Jonathan Haidt || The Coddling of the American Mind

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
with a guest. You will stimulate your mind and give
you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast SI. Today,

(00:35):
I'm really excited to have Jonathan Height on the podcast.
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

(00:57):
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

(01:19):
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,

(01:39):
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

(02:00):
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

(02:22):
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

(02:46):
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

(03:09):
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

(03:30):
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,

(03:51):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:34):
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.

(04:55):
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

(05:18):
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

(05:41):
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,

(06:05):
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

(06:27):
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.

(06:48):
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,

(07:11):
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

(07:33):
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

(07:54):
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

(08:18):
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

(08:39):
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

(09:01):
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

(09:22):
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

(09:44):
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

(10:07):
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

(10:30):
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

(10:51):
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.

(11:11):
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

(11:32):
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

(11:53):
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

(12:15):
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

(12:38):
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,

(13:01):
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

(13:22):
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

(13:42):
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

(14:04):
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

(14:26):
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.

(14:53):
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

(15:13):
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

(15:35):
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

(15:57):
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.

(16:18):
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

(16:40):
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,

(17:01):
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

(17:21):
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

(17:43):
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

(18:05):
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,

(18:28):
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

(18:51):
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

(19:11):
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

(19:32):
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

(19:52):
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.

(20:15):
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.

(20:38):
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

(21:00):
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

(21:21):
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

(21:42):
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,

(22:05):
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

(22:26):
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

(22:47):
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

(23:09):
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

(23:30):
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.

(23:52):
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,

(24:15):
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?

(24:37):
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

(24:58):
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

(25:19):
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

(25:41):
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

(26:03):
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.

(26:23):
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

(26:44):
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,

(27:08):
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

(27:29):
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.

(27:49):
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

(28:11):
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

(28:33):
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

(28:54):
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

(29:16):
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

(29:38):
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

(30:00):
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.

(30:22):
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

(30:43):
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,

(31:04):
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

(31:25):
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

(31:47):
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

(32:11):
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

(32:32):
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

(32:54):
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,

(33:18):
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,

(33:39):
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

(34:02):
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.

(34:22):
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

(34:44):
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?

(35:05):
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

(35:27):
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

(35:50):
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,

(36:10):
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

(36:32):
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,

(36:54):
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,

(37:16):
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

(37:38):
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

(38:00):
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

(38:21):
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.

(38:43):
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

(39:04):
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

(39:25):
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

(39:46):
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

(40:06):
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,

(40:28):
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

(40:49):
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

(41:11):
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

(41:36):
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.

(41:56):
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

(42:17):
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

(42:38):
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,

(43:01):
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

(43:23):
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

(43:45):
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

(44:07):
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,

(44:28):
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,

(44:49):
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

(45:12):
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

(45:32):
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

(45:55):
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.

(46:15):
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

(46:37):
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?

(47:00):
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

(47:20):
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

(47:42):
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.

(48:05):
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

(48:26):
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

(48:47):
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

(49:07):
you to join in the discussion at Thespsychology podcast dot com.
That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a
rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks
for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and
tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
and creativity.

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