Jonathan Haidt || The Coddling of the American Mind

Doctor Height is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultures, including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. Height is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and of the New York Times bestseller The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided

by politics and religion. His third book, with Greg Lukianoff, is called The Collbling of the American Mind, How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Thanks for trying with me today, Jonathan. My pleasures got Good to see you again. Good to see you too.

So when we talked around twenty fourteen at one of these imagination retreats they're organized with Marty Selligman, you brought up some of the zeitgeist was just starting, right And in your book I noticed you right, you said surprising events began happening on college campuses around twenty thirteen and twenty fourteen, So it was right around then they were having this conversation. That's right. So you know, you and I have been in the academy for a while, and

after a while, you think you understand students. And then suddenly, in the twenty thirteen to twenty fourteen academic year, there started being some reports about students asking for trigger warnings and safe spaces, and the first articles about that appear in the New Republic of the New York Times. And I started seeing some signs of that in my own teaching,

and Greg started seeing it. So so it's amazing how it seems to come out of nowhere, and at first it's only on a few elite campuses, so most people didn't see anything of this until Halloween of twenty fifteen. Many people will have heard about the events at Yale, you know, protests around Nicholas Christakis and Erica Christockus. So the Academy has been changing very quickly. We don't know

how extensive this is. We don't know whether things are happening at most schools or just the elite schools, but it is a kind of a new constellation of moral ideas and practices that kind of swept in from like not being there at all in twenty twelve to being pretty widespread in twenty seventeen. Right, So you call these the tumultuous years twenty fifteen to twenty seventeen. Can you describe some of these specific incidents that you're referring to

as tumultuous. Sure, So, you know, the Academy is a very special place where from maybe four hundred thirty BC until around twenty fourteen, it was good to be provocative. You were supposed to be provocative, that a word of praise. But beginning around then, people were provocative in the wrong way. Found that some students, not most, this is not about most students, but there would be some students who would say, you know, that is unacceptable, that cannot be set on

our campus. So the first shoutdown that we know of was at Brown University in twenty thirty fall to twenty thirteen. That's the first I did it one week. Can identify where Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was brought in to speak in a series that brings in diverse viewpoints, and because he was, he didn't I don't think he originated, but he was. You know, they used to stop in risk police in New York. So, okay, so students wanted to protest, that's great, that's fine. But they protested in a way.

Their goal was to shut down the talk and prevent others from hearing. And so that was the first one and nothing happened to the students. There was no punishment, and that's generally been the rule when students have acted as though it's their right to shut down a talk. So that's a sort of a very surprise of it. It's very contrary to academic norms. Protest is fine, but

stopping people from hearing, stopping people from speaking. You know, we're all liberal in the sense that not left right, but in the sense that our culture is based on one of free speech, argumentation, free increy, be provocative. If you have the arguments to back it up, go for it. And so this is a new culture coming in that is very antithetical. Now, I don't want to demonize them. This is always in pursuit of moral goods, and this is the theme of all of my work in the

Righteous Mind. Bad people aren't divided at all. They have no guilt. The bad people are all united, and we must all you know how to get them. So you know, this is a battle of moral goods. This is not a battle of good versus evil. It's a battle of different conceptions of the good. But it really washed in around twenty fourteen, and then by twenty fifteen Halloween twenty fifteen is when it went national. Okay, and so you

said that you wrote this book with greg Or. You say, this book is about education and wisdom and its opposite. I thought it was a really interesting framing. And as I read the book and I saw clearly how that is the how do you define wisdom? So the reason why we use the wisdom framing is because my first book, it was the Happiness hypothesis, Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom, and so I didn't get it. I should have read

the whole wisdom literature. You know, before I wrote a coddling book with Greg, But I was just proceeding straight from my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis. So there are certain you know, the ancients have all kinds of ideas. They had all kinds of ideas about chemistry that are worthless, and they had all kinds of ideas about biology that

are garbage. They had all kinds of ideas about consciousness that are amazing, and all kinds of ideas about relationships and hypocrisy and morality or immoralism that are time tested and that are the wisest things that anyone has ever said, because there's been a filter. You know, things only get passed down to us from Marcus Aurelius and Buddha because those were ones that really fit with the human mind.

So that's what I mean by wisdom. There are certain psychological ideas that are deeply true psychologically and are deeply conducive, power fully conducive to living a life of happiness, flourishing, engagement, and virtue. So let me see. Here's okay. So I'm pulling out the Happiness Hypothesis so I'll read, well, even I met my dead. Yeah. So here are three of

the chapters, and these become the three Great untruth. It's like, you know, it's like if campus administrators and students had read the happiness hypothesis and then said, hey, let's do everything the opposite. Okay, that's where we would be on campus. And that's where we are on campus. So all right, Chapter two, Changing your Mind, Page twenty three. Here's an opening quote. The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it that is. And here's Buddha.

So it's a great truth. Buddhas is the same thing. What we are today comes from our thoughts of tomorrow, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our minds. And this leads

right into a discussion of cognitive therapy. So if you feel, if you know, if some speaker is going to come to campus and question whether we should have open borders, let's say, and you find that threatening, you find that offensive, and you find that an attack on you and your friends, well you could consult the stoics and you could say, hmm, how am I appraising this? Is this really a threat to me? Is this you know? Maybe he has a reason for zor let me be curious. There's all kinds

of ways you could approach this event. But if students are encouraged to search for microaggressions to believe that their experience must not be invalidated. So this is a new phrase from the last two years. Not just that a speaker or a person or an idea is invalidating my opinion, but if that speaker were to come to campus, he would invalidate my existence. Now that's a really extreme appraisal.

If we care about our students' mental health, should we be teaching them the stoics and saying, here, why don't you try some different appraisals that will be less self destructive and less irrational. Or should we say, if you feel even a little glimmer of offense, you've been a victim of aggression and something needs to be done. So

that's what we mean by wisdom and its opposite. Many campus practices directly contradict the wisdom of the ancients and instantiate practices that will link students into ways of thinking that we know are going to make them more anxious and depressed, and that is in line with the modern psychological literature. Thank goodness for you, because he said you probably should have been hit. But actually it's very consistent.

Especially you know, like how do you define wisdom, Well, you know, the cognitive there's different components of wisdom, but it's very consistent where you're describing, for with the cognitive wisdom component, which in essence of that is the ability to hold very diverse viewpoints within your working memory at one time without prejudgment and also kind of accepting the inherent paradoxes of existence. So I believe there is an existential element of that where you kind of recognize good

and evil. Its dichotomy. Transcendence to me is a big part of the cognitive wisdom. This is wonderful. What's the opposite of your killing me? This is like your health is like, oh I wish this is perfect because we'll probably get to this later. But you know, my big thing that I'm trying to do on campus, I start co founded this organization, Heterodox Academy, because we think a lot of us professors think that you actually need viewpoint

diversity to get our jobs done. You need to see things from different perspectives, and we need to teach our students to take different perspectives. So let me get this down. Holding multiple perspectives. Is this the bald view? Which which theorists are you talking about? Whohould I be reading on wisdoms? Yeah? Well, Baltus has done a really good analysis. I can send you a good review paper and I will also put

it in the show notes. One that I personally prefer, which is quite good and it does rely a little bit on Baltas, but other research as well, But there you go. So we have a special obligation on campus to expose our students to divergent views, to differing views, and sometimes they're going to hate those views, but they should not shout them down or shut them down and

use intimidation. They should actually go to the talk. So this is since I feel like there's such great concordance here, I actually want to read to you my favorite definition of wisdom in its entirety. So I really like this definition of whise people by clinical psychologist Deodre Kramer. She rates wise people have learned to view the positive and negative and synthesize them to create a more human, more integrated sense of self in all its fragility and vulnerability.

This allows for openness, non defensive, and less judgmentalism as well. As a catalyzing influence of negative emotions. Wise people are not pollyannish. They are willing to explore the shadow side of life and are capable of expressing the wide array of human emotions in such a way as to derive meaning.

They seem first to embrace and then transcend self concerns to integrate their capacity for introspection with a deep and abiding concern for human relationships and generative concern for others. The wise person also has the capacity to interact with others in a way that does not put them on the defensive. That's gorgeous. Yeah, please do send that to me.

I will at Heterox Academy. We're getting very interested in intellectual humility, and there are many aspects of our current politics and culture war that push against humility and towards certainty. So this is a very helpful definition of wisdom. Thank you. Sure so. I really like this paper you wrote with Sarah al Jo called moral amplification and the Emotions that

attach us to Saints and Demons. So the wise person wouldn't have this stark difference between you know, I'm the angel, everyone else's a demon, right, Yeah, exactly, And that's great untruth. Number three in our book is life is a battle between good people and evil people. We are so prone to that belief. You don't have to teach it. It's very easy to ramp it up. And what we should be doing on campus is not ramping it up. We should be toning it down. This idea of moral amplification

is really I mean, I found it really profound. You know, this argument that small differences between groups can get amplified into the perception of major and unbridgable differences. I don't think that point is made often enough, right, Yeah, I mean we've kind of you know, we have various things tweedled versus tweedled dumb. You know, we kind of know that that can happen. But you know, to the people doing it, it doesn't seem small at all. It seems

like it's a matter of life or death. And then there's this sense of like or this fundamental need to create heroes, right or to create saints, and a lot of that. You know, the liberals and conservatives, they each have their own hero, you know, their own sort of symbolic notion of their hero. And by propping up you're going exaggerating these differences right when both sides are propping up their most exaggerated version, not even further. That's right,

that's right. So I've been involved in cultural psychology, which is sort of refounded by Richard Schwader in the eighties, and then also course positive psychology with you, which is cores started by or start by Marty Seligman and Mike Chicks and me High. But something I love about cultural psychology is you look at the mind, or you look at how people think about mind, You look at their psychological ideas in different cultures, and then you often can

now begin to see them in our own. So for me, doing my postdoc in India and studying the concept of purity and pollution led me to thinking about sanctity and sacrilege and blasphemy and apostasy on all these religious words. And we might think, yeah, you know that was those were all really important back in the fifteenth century and the Inquisition, but you know, now that we're in a sector society, it doesn't happen anymore. But that's not true

at all. The psychology is ancient. Then we had a couple thousand years where we had big gods, but you know, big gods are only a few thousand years old, and now that you know, they might be less common in the future. Humans have been religious for fifty one hundred, five hundred thousand years, we don't know, and so I think we're seeing a lot of these concepts. What's happening

often on campus is blasphemy laws. So for example, it's very clear, you know, so for example, Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve, it certainly committed blasphemy in that he claimed that there were genetic differences and that was part there could be. He said, that's possible, that's right. He said that he's actually different. Yeah, you know, you're right, right, So he's often misquoted. Now, what he said was very provocative and controversial, and that is you know that we

used to think was appropriate in the academy. But what's happened is because he committed blasphemy, he is banned, at least in some people's minds. If he were to come on campus and speak about the coming apart of the working class in the upper class. That's what he was going to do at Middlebury College. He was coming to speak about what was possibly the most important issue of the twenty sixteen election, which is why is the white

working class so disaffected and so angry. But that was blasphemy, not that he was going to say anything blasphemous, but because he was permanently marked as a blasphemer. And so I think you can understand the reaction to Charles Murray if you resurrect or understand these ancient notions of purity, pollution, sanctity, taboo, blasphemy, apostasy. Could you particularly say, like what the left, which of those that you just mentioned do the left tender gravitudors

and which ones do the right ten of gravitude? Sure? So moral Foundation's theory. This is my main work in moral psychology, done with with Jesse Graham, Pete Dittosena Koleva,

Matt Motel, and Robbie Eyer. We surveyed moral concepts and moral codes and moral texts from around the world, Stone creat Joseph as well at Chicago and found that even though things vary, like when you look, you know, when I first read the Book of Leviticus and read all those purity and pollution taboo, it was the logic of you know, you know, if a woman gives birth to a boy, she must not touch sacred objects for four weeks,

but if it's a girl, it's eight weeks. Like this is a weird kind of logic of disgust and contamination. And then I read all these ethnographies from other cultures and they had a very similar kind of logic to These were cultures that had never met, never associated. So the mind clearly has in it kind of an infrastructure, kind of a ready to build a set of understandings. And so moral foundations theory is about the six main taste buds of the moral sense or foundations upon which

moralities build. So those are number one, care and compassion, which everybody has, but progressive morality builds a lot on if you go to occupy what to occupy Wall Street? A lot? It was about love and care and compassion. Two fairness, fairness, reciprocity, tit for tat, reciprocal, altruism, cheating. Clearly we're predisposed to think in that way. Everybody has that, But progressives care a little more about equality and conservatives

care more about proportionality. Three liberty versus oppression. Everybody hates oppression. Everybody wants to be free. Left and right. There different, mostly just in terms of who they think is the oppressor. So those three are you know, everybody on the left and the right builds on a lot. Then there are three that everyone has individually, but people on the right or moralities on the right, tend to build a lot

more on. So number four is group loyalty. Now, of course the left can do it against the right, but in general people on the right go in more for the idea you know, my country right or wrong. You know, teams, sports, raw, raw, school spirit, and the left is a little more wary of racism, exclusion, walls, borders. The fifth is authority versus subversion, And here is social conservatives, not libertarians at all, but social conservatives really go in for the idea that we

have to have order, structure, tradition is helpful. And this is the sort of Edmund Burke conservatism. Thomas Soel called it the constrained vision of human nature. We need constraints. And the last foundation is sanctity versus degradation. And that's all the stuff about, like why do so many moral codes have to do with the body and food and death and lesions and physical stuff. And this is the work I did with Paul Rosen at Penn was so

lucky to go to Pen for grad school. And then I started looking at morality and Paul Rosen happened to be that the world's expert in discuss so there too. I mean, the left does it sometimes, like there's a kind of a yoga morality where they talk a lot about chakras and purity and anti GMO stuff. So the

left do it. But in general, you know, I think about it as like there's a dimension from Leon Cass who said shallow are the souls who've forgotten how to shut or he's a conservative bioethesist, and Peter Singer who sets sanctity to zero. None of that stuff matters. All that matters is whether conscious sentient beings have suffered. So that is sort of the landscape the six foundations that we have to work with when cultures build moralities. Good

thanks for explaining that. So, in building on your work, I came across Jeremy Freimer's work when I was trying to do a sort of literature review of extensions of your theory in the Political demean and I found something I thought was really interesting. He found that when it comes to ratings of moral exemplars both the globals and conservatives. There is agreement there on three in particular, three characteristics that are included in their wayhing or their judgment or perception.

What biz are? Yeah, sure, care, fairness, and purity. And then the distinctions is that for liberals promoting authority, negatively predictive moral judgments and purity and authority were the major grounds for political disagreement. Okay, but the researchers argue that the similarities outweigh the differences. So I think that is interesting as well to discuss that there are at least there's a common humanity to some degree. And if your group is going to elevate a hero, you're going to

activate all kinds of ideas of sacredness. So it's not that people on the left can't do sacredness, it's that they use it less. It's a less preferred one. But sure, you know, a hero here on the left to hero on the right, most of it is going to be similar psychology. But you know, what I've noticed, having studied morality since I was at PEN in nineteen eighty seven, is that the examples on the left tend to be people who fight racist and that's like the most common thing,

like moralities about fighting racism. It will stand up against racist bullies and you know that does that is heroism. But it just seems to draw from a kind of a narrow band. So what is a give me an example of a form of activism that is broader than fighting for racism. I just mean, if you wanted to hold up examples, I would guess. So in academic psychology, that's almost all been from the let everybody's on the left.

But character development, there's a lot of people who go to study or work on character education, and that tends to flourish in private schools, Catholic schools. So Christians, when they educate from morality, they tend to have a much broader palette of virtues, and they tend to have, you know, seventeen different virtues. That's it's just the virtues that we're consciously trying to instill in our kids are somewhat different.

So Freimer also found that people on both sides of the political divide anticipated that hearing from the other side would induce cognitive dissonance and would require a great effort, caused frustration an undermine a sense of shared reality with a person expressing disparate views, in other words, would damage their relationship. So there does seem to be a tension here between wanting to get along and wanting to arrive at sort of like a truth, a sort of shared

universal or some sort of transcending truth. Usually those are not intention because who is it that they want to get along with. They don't want to get along with people on the other side. The right mind is based on three ideas. The third of the ideas it is

morality binds and blinds. I'm a total Dirk Him. I fell in love with a mail Dirk Him in bad school when I read his book Suicide and in Moral Education, and it just taught me to see groups have needs, and groups need to do something to stick together, to bind themselves together. Otherwise they're prone to dissipate. And so having a common enemy and bashing them and talking about how evil they are is a really good thing to do.

So yeah, I mean, this is why social media is making such a mess of our society, because suddenly social media puts us into conversation in ways that allow us to do this thirty times a day. We can join together to bash how evil the other side is, and every day each of us sees between five and one hundred examples of how unbelievably horrible the other side is, and that allows us to bond together over what, you know, what Nazis or subversive communists or whatever the word is

they are. So it seems like, you know, there are multiple motives why each side wants to avoid exposure to another person's opinion opinion that radically, multiple reasons. One might be a degradation of social status within your group, and it seems like that's what we're seeing playing out a lot on Twitter. Yes, if you think about, you think about for those of you, those listeners who are on Twitter or Facebook, you know, when you think about when do you press like? Why do you press like on

a post? And it isn't just a pure readout of what you liked and dislike, And a lot of it is very strategic. I find that, you know, some like on Twitter, people will there are some people who will look into my likes, or they'll look into who I follow. At the point, he follows a right winger, he follows an all right person. But yeah, I study morality. I follow all kinds of people from all over the place.

But you know, it's like you've got these little you know, Shetland sheep dogs out there nipping at your heels if you don't conform. I love something that you endorsed that someone else said. I can't remember who the other person was and said it, but that we should probably delete old backlogs every year or so or something like that, because what's the point, right, Yeah, yeah, Twitter, Yeah, I mean, there's a program called tweet Delete I think, which I'm gonna.

I'm going to It's on my list. You know, you can say it for any amount of time, so I think i'll I mean, I think it's good to have your tweets around for a few weeks or months because people might still be thinking about, oh I saw a tweet from heyight or you know whatever, what is that? But what I found is that the only people who go back more than a few months are people writing

a smear piece or a hit piece. And so there's a professor MYU has written two of those on me, And what she does is she goes back through all my old tweets and she'll find something which is perfectly innocuous, but she'll then present it in a way to make me seem as though I favored torture or something like that. I mean, so there are a lot of we live in a it's kind of what's it like A we can be prosecutors all the time. Now you can prosecute

our case. And especially because norms change so quickly, So somebody might use a word three years ago that is no longer a word that you should use. But if that word is on your Twitter profile for your life, you know there could be a mob against you in five or ten years. So you know why bother like, who are we benefited by leaving five year old tweets up? We're benefiting our opposition just yeah, well the few people who are playing the game. Yeah. Absolutely, So I thought

that was a really excellent point. So let's talk about another great untruth. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker? Yep? Can you link that to cognitive behavior therapy as well when you explain it? Yes, So the key idea there is anti fragility. It's a wonderful, wonderful idea. The word was coined by nasim Ta Lead precisely because there was

no word in English language for it. So we open the book with this, So we open chapter one with this, and it's just such a powerful idea once you get it that there are many things in the world that are fragile. So a glass is fragile, so you should protect it, and don't let your kids play with your toddlers play with a glass. A plastic cup is resilient. They can play with a plastic cup because if they drop it, it it won't break. But there's no cup that

gets better if they drop it. There's no That just doesn't make any sense. And what TALEV was saying is there are a few things in our world that are like that. There are a few things in our world that have to be dropped. They can't wire up, they can't work unless you drop them periodically. And so the immune system is the best example. The immune system is an open system. You know, it's a miraculous product of evolution, but it's only partly finished, and it requires exposure to

all kinds of bacteria, viruses. It turns out we even need to be exposed to worms. Our evolution had a lot of intestinal worms in it, and because we don't get worms anymore, our immune systems aren't really optimal anymore. And that's why we get certain autoimmune diseases. An the point is, if you think you're doing your kids a favor by washing everything with antibacterial wipes and keeping them safe from dirtant germs, you're not. You're exposing that you're

weakening their immune system. It's anti fragile and you can't do or protect it. And Telleb specifically says, this is what we do with kids, that kids' minds, kids, social life, kid's sense of strength or social confidence is anti fragile. You know, if you had the option of protecting your kid till she was eighteen, and you said, my kid, I don't want her ever to be excluded, that would be so painful. I don't want her ever to be teased. I don't want her ever to be left out insulted.

So would you do that? Would you give your kid blanket protection to the age of eighteen and then sent her off to college? Of course, not, well, certain things I would want to protect them from, like physical violence. Yeah, oh yeah, that's absolutely so. Anti fragile means that we grow from small things, and it's the small things that we must not deprive the kids of, and the small things lead them to be able to take on bigger things.

So of course, if I could protect my kids from being raped or mugged, or work or being in a car that nothing good happens for being a car accident, I would. So when Nietzsche said what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, he was aware that he was anti fragile. There's a great quote from not Confucius Dementius that you know, when Heaven wants to strengthen a man or harden him for a job, he will put him to hunger and

test and test his bones. And you know, Heaven will test him and make things hard for him to prepare him for a challenge. So this is ancient wisdom. And what's happened just in the last few years is we've developed this idea that kids are fragile, and if they are exposed to teasing or insults, they will they will be damaged by them. In fact, the image that we're given from the microaggression theorist is death by a thousand paper cuts. So even if each one is small, they

add up. Of course, if you actually get repeated paper cuts, he'd get a callous and you'd stop getting paper cuts. That's the way our skin is designed, so it's bad psychology. I'd rather get a callous from practicing cello. Yeah, that's exactly that's right. Yeah, our skin gets callous. Our skin is anti fragile, and we've forgotten that. And again, the subtitle of the book is how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure? Good? Can

I riff off that good intentions part? Because I keep getting stuck with something and I wanted to discuss it with you. I want to know, as a professor, if I have students who are generally concerned about an injustice that they're perceiving on their campus, They're generally concerned about something that they may have happened to them that is generally horrible, a horrible thing, what do you recommend we

can do as professors? And then, of course there's implication for parents as well, to help them channel in the most productive way that still allows them to maybe make the world a better place, but also do it in a way that also doesn't protect them from learning and growth. Yeah, So there are many options in those cases. Let's start with some that are just a really bad idea. So suppose somebody says something to you that you think it's

not clear. I mean, it's not hostile, but you know, you think that they were referring to your race or your gender or something like that. So the first thing is you have to decide how to set your own sensitivity and how much do you want to react to things. Do you want to pick your battles, you want more battles, So you have to decide now. Of course, if somebody

doesn't truly aggressive, hostile, exclusionary, that's another matter. But I'm talking about college campuses are generally incredibly progressive places where most people are very welcoming. So I'm not saying that black students, for example, don't face clear indignities. Of course they do, and your question is what should they do

about it? So the first is pick your battles and be sure you're right, and don't waste your time on trivial things and things where you might actually be misinterpreting. That's the first thing. So cognitive therapy can really help you with that, whereas microaggression training is likely to hurt. It's but you really don't want to turn your immune system or your nervous system over to other people so that they get to decide when you get upset. That's

the first thing. Let's suppose it is truly an active racist. Let's suppose it is something that you don't want to You shouldn't just look away or ignore or brush off. What should you do? Here's another bad thing. Social media encourages you to get points by publicizing it and shaming the person and trying to get people to join you. Now, that can be effective in certain ways, but think about what kind of society you want to live in. Do we want a society which we all settle things by

mutual shaming. That's where we're going. That's called call out culture. It's bad for everyone. I talk to students about Everybody hates it. I talk at universities. I say, I describe call out culture. How many of you have that? You think you have that here at your school? All hands go up, So you know, even if you can justify it, the net effect is terrible for everybody. So there are many other things one can do. If it's an individual who did something, sometimes it could be much more effective

to talk to them privately. I recommend that everybody read Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is full of brilliant social psychology when which people resolve conflicts and they often turn enemies into friends. Now I'm not saying you need to do that, but I'm saying in many cases is if you go to a person privately and you do it in a skillful way, they will actually be embarrassed or ashamed, they will apologize,

and you actually make the world a better place. You make that person a better person, and you gain possibly a friend. Whereas if you attack them publicly, you almost never will bring them to your way. They'll feel they'll have their defenses, they'll have their excuses, they'll think they've been unjustly called a racist, and now they're can be more attracted to alt right websites and rants about the way that the left is always accusing everybody of rating system.

So you have to decide how much do you want to get upset about this, how do you want to handle this? And do you want to just attack someone in a way that might feel good but it is likely to just make them dig in good. I like those suggestions because we're in a position where we can really help students. What I like about your book is that it really looks at what are the most effective strategies from a wide varied perspectives, not only ancient wisdom

but also modern clinical psychology. Right, so kind of ground on yourself in that's right. This our book is not about blaming. We're not, you know, attacking sjw's. We don't

mention sjw's. Our book is trying to apply psychology, and I would even say positive, mostly positive psychology, to understand how to flourish in college and to recognize that we're doing a lot of things for moralistic reasons that are preventing students from flourishing in college, which will have massive negative ramifications for businesses that hire them and for the democracy in which they vote. Oh there, I just ran out of there. No but to finish this up. Let

me just read this quote. This is one of my favorite quotes in the book. So Van Jones, who was Obama's you know, green Energies or I think it was, He was invited to speak at the University of Chicago by David Axelrod, who is, you know, a political consultant in an Obama campaign, and I mean Axlerod runs a political talk show at Chicago, and they had invited in I think Skrey Lewandowski, you know, worked I was a Trump person, so he worked on Trump's campaign or something.

At any rate, students protested, they wanted to shut it down. I don't think the really tried, but there was some talk about shutting it down, and a lot of talk about what should be the response of Chicago's students if somebody associated with the Trump presidency comes to speak at the university, what should they do? And so Axelrod asks Van Jones what he thinks they should do, and Jones says, and I've got to quote it because it's so brilliant.

Jones says, there are two ideas about safe spaces. One is a very good idea. One's a terrible idea. The idea being physically safe on campus, not being subjected to sexual harassment, physical abuse, being targeted, you're an N word

or whatever. I'm fine with that. But there's another view that is now ascended, which I think is a horrible view, which is I need to be safe ideologically, I need to be safe emotionally, and if I don't feel safe, it's a problem for everybody else, including the university administration. Meaning I'm a victim of microaggression. I'm going to call it into the bias response team. I'm going to file charges, and some grown up has to do something to punish

the person who offended me. And Van Jones is saying, this is a terrible idea. But here's the kicker. Here's where he really gets the anti fragility, he gets the psychology right. Here's what he says. And here he's really talking to progressive college students. How can progressive students at Chicago become better progressives? How can they become more effective politically? Here's what he says. Quote, 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. Boom, Yes, drop the mic right at that point. Right. That's so you know that advice, I mean that should be handed on a car to every incoming student. Yeah. I think something else that should be taught to all incoming students

is of course, in positive psychology or something. Oh yeah, yeah, I could, you know, try to guess the topic that when I covered in my core I get the most letters from students at the end of the course saying that transformed my life. What do you think it is? The adversity class, the post traumatic growth lecture and resiliency lecture.

Here's the thing that's interesting about that. But I'm shocked every semester that this happens, that this is such a revelation to students, and it just it might speak to the fact that they're getting such different messages outside of that course exactly, because what I teach in that lecture is that you know, Bonano's research, which was the precursor to the postramatic growth research, but showing that, wow, look at the human capacity for resiliency is far underrated, right

I mean, And so when I teach out to students and then they start to realize, wow, like I actually am capable of not only bouncing back, but becoming stronger as you use the word strength strong, it's like a revelation to students. That's right. What we're doing to kids by protecting them is I think tantamount to child abuse. Obviously, it's well intended, it's different. But I've recently begun doing this little thought experiment. Let me just try it on you.

I haven't really said this publicly. Okay, so let's imagine. Let's imagine. You know, so in Americans, American education, we've had this idea that if we push things to earlier grades, kids will learn it better. So if we start, you know, because kids didn't used to start reading until first grade. You know, in Finland, they don't start really academic stuff till until age seven, but we've changed kindergarten even preschool to do academic stuff. Do you think that makes kids smarter?

Do you think that making them start something early means that they'll go further in it with their whole life? No? I mean all the research I've shown, there's like this window where it's better to like face adversity first. Right, that's right, that's right. They're sensitive exactly. There's sensitive periods, and so if you push a skill to before the sensitive period, there's no name, and what you're doing is you're pushing out other things. Okay, so that doesn't work.

Now let's go the other way. Suppose we said, hmm, let's not let kids read until they're fourteen. It's just, you know, we don't want their brains to just, for whatever reason, no reading until you're fourteen, and then at fourteen we teach them to read. What do you think, do you think they'd be as good at reading or do you think that maybe they'd be permanently damaged in their reading abilities? Well, I'm thinking that through. I don't

think either option. I think there's like a nuanced anser there. I don't think they'd be permanently damaged, but I think there would be at a disadvantage. Yeah, on average, on average, Yeah, yeah, it's because the windows closed. But this was all preliminary to this. Throughout history and certainly in American history. Up until the early nineteen nineties, kids went outside to play,

they played with other kids, then they came home. That's the way it always was until the early nineteen nineties. It's no longer that way. So what if we and typically at age seven plus or minus. In fact, all over the world, I used to study street kids all over the world. Around age eight, kids are on the street. They's street kids. They can live without adult help, they can run from the police, they can steal food at

age eight. You know, by seven or eight, kids can certainly walk to school, go out and play groups, get in conflicts. That's the way it always was. But in the nineteen nineties we freaked out based on some early in the eighties, freaked out based on the media ecosystem that put missing kids in our faces. By the nineties, we had this idea that if you ever take your eyes off your kid, if there is not a responsible adult looking at your kid, he or she will be abducted.

Now that was never true. There's child abductions have been, you know, there are few in the country. I mean one hundred eight year is what we know is the FBI stat that we could but we could find, not counting the non custodial parent. Obviously, parents abduct their kids if they don't get them in divorce proceedings, but stranger abductions are almost unheard of. But yet we freaked out and we stop kids from going outside on their own.

In fact, you can be arrested. It didn't happen in the nineties, but the two thousands, you can be arrested. If your seven to nine year old go to a park nearby, you could lose them because a child from child. You're neglecting your children. So what do you think Suppose we took the ability to function independently, the ability to deal with other kids without a referee, without a teacher,

the ability to function as an autonomous person. Suppose we said to kids, no more of that until you're fourteen. You're not allowed out until you're fourteen. Okay, fourteen, Now we'll let you go out, but you have to call in and we have to track you with your iPhone and a Da da da da. So we delay any autonomy, any independent on supervised play until they're fourteen. What do you think when they come to college, do you think will be just as skilled socially or might they be?

Might they have been slowed down in their maturation? Well, then I saw the Black mir episode that played out that very scenario. So based on that prediction, I would say it is not very beneficial to the development. That's right, That's right. And so this I think, you know, again unintentional, but I think this, you know, along with lead point, like the lead epidemic that was just horrible at that damage millions and millions of kids, and I think prevent it,

we stopped them from playing out from free play. We deprive them of free play. That I think is the second biggest terrible thing we've done to our kids. I loved that you brought that into your book, and it reminded me of some great research Gotnik has been doing on you know, play as in delaying the literacy for a couple of years, you know, by having to better literacy. Right, exactly, that's right. There's no reason that kindergarteners should be doing

spelling and math, they should be playing. I really like that. So let's finally cover your third great untruth. Always trust your feelings the righteous mind. The first principle in the righteous mind is that intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. So descript and this is just descriptively, not prescripted descriptively thinking. We tend to have gut feelings that guide our interpretation, and our reasoning follows, like the tail being wagged by

the dog. So that is what we're prone to. And it's an empirical question should we always do that? Is it always a good idea to go with our feelings? And there's a lot of research on when intuition is better than reasoning and when reasoning is better than intuition. And if you're trying to decide what color you want to paint your room, you could reason about it, or you can go your gut feelings. Gout feelings are probably

going to be a better guide. But if you're trying to decide what happens socially, yes, intuition has a lot to contribute. But the whole point of cognitive behavioral therapy is that people make predictable mistakes, especially people are prone to anxiety and depression. So if you are prone to anxiety and depression, you habitually take everything in the worst possible way. You habitually interpret an innocent question as a slight or an exclusion. Yeah, you should stop it. You

should stop listening to your gut feelings. You need therapy, You need help, and so CBT is a way cognitive health therapy is a way of helping you to catch your most common distortions and then correct them. So let's rephrase it. Not should you listen to your feelings. Of course you should sometimes, but you shouldn't take them as definitive sources. Rather, you should get better at understanding which of your habitual thoughts are distortions and which ones are accurate.

You should not have professors on campus telling you to go with your feelings and that if somebody challenged you on something, they're invalidating your existence. They have no right to question you. This is your reality. So if you set people up as though their interpretations are supreme, they're sovereign. Anyone in the classes says, well, I look at things differently, and you say no, no, I'm telling you my experience.

You can't question my experience. It's true. They can't question what you felt, but they can question what you made of it. And so I think in universities we need to help each other think better. In other words, we are also prone to confirmation bias. We are also prone to emotional reasoning and post talk reasoning that we need people to challenge us. We need people to question us. And sometimes we'll say, no, you're wrong, I'm sure that

I'm right, and here's my evidence. Other times we might say, oh, wow, yeah, I didn't think of that. Maybe she didn't mean anything bad by and maybe or maybe she was just busy. Maybe that's all it was. So we need other people to question our feelings. For us, I want to push back against you a second and you said it's good for people to push back. But when I was in grad school, I mean, you've posed my work a lot.

I don't know if I've told you that, but your dual process model of morality with Elfin and the writer was extremely helpful metaphor in my own dissertation. I know, don't if I toldis was a dual process theory and human intelligence that was my theory. So I really drew on that a lot. Elet of the right that would be really cool. Yeah, it's a two volume dissertation that no one's read but my mom. But it's a trade book.

You got to make a trade book maybe someday. Well, and I talk about it a lot in my book un Gifted Intelligence Redefined, But I argue that basically, in a nutshell, intelligence is actually the cognitive flexibility to switch between motive thought depending on the task constraints. And I did a bunch of studies to show that that is a skill in itself that has been undervalued in the

intelligence literature. So saying and intelligence is the ability to switch cognitive either system one or system to motive thought depending on the task constraints and your test demands. The point I wanted to make here is that, and I think it's the same data as what you said, but I would frame it in a different way. I think it's possible to hone your intuition and better so you can rely be a more reliable guide. Your intuition could be a more reliable guide to reality. And that was

a major point of my dissertation. So I would just extend I agree everything you said. It's not only a matter of not trusting your intuition, but actually becoming more confident and knowing yourself better, know when your intuition is working for you and when it's not. Yeah, that's man. How do you sharpen a knife, you know, with another

hard thing? And how do you sharpen your intuitions? If everyone around you says, oh, I won't question your intuition, so that in aggression, you know, then you're not going to get better intuitions. That's right. If you have a therapist or a caring friend who can say, you know what you know, you're doing that thing again where you're assuming the worst about people. Let's look at the evidence.

That's how you sharpen intuition. That's one way, absolutely, I should clarify I wasn't only my mom who read megoritation. I did pass the committee. I want to four people, so well, end this because I'm going to be a very respectable of your time. Let's let's end this conversation day talking about the Herodox Academy because I, as you know, I joined it recently and I've been telling people, telling people that I'm proud, I'm a proud member. I am

for viewpoint diversity. I wanted to raise just one point one additional nuanced data I'm here is I see sometimes and not within the Heaterex Academy conference. I didn't see that there, but I see it on Twitter sometimes. I see it in certain circles, a pitting of viewpoint diversity versus racial ethnic diversity. And that bothers me because I care equally about both, yes, and they don't have to be antagonistic to each other. But I see it pitted

as antagonistic and certain circles of discourse. Have you noticed

that too? Oh? Absolutely, absolutely so. Because part of what's happened on campus is set of policies that are intended to help black students in particular, and that's what a lot of the protests were in twenty fifteen, and so unfortunately the contest have devolved into black students wanting certain policies about microaggression, safe spaces, bias response teams, also ethnic identity centers, and those who said no, no free speech,

free speech. We should be allowed to say whatever we want and even if you know and so in each side holds up the worst elements of the others. So for many on the left, free speech means white frat boys wanting to sell one of VL songs, you know, with the N word. There's no reason why we need to have that on campus. That doesn't do anyone any good. So if you take an extreme view of the free speech side, an extreme view of the identity politics side, yeah,

they are totally incompatible and their enemies. That's not what we're about. We are of the view that for the academy to do what it needs to do, you have to have a space, a very special space. This is not like the public square. This is a special institution that only exists and only does its work if people are exposed to diverse people and ideas. So, if you really think diversity matters, it's not because people have different

skin codes, because they have different perspectives and ideas. If you really think diversity matters, and you have to value viewpoint diversity, and what we're working on several of our projects are how can we solve all the diversity problems together? Are because there are some ways. There are some ways recommended often by diversity consultants that involve very heavy handed training about white privilege, and there are ways of doing

diversity training that backfire. The more you blame people, the more you turn them against diversity. So there are ways that it's done on and there's there's an article in Science on this. There's all kinds of articles that diversity training either doesn't work or sometimes it even backfires, and so we say we've got to stop that. Companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on training that doesn't work. Everybody feels like a victim. Now Google is getting sued

from both sides. In the future, everybody will be sued from all sides. This is a complete mess. We have to solve all the problems together, and that means we have to look at what we're trying to do in the classroom. What are the features or factors that might make black students feel less welcome. We've got to address those that. We have to address them in ways that don't make other people feel that they live in terror

being called a racist. So that doesn't help anyone either the black students, if the white students are free to talk to them, So we have to address them all together. We cannot address them on Facebook or Twitter. We cannot address them in the public square. We cannot address them in anywhere where people can grandstand and show off. We have to work on the dynamics of small group discussions and recognize that what we're doing is hard and important.

It's going to acquire everybody to try harder, to give less offense and to take less offense. We've got to create conditions in which people can give each other the benefit of the doubt, listen to each other, and welcome those who see things differently. That's what diversity can do for us. Gosh, if there's anything that this world needs more now, it's not. So. I want to wish you good luck on that project, and I wish you and Greg all the best on the book tour blitz that

will be happening soon. Well, thanks so much, scot. I. This ultrapsychological discussion with you. Thanks and good look to you me too. Thanks. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at Thespsychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a

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