Think Forum: Jonathan Haidt

good evening I'm Barbara Schneider president of Case Western Reserve University well thank you I am so pleased to be here to welcome you to the first program in the 2018-2019 think forum lecture series featuring acclaim social psychologist professor jonathan hight who is faculty member in ethical leadership at NYU's Stern School of Business you're gonna learn more about him in just a minute we are always excited to have you in the beautiful Maltz Performing Arts Center the think forum series is a spectacular group of speakers each and every year this year upcoming attractions include Julia Yaffe a contributing writer at the Atlantic and former Russian correspondent for the New York Times Tirana Burke founder of the me2 movement and Viet tan when literary scholar writer and professor at the University of Southern California I want to begin by saying thank you for all they do each and every day for Case Western Reserve to the members of our board of trustees who are here with us this evening vice chair of the board Tim Callahan Ellen Mavic dr. Vince Galgiani Celia Weatherhead and America trustee Sally Gris thank you all you are my heroes for everything you do and it is also great to be able to welcome tonight's community partner the City Club of Cleveland we're delighted that its CEO Dan Mull trip is here with us and I want to say thank you to Dan for being with us and for your partnership thank you Dan and finally thank you to our sponsors the office of inclusion diversity and equal opportunity led by dr. Marilyn Sanders Mobley the Division of Student Affairs led by vice president Lou stark and the Center for business law and regulation led by Professor Jonathan Adler and more about him eminently these individuals and and offices are among our strongest advocates on campus for promoting rigorous and respectful discussions among members of our campus community and the broader community on issues that affect us whether it's at the local level or the national or the international level and they do great work with our students our faculty and our staff now it is my pleasure to introduce Jonathan Adler he is the inaugural Johan there high Memorial professor of law at our School of Law and he is going to introduce this evening speaker professor Adler is a renowned scholar of administrative law his work focuses on regulatory policies related to the environment as well as on constitutional issues and he teaches courses on those topics he is a prolific writer and has written or served as editor of seven books and more than a dozen book chapters his most recent books include business and the Roberts Court and rebuilding the arc new perspectives on the endangered species act and form you see his writing in both the top Law Review journals and in the popular press including in The Wall Street Journal in the National Review in the New Republic Washington Post USA Today this year he was listed as the eighth most cited public legal scholar in the country and he is the only one of those scholars in the top ten who is under 50 years old professor yes the young Jonathan Adler professor Adler has testified before Congress many times on issues including health care reform various environmental issues his work is widely cited by the United States Supreme Court as well as in many national newspapers and media outlets he recently commented on the benefits and disadvantages of public congressional confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court nominees for Bloomberg and provided his views about how the Supreme Court has addressed cases with precedent in recent history for the wall street journal when you hear him speak you might recognize his voice because you hear him regularly on radio and television he's appeared on PBS on CNN MSNBC Fox News ABC News and NPR in addition to being an excellent communicator of some of the country's most important and complex issues he's also an outstanding teacher among his teaching awards is the distinguished teacher award from our law schools Alumni Association we are so proud of everything that Professor Adler is doing it is my pleasure to welcome him to introduce today's distinguished speaker please welcome professor Jonathan Adler Thank You Barbara after someone awkward after an introduction like that because I'm not your speaker but I'm very very honored to be able to introduce our speaker this evening a couple years ago president Snyder and I were talking about the issues raised by the fact that it seems that people can't talk anymore about divisive and controversial issues and how that problem poses such a threat to the mission in place of a university where we have to be free to speak to inquire to ask challenging questions and to challenge ourselves and in one of those conversations I pointed to some of our speakers work and president Schneider said well get him to come speak here so eventually we were able to do that and although interestingly enough this may have influenced the story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about tonight's event some of you may have seen it it has the headline author who says Americans are too sensitive to speak @cw are you I guess it's good that our reputation as a place of challenging inquiry and and and discourses is is well-known enough that P that Americans are too sensitive to speak here but I'm quite happy that that Professor height is is not among them it really is an honor and a pleasure to be able to welcome him to our campus Jonathan Hite is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business he previously taught at the University of Virginia his life's work or his his dominant work has been to try and apply the insights of moral psychology to help institutions function better whether that's political institutions business institutions or in much of his current work the university which led him to co-found an organization called heterodox university which is in part about making sure that universities remain a place where we can talk to each other we can exchange ideas and feel free to speak and inquire he's you haven't come here to hear me so I will I will wrap up but he's the author of several books the happiness hypothesis the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion which I heartily recommend and the book that is the inspiration for his talk tonight the book that is already a New York Times bestseller the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion or sorry that's the one that's told you about the coddling of the American mind how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure it's only been out a few weeks it's it's been consistently on the New York Times bestseller list where I expect it will remain for some time it offers some interesting and and perhaps challenging ideas about why we are where we are and what to do about it so again you didn't come here to listen to me so with no further ado it's really my pleasure and honor to be able to introduce Professor Jonathan Hite well good evening if I was afraid to speak here that warm introduction and welcome would put me at ease so thank you for that and this beautiful room this is a lovely venue to speak at I'm very pleased to be here talking to you tonight I had some great conversations earlier today one with the students at lunch and then another with faculty and administrators afterwards and as I speak at various universities and as I just wrote a book co-wrote a book on this it seems as though case is in pretty good shape there are Titanic forces that are that are reshaping and challenging institutions of all sorts in our country and not just in our country and other democracies as well it's a very complicated difficult time what I saw today at least suggests that so far case is doing very well at it that is it's addressing the issues addressing concerns and demands from students but people are doing it in a civil way the faculty the administrators are thoughtful about well how do we respond to these new new issues how do we change orientation how do we teach the students to dialogue with each other in ways that don't lead to lead to blow ups believe to understanding so I'm very pleased by what I've seen here today now the issues that I'm talking about are if they first emerged on college campuses but it's clear now that there's they're spreading down into high schools and even elementary schools they're spreading out into the workplace so even if you don't care about universities even if you don't care about this university and I shouldn't even say that because everybody here loves this university these issues I think are are ones that it will it will help you to understand because you're going to see them in the newspaper tomorrow you're going to see them in strange things that that people say that you can't understand unless you understand this new morality which is coming in and let's try to understand that so let's start with universities it's very helpful when analyzing some institution to talk about its Talos Talos is a word from from ancient Greek Aristotle and other philosophers thought it was helpful to speak about anything in terms of to analyze in terms of its tailors its purpose or function and so if we talk about a knife what's the tailless of a knife it's to cut so if a knife doesn't cut well it's a bad knife what's the tailless of a physician it is to heal so if there's a physician who's not very good at healing he or she is not a good physician so what's the tailless of a university if we're going to evaluate universities we need to do it with respect to what is their talos now we certainly have an idea within the Academy we we trace our origins back to Plato's Academy to Socrates and the Philosopher's up on the hill outside Athens this is Rafael's School of Athens with Plato and Aristotle in the center and there's a lot of contention they're talking they're arguing but it's all a very civil and in the process something happens something emerges what is it that a good university does well the answer is contained on the crest of most many or most schools so Veritas is at the University of Harvard Yale throws on the word Lux or light as well so it's usually Veritas or light sometimes it's knowledge I think if I'm remembering correctly Animal House was a favored University does that I think was knowledge is good I was their motto so so universe the tailless is truth they are these special institutions that when they are well constituted they they find truth they defuse it they send it to the next generation they preserve it from previous generations and there's something we tell ourselves about ourselves which is that we are fearless I taught for 16 years at the University of Virginia and all over the campus grounds I should say it says for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead so long as reason is left free to combat it so fearlessness and pursuit of truth well the the story that brings me here today the story that led to the book is that my co-author Gregg Luc Lukyanov is the president of the foundation for individual rights in education it advocates for student rights it pushes back on schools that are constantly trying to restrict students rights to speech and over control their lives and Greg had been doing that since 2000 now in 2007 he had a very serious truly suicidal depression and he committed himself to a hospital and then when he was released he he underwent therapy specifically cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT it's a technique which I'll say more about but in which you learn to challenge your distorted thoughts and in the process you improve your thinking and then you actually the depression lifts so that was in 2008 and then as he continued his work mostly pushing back against administration's administrators while the students were as he says always the best constituency the students wanted free speech the students didn't want to be over protected but suddenly in 2013-2014 Gregg began to see the students espousing exactly the same cognitive distortions that he had learned not to do catastrophizing black and white thinking mind-reading all sorts of I'll show you those later but all sorts of cognitive errors and I'll give you some examples of that in a moment so Gregg was puzzled by this and so we invited me to lunch he'd read my first book the happiness hypothesis where I talk about CBT we and he met me through a mutual friend invited me to lunch shared his idea with me that strange things were happening on campus because somehow students are learning to think in distorted ways and this is likely to make them depressed and anxious so I loved his idea I thought it was brilliant and I provided this psychology I'm a social psychologist I provided the psychology to work this up into an article which we published we submitted to the Atlantic in 2015 and it was finally published in August of 2015 what was happening in the meantime as we began to see in only in 2014 we began to see the first articles about trigger warnings demand students would make to be warned before a book or idea or speaker would say something that might upset students safe spaces we'd all heard of safe spaces and straight benita and places that the UN is protecting people but the idea that a classroom should be a safe space where where people's ideas will not be challenged or attacked was new and so the front page of the New York Times or the reviews section debated Brown between two feminists some students were very upset they thought that this could be very dangerous for brown students to hear this debate because it could invalidate some people experiences and if that happened those students would be damaged by witnessing this debate so they needed a safe space a place they could go recover or or stay away from the initial debate we began seeing articles like this where professors were saying they were afraid of their students so something is changing on campus ideas seem dangerous students seem to be wanting protection demanding protection and sure enough if you look at more quantitatively Google Trends you put in the words trigger warning or microaggression which I'll come back to they don't exist before 2011 they only really become things in 2014-2015 so something new was emerging on campus around 2014 plus or minus a year we wrote this up published it in August of 2015 tried to explain Greg's theory and then we went back to our day jobs and things that we were doing and it was only at Halloween that all hell broke loose on some campuses and many of these things we were talking about suddenly became household words it was very clear that that there was a new moral culture on some campuses so protests begin at Yale over an email about about Halloween costumes nobody wore a bad costume but there was an email about wearing costumes that led to a controversy which then spread quickly to at least 80 school students making demands of the administration largely for a lot of protections a new moral culture is emerging that was very hard for people to understand at first it wasn't really a left-right issue because older people whether than the left or the right professors university presidents all believed in free speech and so so it was a very confusing time it escalates through the Trump election to the 2016 election there fortunately has been very little actual violence but there are a few episodes with true violence the protests at Berkeley being the most spectacular spectacular ones nobody's been killed so far but there's been a number of people injured at Berkeley we saw an idea that's become very common now on campus which is that words are violence and if words are violence then shutting down a speaker violently is self-defense so violence these are this is the words of students at Berkeley violence helped ensure the safety of students asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act in itself and therefore violence is justified to stop these people a more actual violence at Middlebury College students protesting a talk by charles murray that attacked her him and a political science professor who got a concussion and possibly permanent neck neck down neck injury protests have all sometimes moved inside classrooms some students now we'll take bullhorns into classrooms and disrupt classes in order to make themselves heard again this is not common it's not that it's happening every day but it does happen so much so that professors and administrators are on the defensive for example I don't take any chances at NYU I do not say anything controversial I can be country with crown Traverse with you because you can't report me you can't like do anything to me if I say something that offends you but if I'm at NYU there's a sign in every bathroom telling students what number to call or what email to send to report me or anyone else who says something that they think is offensive so I just don't take chances at NYU so the puzzle that we're here to discuss is what is this new culture where did it come from and what are its effects the way you can recognize it is if you see if you hear if you see these terms safe spaces trigger warnings microaggressions bias response teams if you see things described as matrices of oppression if there is what is what students refer to as a call out culture and if this call out culture tends to focus not on things that people did to each other but typically on a single word it really often anchors on a single word people be called out for using a word so what we think is happening here is that students think that they are fragile now it's not clear whether they think that they themselves are fragile or whether they're standing up for other students whom they think are so fragile that they will be damaged if this speaker would have come to campus or if this book were to be assigned so they think that that other students are fragile that this is all occurring in a dangerous or hostile country now you could make a case for that if you like that is certainly possible but it tends to also be that the university is is a dangerous and hostile place and so therefore students need protection at the University from a variety of threats that are not physical threats so that's the puzzle where did this come from why did it emerge so suddenly it's not at most universities that is America is 4,500 institutions of higher higher education and most of them you don't see this but if you look just at elite schools in the Northeast and along the west coast you do they're at pretty much all of them as far as I can tell now why this is happening much of the book concerns this I won't go into this this would take a long time but there's no easy answer there's no one answer we think it's it's a really fascinating puzzle for a social scientist it's a great time to be a social scientist because things are changing and in all in interrelated ways so just very briefly we put this in the context of rising political polarization in the United States with the political purification of the universities that is they used to lean left but now they're so far on the left that in terms of the faculty that in many departments or many fields there's hardly any any conservatives and that just means that since we all believe that diversity makes us think better diversity confronts us with opposing views in many fields there aren't there is not a diversity of ideas so if students aren't exposed say the conservative ideas when a conservative speaker comes to campus it's very threatening number two rising anxiety and depression which I'll show you in a moment that's just since 2011 and linked we think to social media paranoid parenting we began raising kids very differently in the 80s and especially the 1990s part of that is that we we've deprived kids of free play since the 1990s I'll tell you about that more the growth of bureaucracy at universities the rise of much greater fears of being sued so a very defensive posture also a kind of a consumer mindset that the students are consumers rather than students and lastly there a variety of changes in thinking about social justice and what exactly justice requires so it's really located it's fascinating these all interrelate most of these are happening in the UK and Canada as well they're not happening so much on the continent it's it's a distinctively Anglosphere problem between all the english-speaking countries they're going there a little behind us about a year behind us but they're all of our countries are moving in the same way on the on most of these trends so that's that's why it happened as for understanding what has happening what is this new culture but I want to talk to you about tonight is the central part of the book which is that there are three really really bad ideas ideas so bad that if we could just convince students to accept them we can pretty much guarantee that they will have lives of failure and misery and lack of effectiveness so what doesn't kill you makes you weaker always trust your feelings and view life as a battle between good people and evil people these are three really terrible ideas let me explain why so my first book is called the happiness hypothesis it grows out of the introductory psychology course that I taught at UVA and in teaching psychology I would quote from the ancients and Shakespeare and religious texts and I found that the ancients were just horrible at biology and chemistry and physics but they were very wise about psychology human nature human relationships and so I organized I scanned ancient wisdom from all over the world and organized into ten ideas that the ancients had in multiple cultures and then I analyzed the psychology so let's talk about three of them so there's a very common idea it's chapter seven of the book on the uses of adversity so the bad idea what doesn't kill you makes you weaker you all recognize as being the opposite of what Friedrich Nietzsche said when he said what doesn't kill me makes me stronger there's a basic psychological principle here the word is antifragility it's a wonderful word or rather it's an ugly clunky word but it's necessary Nassim Taleb who wrote the Black Swan coined it I shall get to that moment so the idea that it's a great truth is that it occurs to people in the West and the East some monks or mensches said when heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man it will exercise his mind with suffering subject his sinews and bones to hard work etc etc so as to stimulate his mind hardened his nature and improve wherever he is incompetent so again great thinkers east and west have come to this realization Nassim Taleb the author of the black swan wrote a very interesting book called anti fragile he had to make up this word because we don't have a word for this in English he is kind of sick of hearing about the word resilience sure we want our kids to be resilient but what does it mean to be resilient he talks about you could be fragile so a wine glass is fragile you should protect it you should never drop it a plastic cup is resilient you can give a toddler a plastic cup because if she drops it nothing bad will happen to it but the cup doesn't get better from being dropped and what talib on today capture and he here he's writing after the after the global financial crisis where he's one of the few people who predicted it he observed before the financial crisis that our banks were in a fragile state that they were never really tested properly and that unless they had experienced a variety of threats and coped with them they were liable to catastrophic failure so he predicted that the whole thing was gonna collapse and it did and in the wake of that he's trying to say we need to understand that there are systems that are anti fragile there are systems that need to get dropped they need to get kicked knocked challenged or they can't become strong and so he gives examples so bones if you don't put any pressure on your bones if you fly to Mars and you're weightless for seven months when you get to Mars your bones aren't going to work very well bones are anti fragile they need challenge the immune system is the classic case I'll go into that in a moment and then he talks about children's let's talk about these so peanut allergies so this we have a very mixed age audience here of all ages those of us who went to school before the 1990s we took peanut butter and jelly sandwich is quite often nobody talked about peanut allergies because they were extremely rare now peanut allergies are much more common the rate tripled between the nineteen early 1990s and about 2010 the rate tripled why why have peanut allergies been going up well a number of researchers on the immune system had theories and they tested it in a major trial that came a major study was published about two years ago in which they as they wrote peanut peanut allergy is an aberrant response by the body's immune system to harmless peanut proteins the prevalence of peanut allergy has doubled over the last ten years that was when they were writing but only in the US and other countries that advocate avoidance of peanuts during pregnancy lactation and infancy in those countries such as ours where we keep women away from peanuts peanut allergies go up so they thought let's put this to the test this study was based on hypothesis that regular eating of peanut containing products will elicit a protective immune response rather than an allergic immune reaction what did they do they they they solicited they got the participation from six hundred and forty women who were pregnant with with infants where they they they recruited the the infants who were at high risk of immune problems because they either had eczema or they had an egg allergy both of which illustrate that you have some sort of immune tissue and what they did was they got the randomly assigned half of them to consume it's an Israeli snack made of puffed corn with dusted with peanut powder little you know peanut taste so kids love this stuff so in infancy give your kids stuff with peanut dust or follow standard advice and keep your kid clear because my god your kids at higher risk of peanut allergies so don't go near peanuts you know and then they tracked of course they tracked them very carefully and at five when they tested them they gave them an immune test to see what how their bodies responded of those who were given the standard advice to avoid peanuts fourteen percent of them had a peanut allergy meaning that for the rest of their life perhaps there going to have to avoid peanuts or they could die 2% of those who exposed to peanuts had allergies you can cut the rate almost all the way by giving kids peanuts so what they said in the description at the end is they say for decades allergists have been recommending that young infants avoid consuming allergenic foods but our findings suggest that this advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in peanut and other food allergies so this is a really really clear example of how good intentions and bad ideas have set up a generation for problems ok let's try that again let's take a whole generation of kids and let's protect them let's protect them from everything we can let's let's always be there for them don't let them out don't let them in a plate vague where they couldn't get injured we have to be there for them to protect them and of course then when they go off to college we have to be there too because they won't know what to do so we have to be there for them let's protect them now here's a playground from about a hundred years ago okay in my opinion this is too dangerous kids kids could actually die from this okay so you know I'm not you know don't get me wrong here I we need to pay attention to safety this is I don't know the year on this but it's more recent and as you see kids could get hurt here but it's hard to see how they could die but yeah you really you know you could get hurt here you could fall from those rings and and you could twist an ankle even you might bang your head I think this is probably just right because the playgrounds that my kids go to are like this or this and there was a really interesting article in The Wall Street Journal last year by a developmental psychologist titled should we let toddlers play with saws and knives because in Germany and Switzerland they do they let kids play with tools they let them play with sharp objects fire they get burned and then they learn not to touch hot things and what gopnik says here is she says trying to eliminate all such risks from children's lives also might be dangerous there may be a psychological analogue to the hygiene hypothesis which is the idea that if you keep your kids bacteria free you damage their immune system similar to the peanut issue there may be an analog to that to explain the dramatic recent to explain the dramatically recent increase in allergies there could be an analogy where when we do protect kids from risk we have bad outcomes she says in the same way by shielding children from every possible risk we may leave them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren't risky at all like a book or a visiting speaker that you don't have to go to students may come to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren't risky at all and we may isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master so the the dictum the folk wisdom and in our book it's based on we have three quotes at the beginning this is one of them prepare the child for the road not the road for the child most of you in here look like you have children or at least are of an age where you could have children actually raise your hand if you're an undergraduate raise your hand high if you're an undergrad here at case anywhere okay all right so we've got probably 30 or so raise your hand if you are a parent raise your hand high okay a lot more parents raise you and if you're a grandparent how many grandparents we have here Wow a lot of grandparents okay good so we have multiple generations to compare and it's quite striking when I had my talk with the students and I asked them at what age they were allowed to go outside like walk six blocks to a friend's house or go to a store and if I asked let me ask the grandparents just call it out at what age do you think that you were allowed to just like be outside where an adult was not taking care of you just call it out right so we just heard mostly five and six and some as high as eight okay and that's what it was when I was growing up I was born in 1963 and even as crime was rising the 70s in the 1960s in 70 there was a lot of crime but it was still by eight by you know six or seven you're walking to school and at eight you're out playing you come home when the lights go out you know when the Sun sets you come home I talked with the students here today well let me see okay so student current undergraduates just call it out think about for a moment how old were you when your parents allowed you out like just you're out you're out playing you'll come back they they're not nobody's watching you just call it out yeah so mostly 13 to 15 I heard one or two nines in our conversation one woman said six and I looked at her and she said but that was in the Philippines once we moved here it was 14 okay so what are we doing we're keeping our kids so safe that we don't give them a chance to learn how to walk on rough roads then we send them off to college in Britain they're beginning to get it and Brittany here they're little ahead of us in Britain is starting to realise say ultra safe playgrounds are not good for kids they don't learn anything so they're actually putting construction materials on playgrounds and yeah you could pinch your fingers you could get hurt did a great photo you see what the kids doing he's making a catapult he's gonna send some bricks up in the air okay okay he's gonna learn something okay but what do we do in America in America we just keep going universities banning snowball fights and water guns because you know what if a snowball hits someone in an eye now it's very important to note here that what's going on on campus the the new culture that came that came in in 2014 is not the Millennials a lot of you see I read this all the time oh those coddled Millennials those snowflake Millennials not true at all the Millennials are not very different from Gen X and previous generations the change happens with the generation after the Millennials we all fought until a few years ago that Millennials were kids born between 1982 and 2000 or so but no that's not true there's a book called ijen it goes through all the numbers there's a sharp break at birth year 1995 kids were born in 1995 had very different childhoods and their outcomes are becoming very very different so just to show you this is data from Jean Twenge from four nationally representative surveys so the percent of 12th graders who the top line is have a driver's license now if you're over 40 or so and you think about when did you get your driver's license what day did you get it on you probably know because it's within 36 hours of your birthday right of your 6 you know like you're they're camped out cause like we couldn't wait to get a driver's license but in recent years a lot of high school students are not even getting a driver's license they don't go out very much what do they need a car for the percent who have ever tried alcohol and again now they're you may not know when you first tried alcohol because it may have been back in like junior high school or something so but have you ever tried alcohol the number that have ever tried it is dropping very rapidly have you ever gone out on a date or had to something more or less like a date have you ever worked for pay on all of these things they were beginning to drop for the late Millennials kids born in the early 90s but once I gen or Gen Z you might have heard of his James II once Gen Z enters the data set these life experiences that all involve kids doing deviant things work isn't deviant but things thank well now it is alright doing things that give them an independent life out of the eye of their parents they are responsible for themselves they're taking risk for themselves they're not being supervised by their parents those plummeted beginning with kids born in 1995 and again this is not their fault it's the way adults you know my generation the way we treated our kids and social media those two things combined have really changed the childhoods of kids born after 1995 and here are the results this is federal data the number of the percent who have had at least one major depressive episode in the past year and that's defined there are nine symptoms if you say yes to five of them you count as having had a major depressive episode so the rate of the rate for girls has shot up from about 12 percent to 19 percent so one in five one in five was one in five teenage girls has had a major depressive episode it's way up as soon as I gene enters the dataset boys is upset that is actually up I mean the percent is a percentage is up but it's not nearly as dramatic as what's happened for girls now the limited to college students same thing what back in 2012 when the question was asked do it was do you have a psychological disorder of any sort and they gave depression as an example what percent of students say yes and so what we see is when in 2012 when was all Millennials it was about 3% of college men and about 6% of college women but by 2016 when Millennials are gone it's all I gen the numbers are way up for both genders for women it's about 15% of women say that they have a psychological to sort these are college women about us one in six or so say that they have a psychological disorder that's a big change from just five or six years ago now last week which weeks ago in the New York Times an article appeared by a psychiatrist who I normally like I still like him but I think he's wrong when he says the big myth about teenage anxiety and he says don't worry about all these reports you hear there's little evidence of an epidemic of anxiety disorders it's just based on self-report measures and these self-report measures are over estimates don't worry it's not happening no he's wrong here's some data which is not self-report these this is a nationally representative sample of hospitals admission data what percentage of their catchment area of the age group what percentage they can calculate a rate 400,000 of girls and boys who are admitted because they harmed themselves in a way that was not fatal these are not suicides these are like cutting yourself taking poisoned doing something that you could put you in the hospital but you're not going to you're not dying and so what you see here is if we trace the data out until 2009 there's no trend from 2001 to 2009 there's no trend as soon as I Gen comes in trend but note if you just look at the middle bar the orange bar for for this is now this is just girls if you look at girls who are in their 20s no trend so these are Millennials they're not up look at girls aged 15 to 19 the top line they start going up pretty much as soon as they get an iPhone look at the bottom line ages 10 to 14 that's a very very steep increase several hundred percent increase in terms of the the ratio so there's something going on with especially teenage girls who have been somehow damaged by something gene twangy thinks it's mostly social media social when boys get iPhones they basically play video games all day long when girls get social media they're doing things that involve social comparison and relational aggression at times so that's at least we don't know why is happening but that's the leading candidate for why girls we have a crisis of mental health for teenage girls born after 1995 and most alarmingly and again not self-report data the suicide rate so it's up for so this is if you what I did was I this is federal data CDC data I calculated the average suicide rate per hundred thousand for 2001 to 2010 and then you compare that to the last two years a day to 2015-2016 average to make it smooth out the boys suicide rate is up 25% which is gigantic 25% increase just since 2011 for girls that increases 70 percent 7-0 70% increase in the suicide rate for teenage girls this is not self-report data this is not some panic cooked up by the media these are a lot of dead teenagers we're seeing this all over the place wherever young people are college mental health centers are overwhelmed they've been overwhelmed since about 2013 or 2014 is when these articles started appearing and so again in a lot of ways whatever it is we're doing something is going wrong with the mental health especially for girls but also for boys somehow we're setting them up for failure and so the principle here the psychological principle is that people are anti fragile and what I want to do to bring it back to case is let's imagine a university that was built on the idea that people are fragile students are fragile we must protect them we must protect them from unpleasant experiences from feeling threatened from feeling emotionally unsafe or imagine a different University that was based on this wisdom principle rather than the bad idea prepare the child for the road not the road for the child all right let's keep going let's look at a different chapter of the happiness hypothesis chapter two changing your mind so the bad idea is always trust your feelings and it's a bad idea because it contradicts a very basic psychological principle which is that we are all prone to emotional reasoning and the confirmation bias this is the widest principle this is the most universal principle of ancient wisdom wherever you look you will find sages who have articulate this principle so Epictetus wrote that what really frightens and dismay is us is not external events themselves but the way in which we think about them it is not things that disturb us but our interpretation of their significance of course famously in in the Hamlet Shakespeare writes there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so and in Paradise Lost Milton writes the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of Hell a hell of heaven you find it in the East as well Buddha says your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded but once mastered no one can help you as much not even your father or your mother learn to think for yourself learn to question your automatic reactions what filters are you applying to the world choose your filters carefully Buddhism of course is a is a set of procedures and paths and meditation for gaining control of the elephant gaining control of your first reactions and having more considered mature calm reactions and interpretations Aaron Beck the founder one of the founders of cognitive therapy in the West rediscovered these principles in the 1960s and developed one of the most effective cures for depression and anxiety out there what Beck discovered is that people who are severely depressed have very negative views about the world about the future and about themselves and their self reinforcing they believe all kinds of terrible things about themselves in the world in their future and if Beck could get them to examine some evidence work with them to test test one of their assumptions and they see it's not true it would have a it would have a liberating effect and then that would allow them to question the others but then they go right back to it you know 10 20 minutes later but if you work with them over the course of a few weeks to question their assumptions to quit look for evidence question their distorted cognitions he found that he could cure depression and anxiety so many of you in this room have done CBT in some form the core of it is you learn the names of these distortions you learn to recognize them in yourself mind-reading fortune-telling catastrophizing the most basic of them all the most important one in general I think is emotional reasoning which is our feelings do guide our thinking a lot of my prior research was on that in moral judgment but when you when you decide how the world is based on how you're feeling at the moment that is emotional reasoning and in CBT you learn to stop doing that you learn to look for external validation is this true or not true so this was the idea at the heart of our Atlanta cortical that somehow students were learning or being encouraged to do more emotional reasoning and it was leading to some of these blow-ups on campus and it's really bad for their mental health now I want to focus for this part I want to focus on an idea that has become very common at universities a lot of the coverage early on was on warnings which are not very common but the idea of microaggressions is a very very common idea that raise your hand if you've heard of this if you know what a microaggression is raise your hand high raise your hand if you this is the first time you're hearing the term raise your hand high okay a bunch of people with gray hair are saying that okay so it was a very important article by psychologists named Gerald wingsu and so a racial microaggressions it's a brief and commonplace daily verbal behavioral or environmental indignities whether intentional or unintentional and this is very very important that communicate hostile derogatory or negative racial slights and insults towards people of color now the idea contains two things that are very good and one thing that it's very bad I think so majest a micro aggression is a useful term because you know as as overt acts of explicit racism certainly on campus are way way down since the 50s and 60s as really overt obvious acts of racism are way down we need a term for subtle things small things where maybe it's still--it's denial but hey I didn't mean anything by that so it's useful to have the concept of as small a micro aggression that's a perfectly valid concept I think now one of the points of the article though is that if you're a person of color if you're LGBTQ on campus a lot of things happen that maybe there was no bad intent but it still makes you uncomfortable you have to deal with it over and over again that's a very useful concept but I suggest we should call that a faux pas that we should not call that an act of aggression so it's useful for us to have a conversation on a college campus about all the dumb things people say that you know you know every you know every East Asian person here is you know you know dozens of times every week about you know where you from know where you really from or something like that so it's important to have a way to talk about these things that's great but the word should be faux pas a faux pas is the French word for a false step we use in English as an embarrassing or tactless act or remark it's a mistake a blunder a gaffe an indiscretion we need to talk about this but the really bad thing about the micro aggression program is that it specifically says that intent does not matter we should judge each other not by what they meant but how you feel judged by how you feel after all in the end what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us now the reason this is such a destructive idea and it is so bad especially from members of historically marginalized groups is this at all of our universities we are working really hard to increase diversity and to work on inclusion I shouldn't say all but as far as I know most universities every place I've been we're trying hard now what happens when you increase diversity you're guaranteed to have more misunderstandings it's almost by definition let's take people who don't share a common set of assumptions and norms and rules of behavior let's take a lot of international students let's get a lot more social class diversity let's bring all kinds of people from diverse backgrounds together and put them into intense conversations about race and gender and all and politics and all sorts of things your Garrett diversity means more and more and more misunderstandings more and more and more faux pas it's guaranteed so what should we do about that could that be beneficial if we handle it right it could be really beneficial so here are two ways we could handle it option a is we teach students to be more polite we teach them about micro aggressions and racial or gender whatever faux pas we teach them about them we say do less of this and at the same time in our community as we struggle to do this give each other the benefit of the doubt this is hard diversity is hard cut each other some slack that's one way we could handle it here's another how about if we teach students to focus on emotional impact ignore intent do not think about whether the person meant something if you feel marginalized that person committed an act of aggression against you and now you can go into any bathroom and you will find the number to call to report that person to the appropriate Dean what do you think which way is likely to lead to more harmony inclusion calm friendship and learning from diversity so I asked you to consider two different kinds of University one is based on the idea that you should always trust your feelings and by the way here's how you can be more outraged and to those negative feelings are traumatizing and they will leave a permanent scar on you imagine what it'll be like to be at a university like that or imagine a university based on the opposite ideas all right now very briefly I just did the last one very briefly because where I want to be plenty time for questions chapter 4 of the happiness hypothesis was on hypocrisy and self-righteousness in every culture that has left us writing about human nature and relationships we find ideas we find ideas about this so the bad idea is that life is a battle between good people and evil people and the good idea is that we're all prone to dichotomous thinking or dividing the world into good and evil and tribalism based on that so the opening quote we use is from Alexander Solzhenitsyn who was a Soviet did he wasn't even a dissident he wrote he wrote a negative thing about Joseph Stalin in a letter to a friend during World War two his letter was read he was thrown into the Google log for four decades for a long time and while he's marching off to the gulag presumably to die he looks at a guard who's marching him and he realizes you know what I could just as well have been that guard he if things have been different he would have been the guard marching people to their death and he writes the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being okay this is wisdom we see the same thing in the in the certainly in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus says why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye but you do not notice the log in your own you hypocrite first take the log out of your own eye so why is people east and west ancient times and modern no we are all by nature hypocrites prone to saying we're good you're bad combine that hypocrisy with tribalism I love this Bedouin metaphor I against my brothers I and my brothers against my cousins I and my brothers and cousins against the world humans are tribal creatures were very good at this so if you imagine tribes of hypocrites basically human-beings tribes of hypocrites put together should we be calming down the tribal sentiments or ramping them up sometimes in some parts of universities we ramp them up there's what's called a call-out culture there's a kind of a mindset that goes with it and so this is this was actually from a Canadian student from 2014 but it really captures the cognitive effects of it it's a really brilliant essay I'll just go through it part of it very quickly quickly so Trent Edie is a he's a queer activist since high school he goes to McGill University in Montreal becomes much more radical but by his fourth year of college he realizes oh my god what have I done he steps back and he writes I used to endorse a particular brand of politics that's prevalent at McGill and in Montreal more widely it begins with good intentions and noble causes but in metastasizes into a nightmare I've pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing dogmatism groupthink a crusader mentality and anti intellectualism and then he says this is I've done everything about to say I am guilty of myself he says so just look at that list look at that list of ways of being and think whether you've encountered that especially on the Internet and these are the hallmarks of the tribal mind preparing for battle these ways of thinking are absolutely incompatible with what we're trying to do at a university he says thinking this way quickly divides the world into an in-group and an out-group believers and heathens the righteous and the wrong chess every minor heresy inches you further away from the group when I was part of groups like this everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues so I want to ask the younger people if you're under 25 in this audience think about whether have you come across people on the Internet have you seen this way of thinking and behaving raise your hand if the answer is yes okay and raise you hand if the answer is no you've not seen this before okay nobody so everybody has encountered it now let me ask if you see it at case if you see people like this if this is part of the discourse community Act case raise your hand if you suggest those of you raise your hand before raise your hand if you've seen this at case okay students raise your hand high okay and raise your hand if you've not seen that case all the same okay so everybody said they have seen it at case so it is here my sense is that it's not nearly as dominant as it is in schools in the in the in New England and in California and Washington State but clearly it is here it is everywhere this is call-out culture it's really scary it really makes you self censor because if you just say what you think you could be in a lot of trouble this is a couple of cartoons I hear it's because we're right and they're wrong and this is my favorite there can be no peace until they renounce their rabbit God and accept our duck God so so this problem this this this way of thinking it's a common human way we need to actively actively synonymous they suppress we want to we want to structure our societies that we have less of it it's it's poisonous to free inquiry in free speech one of the best pieces of advice the way to think about this because you have to deal with identity issues race issues LGBT you have to talk about all these issues which is what tends to be the heart of these debates but there are two ways to do it you can do it by coming together to bond against the enemy the you know to always see everything in terms of oppressors and victims we call that common enemy identity politics or you can do it was the dominant strand of the in the civil rights movement opposed trans but the dominant Martin Luther King Pauli Murray which is to appeal to people's humanity and then say some people are being some of our brothers and sisters are being denied equal dignity equal opportunity as Pauli Murray says who's a civil rights activist episcopal priest 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 where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group i shall shout for the rights of all mankind so again i ask you to imagine a university based on the three bad ideas what would it be like what would be like to be a person of color in such a place where many people were said that they were fighting for you but the environment would be constant fighting or what would it be like to be had a different University based on these three ancient principles these principles that are consistent with psychological wisdom what would it be like so very briefly just to leave some specific suggestions for how to make things better if we take the first principle what can we do well here we have to change the way we raise kids we have to start letting them out we have to let them practice independence before they're 16 and so I urge anyone who's a parent with young kids or if your grandparents give these books to your kids the book free-range kids by leonora scan Daisy and Leonora and I started a website a program called let grow if you go to let grow org we have a lot of ideas for how you can solve the coordination problem how you can get your school to to back off give kids some independence how you can team up with your neighbors to actually let the kids outside to play so go to let grow org principal number two we're all prone to emotional reasoning confirmation bias every university should be teaching CBT it's so easy to do it's so effective against anxiety and depression you can do what you can learn it yourself you can learn from a book you can learn it from an app so we urge Gregg and I urge every University to consider including CBT in orientation training also intellectual virtues org has a lot of ideas for how to educate for intellectual humility and other virtues principle number three we're all prone to dichotomous thinking and tribalism my colleagues and I have created a program we call open mind if you go to open mind platform org it's a six step program you can run it on any platform you know iPhone PC laptop anything and it walks you through five steps you learn what you'll gain from viewpoint diversity you'll learn to cultivate intellectual humility you learn some psychology about why we get into these fights you learn how to talk to people who come from different moral worldviews than yourself so it's a very practical program it's already being used here at case in a couple of classes a couple of programs it's being used in one hundred and thirty classes right now around the world so we have very high hopes for it we're collecting data to test its efficacy and to make it more effective so go to open mind platform or get will work in your church or synagogue and your company anywhere where you're finding that people are increasingly polarised and angry which is pretty much America and so to close I just want to quote Ruth Simmons was the first african-american president of naívi League school when she 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 again this is all about collisions you can't have a university without collisions without challenge without productive conflict and so I urge you here at case to stick to our talos think about the tailless of university and and figure out ways to keep the university close to that talos keep and keep it far away from the three very bad ideas that are damaging and shaping American education thank you very much give me time for some questions there are microphones in the aisles if you have questions one quick thing please be sure to make them questions so you know a sentence may be a few dependent clauses ending with an upward inflection that's designed to elicit a response and I will I will steal the prerogative of being here to ask the first question we use a lot of your talk suggests that for those of us in the university the problems are already there when students reach us and I was wanting to see a little bit more about as a university how can we not merely try to embody those truths or those principles that you laid out but what can we do to try and counteract these problems and in many respects better serve our students and better prepare them for being for being citizens great so so yes the problems are there the mental health crisis is not caused by universities the same data that we see for universities is true for high school kids so I think one of the most effective things universities could do is to make it clear that they are admitting for evidence of independent thought and living the data from gene twangy shows as she says eighteen year olds today are the equivalent in maturity of 15 year olds from 20 or 30 years ago because they haven't been given the chance to practice independence so we suggest in the book we should reconsider whether 18 year olds should be in college maybe what we should do is is have a norm of a gap year American parents are so horrific leo ver protective what if the top schools all said we prefer people who've had a gap year we prefer people who've left home lived away from their parents maybe doing work live in a different part of the country maybe in the military or public service something and we will prefer people to show evidence of that well right away you would find a lot of very competitive parents giving their kids more independence because that's what parents are most concerned about it's not their kids happiness it's Willie get into a top school so I think universities and high schools can work together to change our expectations it's cruel what we're doing to kids robbing them of childhood in order to get them what ready for college so I think we could all work together to take the pressure off of kids school at age 14 and those who stay at home until they're 18 before they go away yeah that's a very good question I don't know of data on it I would love to see I would love to see the data it's very complicated because there's many things wrapped up in that obviously social class is hugely wrapped up kids who go to boarding school are much more likely to come from upper-class households and I haven't been able to get clear whether we have a whole section on social class in the book the overprotection happens from middle class all the way up working class are much less overprotective but their kids are exposed to much more trauma so they have very different reasons for anxiety and depression so it's really complicated boarding schools are incredibly overprotective so I should look into that more we could learn something from boarding schools what we should compare I guess if we could find yeah if we could find a way of identifying which boarding schools are really overprotective in loco parentis and which ones actually give them experience I have not done that I should start asking around for that thank you I have two quick questions one is what did you would think frightened the parents of these kids that they're being so overprotective and secondly I'm assuming that when you talk about them being set up for failure that you're talking beyond the university so how do you define that failure okay let's take the second one first set it for a failure first of all the fact that so many kids are now seeking counseling and unable to get it the fact that so many kids are depressed and anxious throughout their college years can you imagine spending you know most of us who are older think back to your college days and it's like being a kid in a candy shops like my god I can take that course and go to that tough all these possibilities all these interesting people but you talk to a lot of kids today and it's like you know being kid in the minefield there's all these dangers and threats so I don't think that kids are thriving or enjoying college as much as they used to and then yes the great majority will graduate but then what happens to them very large numbers of them then move back home we have failure to launch so we already are seeing the data from the late Millennials now there are lot of reasons for that student debt housing prices it's not just failures within themselves but we our parents are complaining and saying you know the kids then my frit my kids friend they just don't you know they don't have to get up and go because they've been shepherded all the way to college then they're shepherded through college and then they get out now what go home so that's what we need as for another way the first question was what was it again there's cable TV scared the hell out of them it was it was the Etan Patz murder and the Adam Walsh murder and then Adam Walsh's dad those were 1979-1981 and then cable TV comes in so there are hardly any abductions by strangers in this country it almost never happens that it's an abduction by a stranger but when it does it's on TV all the time so even as the crime wave was ending in the 90s parents were freaking out and then social media does it too so it's the media environment did it to American parents Plus shrinking family size when you got a lot of kids frankly you're not as worried about them that's no time no time okay yeah professor thank you very much for your presentation I really enjoyed your comments and I look forward to reading your book but you know what what you have described to us is you know is taking you years you know to really understand as well as you do and it's very clear you do and the implications of this trend are not something that you know you can flip a switch you know sign a book you know whatever and and it's going to be moving back in the right direction again that's what you could you talk a little bit about you know how long or how much longer you think this gets worse before it starts to get better yeah and and maybe if if you could just share a little bit about where you are seeing encouraging signs and and the kinds of things that people in this room could try to get involved in perhaps encourage that process to move along a little more quickly thank you very much okay thank you so if we don't do anything about it I think things are gonna get much worse as far as the eye can see fortunately a new book was just published called the calling of the American mind which because the mental health crisis is so serious and because most parents are aware something is going wrong when Greg and I talk about that we're getting people are really attentive people want to change so I actually talked to university presidents and administrators it's hard enough to be a university president or administrator their jobs have gotten so much harder in the last few years because there's all these blow-ups they never know what's gonna hit them they want a change so the will is there here are a few very simple noble here are a few very clear things that could be done to have a big impact number one write to or contact your state legislators here in Ohio and ask them to pass a version of Utah's free range parenting bill Utah's the first state in the Union that has said that parents cannot be arrested for letting their kids play outside in much of America you can be arrested if your kids are caught playing outside because that's child neglect and once once once the bureaucracy gets involved once Department of Family Services gets involved they don't have common sense they have rules and you will be investigated for months and months and so mostly so it's it's a bit scary let your kid outside so that's number one every state should pass I'm serious about this contact your state representatives ask them to pass a bill in Ohio a free range parenting bill once that's done now you and fellow parents or you know we can get together you can say okay let's have a you know play club on Fridays we should have rearranged Fridays pick a somebody's backyard or a park and all the kids between HD 8 and 12 they know they can go there and there's action there's fun there's things going on and maybe you have a designated parent who lives nearby so if someone gets hurt the kids can drag the other kid over and what do we do mrs. Smith you know but the kids you have to let the kids play outside without an adult watching them you have to so if you have a lot of changes to childhood so go to let grow or lots of suggestions there at university is we need clear leadership the presidents must be firm and clear that we're going to address all these issues together these are difficult issues while we're doing this everybody gets to speak nobody gets to intimidate anybody else if you shout down a speaker if you intimidate someone for telling their views you might be expelled it's a very serious violation of academic value so you need clear leadership that's something we've seen in very few universities so far but I think we're gonna be seeing a lot a lot more of it and as far as I know as far as I know professor Snyder president Snyder has been clear on this she's been very concerned about these issues trying to dress all these issues at the same time so good leadership we think orientation there's a lot that that you can do at all levels I think we have a question up in the balcony am i right let's try to get some current students are there any students current undergrads online okay are you guys students back there I know I have a student with me but she's in high school okay maybe let her talk know what alright let's try it let's try it let's see what you have to say so my question is is there have you have you found a difference between children of families in which both parents work you know children who grew up in daycare or those and those of the stay-at-home parent that's a great question I have no idea there's huge amounts of research on the differences between outcomes I wouldn't dare go into it without going fully into it cuz it's really complicated so I don't know here's a shocking statistic for you though if you compare the amount of time that men spend with their children now compared to the 1950s it's a lot more well that's good right that's great think about women how much time are women spending with their kids now compared to the 1950s how much time a woman's spending now when most of them work compared to the 1950s when very few of them worked outside the home answer women are spending more time now than they did in the 50s and they have far fewer children the point is we're spending too much time overall parenting our kids in terms of money quality time is important but we spend all our time around them but on our phones so we got the worst of all worlds we're over supervising them without really attending to them so I don't know I don't know there might be effect but I don't know them thank you very much for coming yesterday I'm gonna mention Twitter so bear with me yesterday on your Twitter you responded to an article that had been critical of your new book and one of the questions they had what was wasn't really phrasing the question but it was an interesting comment that I wondered what you thought about and now we've had a full day to think about it I expect a long detailed response but they said that they wondered whether value neutral searches for truth and classical liberalism had kind of emptied a social cohesion that was actually necessary for the search for truth on campuses and I just wondered what you thought about thank you yeah so I was always on the left until I wrote the righteous mind and then I realized that wow there's really good ideas from conservatives and libertarians also and so then I stepped out or not on any team and I really enjoy reading perspective a seriously the John Stuart Mill idea that you have to hear things from all sides and so a conservative critique we get criticized a lot from the left we also get criticized from the right for in exactly that way the the conservatives have long realized or their insight is that you need you need binding social structures family religion something people need to be bound in this was Emile Durkheim's great insight in the 1890s you need to be bound in and the right blames the left for you know for the sexual revolution for throwing off the constrains weakening the family and so the the right is saying you're reaping what you sow this is your fault for you know all of you who said let the kid you know let you know get rid of social norms so I think there's a lot of truth to that I think we we had to change many of the restrictive norms and institutions of the 50s and I think it went too far in thinking that that constraint is bad I'm a big fan of Thomas solo and his idea his book conflict divisions I'm sorry I'm going too far into it just to say I thought it was it was the best criticism I've had of the book it was a conservative critique saying that the things were recommending the book are too weak that we're not gonna really get back to a thriving healthy social order until people have a sense of being bound into something that gives them a sense of meaning and belonging and it can't just be like this therapeutic community is good you know it's something like religion or patriotism something like that I think that's a very powerful critique and I'm thinking about it still thank you yes good evening I just wanted to briefly refer to your comment about microaggressions and misguided intentions with that do you think the emphasis in order to solve this should be best place as a top-down one or we need to inform institutions of perhaps the benefits of phrasing it as faux pas as opposed to microaggression more of a bottom-up where we are trained to better give each other the benefit of the doubt or do you think equal emphasis needs to be placed on hold good great question I think both are necessary given the incredible amount of attention and effort and money that universities are and high schools are putting into training and giving you a vocabulary I think we do need to top-down change but where it's only really gonna kick in is when the next do the kids are in high school now start mocking this stuff if they start making fun of if they use the word safe space and microaggression only as a joke and I hear they are doing that so kids are subversive if the kids themselves are saying screw that we're gonna figure out that you know these diversity issues ourselves now it might be that they just make it worse and they you know and the Internet makes it nasty stuff but if kids themselves figure out ways to talk among themselves and work out problems for themselves and conflict for themselves then I think what things will really change thank you hey here we go I'm a graduate student here so I'm a professional I'm a nurse practitioner and then I'm in a doctoral nursing program here at case and so the cost of the education is necessarily always on my mind I paid two thousand eleven dollars per credit hour to attend which is you know a lot of money to me probably I would think to anyone and it's a it's a really good school and I'm happy to come here I just wonder you know within your I haven't read your books pardon me within your research have you found relationship between the rising cost of particularly secondary education in us particularly since the 1980s and the the increase in depression anxiety oh yeah good question there's a lot of a lot of people try to find relations between external like economic factors debt the global financial crisis unemployment and those things tend not to have much impact on people's on people's happiness even after the global financial crisis depression didn't really rise we tend to be much more affected by local things and relational things so debt is a serious problem but I don't see any relation between it which was it's been rising steadily but the depression only began going up after 2011 similarly many people say well of course students are depressed they know the financial crisis unemployment well no the bottom dropped out in 2008-2009 anybody who graduated in 2009-2010 you know it was in big trouble but every year since then the job market he's gotten better and better and better and as it's getting better and better and better depressions going up and up and up not one it's not causing the other I'm just saying that if you're looking for the explanations of this in external or economic things you're not going to find it the economy fluctuates all the time back to the depression and before you don't see links to mental health between those things so now I don't think that's what's causing it it's a separate problem have we had any questions from current undergrads are there any I'd love to get questions or criticism especially from undergrads if you think I've said something wrong you disagree with I'd love to hear from you should anybody wants to jump in line and say that if you get please come on I'm sorry okay I just think it's a you know okay please please come up nobody knows we're almost out of time so if you would could you if you're under undergrad please come up to the front or unless you're an internet I'm sorry okay good good please but I'm so sorry okay go hi first of all I'm a big fan of you so thank you for coming here thank you I have two questions one I two of them okay I am a member of a Jen I was born in 1999 I was wondering what besides as you mentioned cognitive behavioral therapy could I do to alleviate these qualms that I have with my own life and also what do you do with your children to prepare them for the world great so we often think that you need to be taught something that okay you know Courtney so a lot of universities are now giving courses on failure we have to teach you how to fail right okay no we learn from experience primarily and so think of yourself think of yourself you've got this brain inside you which is still myelinating still developing you have to like think of it almost as like you know your dog you want to walk your dog around and show it all sorts of things that's not that's a bad analogy never mind that one you've got to give yourself a lot of experiences where you put yourself in a situation that you're a little scared of but you're not gonna die and so I would suggest I was just traveling alone or be more ambitious traveling far away but we know with a friend putting yourself in situations where it's a little scary I just do that over and over again so I when I was I used to travel I would go to traveled around I would do like two month trips by myself it was always really kind of scared when I was like going to the airport getting on a plane but you'd go you know I'd go to Europe or South America and then you know you meet people it's a lot of fun so I would suggest really think of it as though I don't know if you want your background but I'm assuming that you were overprotected at what age were you able to go outside on your own twelve okay so so you're deficient in experience don't tell your parents I said this but with the best of intentions they have slowed down your development I agree it's what anyway so that's what I do with my kids so once I lit read the North Canadian my wife and I tried to send them out more my son when I was trying to send into the store across the street and we live in Manhattan which is incredibly safe there's like no crime it's as safe as when my parents were growing up in New York and the 30s so I've try to send them out but my dad might my son would say but Dad people look at me funny there are no other kids out there but we just kept going and then you know and then especially once he had to take the subway to school in sixth grade so for him at eleven at first he was a little scared of the subway but it only took two weeks after two weeks he's great he knows the subways so much better than I do he goes all over the city now so you just you have to you have to challenge yourself and and and and push through the feelings of fear and that's the way you grow thank you we have time for one last question right hi so I have two small questions one is considering the fact that we're combating against cognitive dissonance confirmation bias liking disliking bias and tribalism but also like mob mentality how do you recommend that we as individuals approach since it says it's hard because they're gonna want to shut you down how do you approach someone that's trying to say that your ideas are wrong or even if even if you're just trying to convince them that it's a good idea to at least hear other people out in a peaceful manner and have this dialogue how do you how do you recommend approaching that or do you think it's not possible and the other small one is um after the lecture is there any chance you could sign my copy of the happiness hypothesis there will be there will be um we do have we were able to get the University of Barnes and Noble to make books available in I guess it's the hallway over there and there will be at least some time for a book signing as well second question yes on the first question I love the way you phrased it how it was it how do you deal with somebody's trying to attack your ideas the answer is you say thank you because we all suffer from confirmation bias you know scientists aren't great because they're so smart scientists are great because they join a community which institutionalizes attack if I publish something if I put something out there it will be attacked so I better have my ducks in a row and so when that that conservative person wrote a critique of the book I actually I thanked him for it it was some really good idea I wouldn't have thought of those things so you have to have an attitude of saying we are all imperfect we are all arrogant we are all hypocritical self-righteous we need others to challenge us it's not an attack it's helpful to you so I would urge everybody go so we John Stuart Mill's book on Liberty one of the greatest works ever on speech and and learning go to heterodox academy org slash mill we have an illustrated version of just chapter two edited to be half its size very readable read that you'll understand why you should say thank you more broadly and this gives me thank you for the question is this a perfect chance for me to you know you always want to end on an inspiring note especially being a dark scary talk something I'm thinking a lot about is we are all drowning in outrage when I was a kid when I was a teenager I was you know as always on the left I hated the Republicans and like every month there'd be some new terrible thing that the Republicans did or said and we talked about how terrible the Republicans are okay well now you know it's it's not every day it's every hour it's every minute and it's got a video attached so we're total it's like we're being force-fed you know we're not forcing you know our friends are putting it in our mouths and where we swallowing whole you know amounts of poison poison poison and so so here's my suggestion I think I'm thinking of writing something on this I think we all need to take the anti outrage pledge because there's way too much we're choking on it and so let's try it I suggest that we everybody say this to conclude it goes like this I will I will give less offense I will take less offense I will pass on less offense that means I will give less offense I will try to do fewer faux pas I will try to be more sensitive but at the same time I will try to be more insensitive about things coming and I will take less offense I'll give other people benefit down and of all the things that come in and all the things I send out I'm gonna cut that by 90% because if you think about it if you if you pass on only 10% of what you normally do then you're still 50 times more outraged than you were 10 years ago so okay so so consider if you're willing to say that would be you don't have to it's just a nice and uplifting way to end it so I'll say each of those three statements you just if you want to say it after me I will give less offense I will take less offense I will pass on less offense thank you very much good night professor Hyde thank you so much for joining us this evening thank you all for being here [Applause]

Channel: Case Western Reserve University

Views: 76,767

Keywords: case western reserve university, case, cwru, haidt, malt performing arts center

Id: DSpj7Cj2uok

Length: 83min 42sec (5022 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 05 2018