saying i'm coming in because i'm very stressed my point is gen z is not actually more stressed than previous generations i've seen this in several data sets the difference is that we never gave gen z the chance to learn how to deal with ordinary everyday stress and so it shows up as anxiety and depression i've been looking at other countries i've traveled to a number of other countries talking about the book and we see the same pattern in all of the english-speaking countries where i'm able to get good data and understand it so in britain self-harm is up the boys again up a little bit girls up a lot in canada uh same thing boys well here boys are up a little bit girls up a lot especially uh in the higher age group but again as a percentage this is the biggest percentage increase there the younger teenage girls in australia and new zealand in australia the trend is not as sharp but again we see the same trend for mental illness meaning depression in this case in new zealand is really interesting because it's the last english-speaking country that lets kids out to play they play rugby they have this idea that they say take a concrete pill toughen up new zealand is they're much tougher than the rest of us and i was hopeful that new zealand things would be different and they were the trend is just starting in new zealand and as they say in new zealand every bad idea from america comes here three to five years later so why is this happening and what i'm telling you tonight what i'm sure the case i'm trying to build is that we weakened a whole generation because they're anti-fragile but we treated them like they're fragile so we weakened their defenses we weakened their toughness we made them more delicate and then social media came in for the same generation that was weakened social media comes in just as they're reaching puberty this i think is what explains the timing and the sex difference and the fact that it's happening in multiple countries at the same time or with just a couple years delay so i'm writing an essay now for the atlantic uh with tobias rose stockwell who understands social media from the inside i don't and what i've learned is that social media was actually a pretty nice place in its early years there was friendster there was myspace there was the facebook as it was originally called and these were just glorified address books that let you link to your friends and display a few things about yourself they were pretty nice but things really really changed between 2009 and 2012. so check it out in 2006 facebook opens to the world so now anybody can lie and say they're 13 and get a facebook account but very few 10 year olds do in 2007 the iphone comes out but it's expensive and very few 10 11 12 year olds have one by 2009 though a lot more have them and facebook introduces the like button which makes it much much more addictive because now everything you do is rated by others and the like button allows gen z to become like bf skinner the behaviorist training pigeons by giving them little tiny bits of reward for the desired behavior so gen z connects hyper connects to each other so they all become psychologists training each other and they all become pigeons being trained by each other so this is i think a transformative moment 2009 when social media becomes much more addictive and much more shaping um twitter adds the retweet button facebook copies that with a share and now outrage can spread things can spread and go viral much more quickly so between 2009 and 2012 is the key period when social media changes becomes much better at fomenting outrage much better at being at addicting people sucking them in and keeping them on and this is the two-year period when american teenagers go from mostly not online to mostly on online online i mean on social media daily use so before this kids would often go over to each other's houses and they would talk face-to-face and they would do things together after this they mostly go home sit on their bed and interact via their phone and we this might have been great we might have thought and i thought maybe this will make them super social if they have all this social interaction but that doesn't seem to be what happened instead what happened is this this is the period when it all changes and right then is when the mental illness the depression rates take off social media also perfectly explains the sex difference why is why are boys doing a little worse but girls in every country that i've looked at are doing much worse first the boys are mostly playing video games and it turns out video games aren't that bad um they can push out everything else you know the kids can become you know pasty and vitamin d deficient and you know but um but it doesn't do the bad things that we thought uh it doesn't make them crazy killers um social media though is worse than we thought i believe so girls use social media more girls are more affected by constant social comparison that's always been the case and it used to be that it was the models in the magazines that were airbrushed when i was growing up there was a lot of talk about that it's bad to expose teenage girls to these fake beauty standards that are impossible to reach well guess what it's no longer models and magazines it's now all of your friends so my niece showed me how she took a photo of herself um she pressed a single filter button on on instagram and her face got narrower her eyes got bigger and her skin got perfectly smooth so she was suddenly much more beautiful so imagine how look seventh and eighth grade are the worst years of everybody's life right imagine making it ten times worse by stepping up the social comparison and suddenly everyone's more beautiful than you this is terrible for girls girls are more effective than boys by the fear of missing out and fear being left out and lastly girls and boys are equally aggressive aggression is part of human nature as is cooperation but boy's aggression is physical they physically threaten each other and so on weekends they can't be bullied and when they're all playing video games they can't be bullied so boys bullying is it was not made worse by the arrival of smartphones but girls aggression has always been relational they damage each other's relationships or reputation and now they can do it 24 hours a day including weekends you can never escape and you don't even know who's doing it because they can create anonymous accounts so this has been a disaster for girls and a boon to the mean girls who who are experts in bullying i have a lot more on this if you want to dig deeper go to thecoddling.com and then click on the solutions in better mental health there's a lot more research there you can you can dig into okay so that's okay that was the longest one the other two will be shorter but what doesn't kill you makes you weaker is just wrong kids are anti-fragile we've treated them like they're fragile we've denied them experience in the real world but we said go ahead and have as much experience on the online world as you want we have no idea what will happen it's a giant national experiment let's just hope for the best and that's what happened uh bad idea number two very briefly um is is wrong the truth is that we are all prone to emotional reasoning and the confirmation bias and this is the central idea of the stoics and of buddhism and of many other wisdom traditions so epictetus said it is not things that disturb us but our interpretation of their significance and this is basically in the insight of cbt something happens in the world did it hurt you well if you think it's the end of the world then it does hurt you if you catastrophize then it does hurt you um so buddha said your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded but once mastered as you learn to do in cbt once mastered no one can help you as much not even your father or your mother aaron beck one of the founders of cbt basically developed a method of teaching people to question their feelings you feel left out you feel sad did somebody really insult you did they do they mean to to exclude you let's look at the evidence and it turns out often you're wrong and so cbt is basically ancient wisdom turned into a therapy you learn how to how to catch yourself catastrophizing over generalizing dichotomous thinking all those things in college i'm going to shorten this one for time i want to keep the talk to to an hour i have a lot to tell you so i'm going to really skip this one except to say that in college a lot of the innovations that we've done since 2015 often because the students have been demanding them and teach students to do this to embrace this untruth we teach them magnification when we teach them to find microaggressions in ordinary conversation we teach them emotional reasoning that if that it's not we teach them literally that it's not intent that matters it's impact that's the thing that the students sometimes say and so if you if you feel offended by something then you were attacked and then the attacker therefore needs to be punished by an adult we do fortune telling students are rarely asking for trigger warning for themselves they're usually saying we need a trigger warning because some people will be traumatized by this book that's fortune telling very few people are traumatized by a book so i'm going to again shorten this one but this is chapter 2 of the book and we'll move on to this one bad idea number three which is incredibly important on college campuses and increasingly in the workplace it's very important for you to understand what's happening and how we are coming apart with increasing demonization of each other across the political divide and many other divides so this is a really bad idea to teach students that life is a battle between good people and evil people that is a recipe for constant conflict and for uh for destroying cooperation what's true is that we are all prone to dichotomous thinking and to tribalism these are our default these are easy you don't have to teach people to do this alexander solzhenitsyn said it most most brilliantly when he describes his time in the soviet union's gulags and their prison camps when he could have been all moralistic and talked about how evil the regime was and what a victim he was but he notices that he himself with one slight different decision he would have been a guard not a prisoner and so he points out that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being we're all capable of good and evil we all do good we all do evil combine that and of course this insight is common to all the wisdom traditions why do you see the speck on your neighbor's eye but you do not notice the log on your own we're all hypocrites we're all good we're all evil we all need to be more morally humble but instead what do we teach students on campus oh just to bring in also in addition to our dichotomous thinking we're all prone to tribalism this bedouin proverb captures the logic perfectly i against my brothers i and my brothers against my cousins i and my brothers and cousins against the world we're really good at doing us versus them whatever the level of attack is we organize and we fight them so you put this all together and you get the culture of the call out culture that has spread across campuses since 2014 2015. so here's a great description of it from a student at smith college in massachusetts 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 detect a politically incorrect view and call the person out on their mistake and i want you to think those are your students here i want you to think do you see that here and i have no idea what the answer is going to be i imagine it's better than at smith but i don't know what we're going to find here but 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 so that's a very good description of call-out culture it chills speech because people are afraid not of being punished by the officials but of the social shaming the calling out the attack by fellow students so my question so if you are a current student at uccs please raise your hand high right now okay so just you just okay put your hands down now and my question is two questions the first is going to be does this characterize the overall climate here at school and then the second is have you seen evidence of it in some places so first does this characterize the overall climate at the school raise your hand high if you'd say yes okay great only only about three people great uh and raise your hand if you'd say no current students right here and say no okay great so um you'll be very pleased to know that i did this demo at uc boulder last night and most of them said that actually they did see it at boulder so this is you're doing much better than boulder i imagine there's some rivalry yeah okay okay okay but now my question is to current students have you seen this in some parts of the university raise your hand if you'd say yes okay now it seems to be most to you and raise your hand to say no you've not seen any sign of this uh one raise your hand high one two three okay about about eight or ten all right so so this is common in many universities that it's here but it hasn't taken over you should thank your lucky stars that you're not going to yale brown harvard middlebury um boulder uh you know i think this way i think this is actually being recorded it's gonna be put online and i'm gonna get in a lot of trouble but okay um okay so a call-out culture does not just affect the students because we faculty are also afraid of the subset of students who do the calling out and we are self-censoring like mad i just spoke to some professors at a major midwestern university they teach cognitive psychology and they said we just don't even teach intelligence anymore it's one of the major areas of cognitive psych but they just won't even touch it because it's just too likely to make students mad so faculty are self-censoring we're often afraid of our students now most of our students are wonderful but in a class of 300 we have to teach to the most sensitive student the one who will report us and many many universities have implemented a bias response team so that students can report us anonymously now central to this new way of thinking where you see offenses everywhere is the is the notion of intersectionality and i want to be very clear that you know this is part of the culture war and you can tell where people are how they talk about political correctness and intersectionality and most people are either on the left or the right and they're all yelling at each other i i don't do that i assume good intent and i find good ideas everywhere and this is a good idea kimberly crenshaw who developed the concept in late 1980s pointed out that that we all have many identities and your experience as a human being is not the sum of those identities they interact and intersect in ways that produce new outcomes so if you're a black woman in america your experience is not just the sum of being black and american being female that there are unique indignities obstacles uh uh dangers problems uh that that affect african-american women and if you don't understand that then you you won't hear them you won't you won't see certain problems so it's a great idea and she has a ted talk which is excellent i agree with everything she says in the ted talk but when you take this idea onto campus and you teach students to think about identities in this binary way where there's there's well like this this is a diagram from the 1990s you teach students to see that everyone exists at a certain point on these binary dimensions either you're white or you're non-white and if you're white you are privileged and if you're non-white you are oppressed and either you're male or non-male and if you're male you're privileged now these are not just descriptions of possible dimensions of identity paired with objective facts about equality inequality it's not just a description these are moral this is a moral map because the people above the line are oppressors therefore they are morally bad and the people below the line are victims and therefore they are morally good and so as it's taught on campus we actually teach students to see the world in terms of good people versus evil people good groups versus evil groups and constant conflict over a zero sum a fixed pie life is a battle between groups over a fixed pie now this diagram is from the 1990s but just last week a friend of mine sent me sent me this i'm sorry sent me this is just to point out that the intersection of evil is the heterosexual white male they are the cause of our problems they are the locus of evil is the lesson that follows from this uh now just last week or two weeks ago a friend of mine sent me something that a student of his gave him this is at an ivy league school in the northeast and she went to a leadership training course so this is how to be a leader and they were teaching intersectionality let's zoom in so what the students were taught are that you should look at society and you should see that there's a privileged group which is cisgender men they're the privileged group and the oppressors and then there's an oppressed group everybody else is oppressed by the cisgender men that's the way you should look at society there are whites who are privileged and then non-whites are oppressed by the whites look at go down to number six the privileged people are age 28 to 52 and they oppress everybody who's younger than them or older than them now this is an incredibly paranoid way to look at the world young people call you should see yourself as oppressed by people like me am i still in it no i'm not oh oh my god i qualify for victim status now um so again it's you know this idea is not disconnected from reality there is privilege there is oppression but to teach young people to look at other human beings and say not you're a human being but oh you're this this and this therefore your moral score is negative three this is a terrible thing to teach people in a multi-ethnic free society and this leads to things like this an essay written by a student in texas about white death and how your dna is an abomination white death will mean liberation for all now he didn't mean literally kill all white people he just meant cultural death that whiteness should be wiped out white people's culture should be eliminated so that's actually not nearly as bad at the new school a few blocks north of me in manhattan students this is one of the most progressive anti-racist anti-fascist spaces you could possibly imagine and at this bastion of very very progressive thinking the students created a safe space for everybody other than straight white people everyone else is welcome no straight white people okay again this is not a good way to think in a multi-ethnic society and it's not just on college it's it's seeping out into the broader political discussion so harvey weinstein is a monster who should be put in jail for the rest of his life but a gender studies professor writes an article that gets published in the washington post that says why can't we hate men collectively we collectively have every right to hate you collectively you collectively have done us collectively wrong okay now it's not that there's no truth to that but you know i'm a product of the 20th century where the big lesson that we learned and that i thought was our key to progress was you know that thing where we judge people by their category we hate them because of their category how about if we do less of that okay that was the 20th century late 20th century summed up in a single sentence in terms of our moral progress okay i think that was a pretty good idea and that's being reversed now the new york times hired sarah jong who had all these tweets about how much she hates white people and it was a big it was a big brouhaha and the time stuck to its guns and they didn't fire her which i think is actually the right decision because i don't think people should we should just stop firing people for something they tweeted we didn't need to just stop that but the point is she is now an editor at the new york times who has this history of of writing really nasty things about white people and white men and guess who chimes in jessica valenti now she is the feminist who was arguing at brown that america is a rape culture so she chimes in with the most perfect restatement of great on truth number three sarah zhang is good her haters are bad black and white thinking good versus evil and she even goes on to say it's not difficult this is obviously true here's the good news guess what black people don't all think alike women don't all think alike muslims don't all think alike okay and a lot of them [Applause] and a lot of them are now beginning to push back and say no no you don't speak for me this is not a good way to go and so the new york times just ran this article i'm a black feminist and i think call-out culture is toxic there are better ways of doing social justice work um there's been a raft of new books by non-white intellectuals and and professors um arguing that we need to rethink identity politics and what so what greg and i do in our book is we say common enemy identity politics is terrible it's it's divisive it's bad for the very people doing it it just leads to constant conflict it's the wrong thing to do if you want to create a welcoming inclusive society but um common humanity identity politics works it's not that identity politics is bad groups need a way to speak up for their interests so you never would want to ban identity politics while leaving in place every other kind of politics but if you do it by starting from a position of love or inclusion or common humanity then it actually works it's better for the people who do it so it and it's the only way forward if you want to create a diverse welcoming society so paulie murray was a woman who was a she was a gay or possibly we might now say trans a woman who was ordained as an episcopal minister and then got a law degree from yale new residential colleges named for her and she wrote in the in 1946 well before martin luther king came on the scene i intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods when my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me i shall draw a larger circle to include them so you still need political activity but if you do within a framework of love and inclusion it actually works the dalai lama tweeted this last year i'm tibetan i'm buddhist and i'm the dalai lama but if i emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers what we need to do is pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people so this is identity politics but done in a common humanity way this is the way that the great civil rights leaders did now obviously there was many there were many schools of thought but the one that ultimately won the day i think was um was king's way and uh when i i did the civil rights tour in montgomery and birmingham and learned that you know after the church was bombed in birmingham uh i believe was king who said some of our white brothers and sisters have made a mistake so he refused to demonize he he was relentlessly humanizing and guess what this actually works this kind of approach especially if your opponent is very strong actually can be more effective so what i'd like you to imagine is that just suppose there was the university that was founded on the three great untruths imagine that when students come in they're told well it doesn't kill you makes you weak or so will protect you always trust your feelings don't question them and life is a battle between good people and evil people and will teach you to tell who is who imagine what it'd be like to go to a university like that conversely imagine a university that taught you instead we're going to prepare you for the road we're not going to change the road here for you we're going to prepare you to actually graduate and be successful and we're going to teach you you know what you've got to learn critical thinking if you feel something look for evidence question it you might be wrong and if they we taught you that you know what life is really morally complicated and that's what we're going to talk about when we read great literature it's really complicated and don't just go with your first judgment and so when i googled uh uccs i think it was actually kind of revealing that the first picture that came up was this night rainbow and you know you say let your light shine or whatever was in your motto so i thought that worked out pretty well um all right so now to wrap up i want to now i hope i've laid out what the problems are on campus and why they're spreading it just in the last few minutes i'm going to go through what can we do so raise your hand if you are a parent whose kids are younger than 16 raise your hand high okay so i'm speaking to all of you please when you go home please go to letgrow.org it was started by lenore skinezy who wrote the book free range kids she's brilliant she's funny i'm i co-founded it with her i'm on the board but she really runs it all kinds of ideas for how you can give your kids more freedom build on their innate anti-fragility second to all of you who are parents or who will have kids soon here are three simple rules to solve what is the most pervasive problem it's the thing that all parents talk about when they're together it's really getting annoying and boring but here are three rules that can actually really help this is what i do in my home first all screens out of the bedroom by a set time do not there's no reason why teenagers should have any kind of screen in their photo in their bedroom overnight because some actually leave the alerts on and even if they don't when we wake up in the night we all wake up in the night at times and just go right back to bed but if your phone is there some will check it and check it and check it and have anxiety and not go back to sleep and that's just bad all around second no social media until high school your kids are going to say but mom everyone else is on it and that's unfortunately true but what i'm working to do is is get it known that this is just so bad for junior high school kids and especially elementary kids we need to make a concerted effort as a society to just keep it out of middle school and younger high school we're not going to be able to keep it out of it but don't let kids have it until they're in high school and third agree on time budget you don't want to be monitoring your kids all the time are you on your phone again what are you doing what are you doing no i'm doing language training it's okay mom oh okay okay you don't want that kind of constant monitoring so set a time budget with your kids and gen z is actually quite reasonable they understand the difficulties here and they often are very reasonable and saying they're not going to say oh i want six hours a day they'll often say well no yeah i do spend too much time on the phone how about two or three you know three hours some number but work it out with them and then you can use the screen time controls or other things that are very very effective third i urge you anybody with any political connections in this state are there any state legislators here or does anybody know a state legislature raise your hand okay good there's several of you please please contact the state legislator you know and urge them to pass a free-range parenting bill in colorado utah has led the way utah is showing you up colorado is vastly inferior until you match them by passing and what it does in utah they pass to love it specifically says that giving kids freedom that letting kids go outside is not automatically neglect which means that if you if your kids go play in a park you can't be arrested unless you also abuse your kids but if you just let them play in a park when they're eight nine ten years old you can't be arrested for that and that gives parents the confidence to actually send their kids out to learn things i want to emphasize that the current regime in which we're all terrified that we're gonna that a neighbor is gonna call and report us if our kids are spotted in the wild is hardest for poor single mothers married middle class families can afford child care they can shift off they can constantly supervise the child never leave him unguarded but if you're a single mother with an eight-year-old kid why can't the kid walk home from the bus stop why do you have to come home from work or hire a babysitter for an eight or nine year old kid when you yourself all of us spent time alone when we were seven and eight anyway please pass a free range law here in colorado there's already talk about it so it's not so talk to your legislators about this second how many of you here are professors or administrators at the university level please raise your hand high okay great about about 15 or so of you i urge you if you run any organization this applies to talk constantly about anti-fragility and that will justify all the other policies that you might do that will actually make students stronger so ruth simmons first african-american president of an ivy league school said learning is the antithesis of comfort the collision of views and ideologies is in the dna of the academic enterprise we do not need any collision avoidance technology here and that allowed her when students demanded that she shut down a speech by i think it was david horowitz she said no in fact she went to the talk to demonstrate you know what you can learn from this you can get stronger especially college administrators everybody is is is is facing this mental health crisis why not teach cbt to incoming freshmen it won't just help those with depression anxiety it gives them a vocabulary for critical thinking it helps everybody and third if you run any sort of organization please consider using open mind it's a program i developed with my colleagues it uses basic research in moral psychology it walks students through five steps cultivate moral humility learn some psychology why we do confirmation bias why you will benefit from having people disconfirm your ideas how do you start a conversation uh and we have evidence that it works i won't go into this but it's free online get a link send it out to your employees members of your congregation the pta whatever it is any group that is experiencing political conflict if you all do this together things should get a lot better and finally everybody who raised their hand before i invite you all to join heterodox academy josh was one of the first 10 members of it we're a totally non-partisan group we're evenly balanced on the political spectrum we love universities we're not trying to help any party we're trying to help universities by saying we need to actively work to safeguard and increase viewpoint diversity so please if you're a professor just join it's free you can quit anytime finally those of you who are gen z students the several dozen of you or you know 50 or whatever it was who raised your hand speaking to you grown-ups all around you have been making assumptions about you from the time you were little they've been assuming you're fragile and most of you are not fragile and if you don't make your voices known if you don't ask for them to back off to let you learn from mistakes to stop overprotecting you they're not going to do it so so now that you've you've heard this talk or if you've read the book you have a language for saying back off we can handle this we'll help each other we'll work it out ourselves if you want a cause to advocate for i would say advocate for helping the next generation behind you to not have the levels of anxiety and depression that you have especially if you care about girls and women's issues this is incredibly important and finally to all of you all of you who are gen z and also millennials um anybody who's still relatively young i urge you to embrace anti-fragility and here is a great way to end the talk the best statement on anti-fragility ever was given by van jones he's a you know democratic activist he was in the obama administration he is he's he's a very progressive politically left activist who actively seeks out engagement with republicans and conservatives who is civil forceful but civil he's a great example for us in our time of polarization he was interviewed by david axelrod who runs the institute of pop for politics at the university of chicago and i'll just play you about two minutes okay wait a second let me just pause this system okay so there had just been um it wasn't quite a shout down a member of the trump administration was going to speak on campus and some students were protesting they were going to shout it down i don't remember what happened but right after that van jones is a guest on david axelrod's podcaster show and axelrod says we just had this episode uh what do you think about it van and listen to his response okay i have a different view but i'm interested in yours look i i don't like bigots and bullies i just want to just point that out i'm against big as i'm against bullies so just leave that as it is those who like bigots and bullies raised here so but i i'm gonna say i'm i got tough talk for my liberal colleagues on these campuses um and they don't tend to like it but they tend to like me so i get away with it so i'm going to keep trying let's test the proposition exactly i want to i want to push this there are two ideas about safe spaces one is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea the idea of being physically safe on a campus not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse or or or something like that or being targeted specifically personally for some kind of hate speech you are an n word or whatever that i hey perfectly fine with that perfectly fine with that but there's another view that is now i think ascendant which i think is just a horrible view which is that i need to be safe ideologically i need to be safe emotionally i just need to feel good all the time and if someone says something that i don't like that is a problem for everybody else including the administration and i think that is a terrible idea for the following reason i don't want you to be safe ideologically i don't want you to be safe emotionally i want you to be strong that's different i'm not going to pave the jungle for you put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity i'm not going to take all the weights 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 stuff you don't like and these 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 get to say stuff back and this you cannot bear [Applause] yeah mhm i've watched that now 50 times and i want to applaud every time i i see it too so so especially to gen z students and to everybody who has any authority over the environments in which gen z is raised and educated i hope you'll take that to heart and so i close with this final piece of advice from more or less from tuleb which is that you are the fire so now go find some wind so thank you [Applause] okay

Channel: Institute for Humane Studies

Views: 186,737

Rating: 4.9027853 out of 5

Keywords: Jonathan Haidt, Haidt, College Culture, Coddling of the American Mind, UCCS, IHS, safetyism

Id: Xi499A4VsN8

Length: 72min 58sec (4378 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CultistHeadpiece]

Submission statement:

In his recent talk at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Professor Jonathan Haidt explains three of the six causes of the emergence of a new moral culture of “safetyism,” and how these elements have contributed to the attitudes of current college students.

[u/ApatheticPhilistine]

Dammit. That's where I live and I had no idea he was even here. Argh.

[u/SwerfNTerf69]

Always upvote this man