Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
From the Archive: Jonathan Haidt & fostering resilience in the age of anxiety
This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, we are opening the archive to share three particularly relevant episodes. The first episode features social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who shares his thoughts on the moral intuitions and untruths that separate us but perhaps don't need to.
Jonathan Haidt is a You might know him from his New York Times bestseller, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. He is also a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Jonathan has helped found various organizations to strengthen his corners of civil society through Let Grow, Heterodox Academy, and OpenMind.
Jeremy chats with Jonathan dive into several provocative questions, including—What is civil society’s exoskeleton? Why are white liberals more depressed? Is social media disastrous for civil society? How did the mental health epidemic among teenagers birth wokeness? What is devasting Gen-Z? How is the death of unsupervised play corrosive in the habits of a democracy? All of this and more in today’s episode with Jonathan Haidt.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas, questions, and recommendations for the podcast! You can shoot Katie Janus, GDT's producer, an email anytime!
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Center for Civil Society's YouTube Channel
Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers. Today we chat with social psychologist and best-selling author, jonathan Haidt, about the moral intuitions and untruths that separate us, but perhaps don't need to. Let's go. Givers, doers and Thinkers introduces listeners to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society. We speak with philanthropists, reformers, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, religious leaders, scholars, journalists and anyone else who will help us understand contemporary civil society's achievements and failure. My name is Jeremy Beer. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jeremy Beer. Thank you for joining us. All right, thank you for joining us for another episode of Givers, doers and Thinkers.
Speaker 1:We are very honored today to have a chance to speak with Dr Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Speaker 1:Dr Haidt received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and taught for 16 years at Mr Jefferson's University, the University of Virginia.
Speaker 1:And just as I have turned my own psychology PhD into brilliant success as a podcaster, dr Haidt has managed to find a little success himself, most obviously as the author or co-author of two New York Times bestsellers that is, two more than I have actually come to think of it and those books are the Righteous Mind why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and the Coddling of the American Mind. How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. The latter book being co-authored with Greg Lukanoff, founder of FIRE Foundation for Individual Rights in Education I think I have that acronym correct. Dr Hyde is not just a thinker, having co-founded several organizations whose goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other and even learn from each other despite their moral differences, and those organizations include Heterodox Academy, open Mind and Ethical Systems. We'll come back and we'll be talking about Heterodox Academy, I think, at least a little today, if not the others. So welcome Dr Haidt.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Jeremy. I didn't know that you had a PhD in psychology. I hope that it has at least enriched your life and made you much better at dealing with people.
Speaker 1:Possibly. Sometimes I am told that it has, I think, other times I am told that it hasn't. Yes, the University of Texas at Austin. I started in clinical psychology. After a year, my professors kindly moved me out of clinical psychology. I was not great. I didn't like to hear people's problems, which turns out not to be a great thing for someone who's in clinical psychology.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. When I decided I was going to go for a PhD in psychology, my girlfriend at the time said but John, you don't like people enough. I had to explain like no, no, it's not that kind of psychology. I'm going to actually try to figure out how people work.
Speaker 1:Right. Exactly, not liking them might help with respect to that goal to some extent, that's true. That's true, give you a little distance. No, yes, it is in psychology which has made me very interested in your work ever since I first discovered it many years ago, and it's work that has met its moment, I think. Luckily I mean very fortunately for you, and maybe unfortunately for some of the rest of us, in the sense that understanding those who are different, living and working happily with them, seems to become very, very hard for people. So it's a good time to dive into thinking about why that might be.
Speaker 1:So I thought we'd talk about those books that I mentioned in the introduction before. It's just sort of getting your view on aspects of our contemporary situation, which has obviously gone through a lot of changes and crises over the last year or so. We'll just start with the righteous mind. I think many of our listeners will have, if not read the entire book, then maybe have seen your Ted talk or have read articles related to the righteous mind. I think the Atlantic is where the original article came out.
Speaker 2:Is that right? That was for the coddling of the American mind in 2015.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, but there you know, you've written a number of articles related to these theses. I think, at least for me, there were two, two lasting ideas, big ideas that come out of reading the righteous mind. One concerns the writer and the elephant as an image that explains how our minds work, as opposed to how we like to think they work. Perhaps I mean this as a compliment, I don't know what you would say about this, but it's essentially an extended elaboration on. Well, you say this in the book on the thought of David Hume that we overrate the writer and underrate the elephant. Can you unpack this idea for people who are not familiar with it or who haven't read your book?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I'm a social psychologist who studies morality, and in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 90s I began studying moral psychology and at the time everybody was focused on moral reasoning how does moral reasoning develop in children, things like that. But it was very clear to me in part from beginning to work look at morality across cultures that morality is really much more emotional and visceral. And I grew up with two sisters and we fought all the time and and made up all the time. And it's just, you know, what I was reading in the books about reasoning just didn't fit Like. When you're mad at someone, all your reasoning goes in one direction and you cannot be talked out of it. And I see that with my own children.
Speaker 2:And so I found that the ideas of David Hume, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, were just brilliant psychologically. Most philosophers aren't that good at psychology, but Hume was great at philosophy and psychology and he famously said reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office that to serve and obey them. And you know, if, if anybody doubted that that was true back in the 90s when I started my research, I would challenge anyone to maintain in 2021 that that is not completely accurate. You know, and as we know, when you, you know, so it's not that reason doesn't matter, and it's not that people don't change their minds. But in the kinds of interactions that we now increasingly have with strangers and no reputational, you know, no reward for reaching agreement, rather reward for attacking the other person more strongly. We'll get into this later, but social media has really warped the social fabric that all the problems that I wrote about in the Righteous Mind in 2012, almost all of them are much worse today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you've anticipated a question. I was going to ask you like how much? Okay, so explain before we go on. Explain the image of the writer and the elephant. So the elephant is this emotional raw experience right that the writer only barely has any control over.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my first book, the Happiness Hypothesis, was about 10 ancient ideas. I read all the ancient wisdom literature I could find, east to west, and I took every psychological claim and there were 10 that were really just brilliant, widespread. And the first is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. And so I think in metaphors, and when I speak and when I try to teach students, I try to give them metaphors and analogies. And the analogies that the ancients used often involved animals. They lived intimately with animals. We don't anymore, but they all were familiar with trying to get an ox or a cow or a sheep or some animal to do what you want, a cow or a sheep or some animal to do what you want. And so Plato and many other ancients said that the mind is like a charioteer trying to steer his two horses. He needs the horses to go, but you know, they're kind of stupid and they have minds of their own and it's a struggle, because everybody can see that people struggle against their own impulses. So when I was writing the happiness hypothesis, I wanted a good metaphor, but all that we were learning in psychology was you know what? The charioteer, the driver, the reason, as Plato said, is actually not that smart, not that independent, and that in fact it's the horses that are in control. But that doesn't make any sense. That's a terrible metaphor. So I just said well, we need a much more intelligent animal. So I picked an elephant. It's intelligent, it's big, and so imagine a small boy sitting on the back of a large elephant. And if the elephant has no desires and the boy tries to, you know, tug it to the left, it'll go to the left. But as soon as the elephant really wants something, the boy on his back can't really force it to do anything. So that's why I coined this metaphor of the mind is divided, like a rider, which is conscious reasoning, on the back of the large elephant, which is especially intuition. It's all the automatic processes, and I found that this metaphor so when I you know, when I die, you know, thomas Jefferson had just three things he wanted on his grave, one of which was that he founded the University of Virginia, and so one of mine will be he's the guy who made up the ride or an elephant metaphor, because psychotherapists love it, like a lot of people really like it, because it really helps them understand themselves and especially, how do you influence other people?
Speaker 2:And this is for all. Everybody listening, for everybody listening. We all have to persuade people, whether it's people you're negotiating with, or bosses, or employees, or donors or whatever. And the main piece of advice I have for you is talk to the elephant first. Don't go in with here are the reasons why my proposal is good for you. I mean, that's better than saying here are the reasons why it's good for me. But don't start with the reasons. Start by appealing to the elephant. Develop trust, develop a sense of a shared future or some sort of bonds of the past. Get them excited about the vision. So if the elephant is leaning your way, then all you need to do is give good reasons to the rider and you're done. The deal's closed. But if the elephant's leaning, against you.
Speaker 1:there's no amount of reasoning you can give. That's going to close the deal. Well, I'm glad you brought this up, as we were talking about just prior to recording um uh, and there are a number of people in the world of philanthropy and fundraising who listen to this podcast and, as part of our training, when we talk, talk to our own staff as well as um people who work for other uh nonprofit organizations or in the world of fundraising, or even in in um uh, in program world uh, we use your metaphor all the time Talk to the elephant and people tend to yeah, once you talk to the writer um uh, way too much or too quickly, I guess, perhaps, rather than getting the elephant steered in the right direction first, that's right.
Speaker 2:That's right. So, especially in political life, if you only talk to the elephant, then you're a demagogue, and that's what our founding fathers warned about and that's what we see with many of the populist movements that erupt all around the world. But you know, if you have good arguments and good evidence, then just wise persuasion is first talk to the elephant and then give all your arguments and evidence. And if we look at America's political history, we've had three presidents in my lifetime who were great at it, and I imagine it's going to jump out at everyone who they were. Certainly Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. And Barack Obama was brilliant as an orator, although and he really understood this but he was not quite as much of a genius in just daily conversation as were Reagan and Clinton. But those three really knew how to talk to the elephant. The Democrats kept nominating people like Michael Dukakis or Al Gore or John Kerry, who were just not very good at it.
Speaker 1:Yes, a little more writer-focused than they were. That's right Not to leave this metaphor too quickly, and this is going in a little bit different direction than the were. That's right Not to leave this metaphor too quickly, and this is going in a little bit different direction than the political. But it seems. This is why it seems to me that ancient writers, philosophers or thinkers let's put it that way would insist on moral education as being essential to being able to do good. Moral reasoning Is that right, like an education of the emotions and habits is the only way you can actually think rightly is to get that right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. And I noticed on your web page, where you have the About Us section, our philosophy I noticed that you quote Tocqueville and you quote one of my favorite sociologists, robert Nisbet, and so I think, yes, it looks from your side. Is that you really understand what the ancients understood about society and about the need for people to be bound into a society? And so I just want to give you this. There's one quote. Oh, here it is. Yes, so the ancients. So, all over the world, the way that children have always been educators, with stories, often within a religious context and with an overarching framework of virtue, ethics, that is the goal of child rearing. The goal of education is to cultivate virtues, and America dropped that, especially in the 60s and 70s. We had this ridiculous thing called the values clarification movement, and, oh, we shouldn't tell children what to think. We should tell them, teach them how to think, and, of course, they have to figure out their own values, which is like telling children we shouldn't teach them English.
Speaker 2:They should develop their own language no no you're being prepared to be successful in a society, you've got to learn that you know you have to understand what the virtues are and how to cultivate them and why they're good for you.
Speaker 2:So moral instruction kind of fell out in the late 20th century and that's why we saw the rise of character education. So I think there was a lot of philanthropic interest, especially on the right in the 80s and 90s, as a way to fill that void. And now, ironically, all the secular schools that were supposed to be going in for secular education a lot of them have adopted this quasi-religious indoctrination system of well, wokeness is the casual, is the common term for it. But it's a real problem because it really does have a lot of the hallmarks of a religion. And my daughter right now is learning. She comes home, they're learning about religion in sixth grade and they learned about Jainism and Hinduism and, you know, soon they'll be learning about Judaism, and so that's great. I want them to learn about all sorts of religions. And my high school kid I'm happy to have him learn about critical race theory and other things.
Speaker 2:But you know I don't want the school to like require my kid to be a Jain or a Hindu or a Mormon, or to embrace, you know, these new ideologies. So maybe we're jumping ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 1:But this is very much on my mind.
Speaker 2:I imagine it's on the mind of a lot of your listeners too.
Speaker 1:I imagine it is too. It's certainly much on my mind, and, from what I hear from our listeners, it's on their mind as well. And is that the best way, then to? I was going to ask you this question how do you understand the wokeness phenomenon, essentially filling this void, this vacuum of moral, giving the elephant direction? I don't want to keep mixing the metaphor.
Speaker 2:I'll handle it for you. When Greg Lukianoff and I wrote the Coddling the American Mind, it's because Greg started to see some weird stuff happening on campus in 2014. He saw students for the first time. Students were demanding protections from books and speakers and ideas. They were demanding trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggression, training, bias, response teams all this stuff that was nowhere to be seen in 2011, 2012. And then suddenly, 2013, 2014,. Greg starts seeing all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And Greg, who had learned CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy, when he had a suicidal depression in 2007, greg saw students making the exact cognitive distortions that he had learned to stop doing. And so Greg came to me with this idea that somehow colleges are making students sick, think in distorted ways and this is going to lead to them being depressed. And I thought this was a great idea and I suggested we write it up and we submitted to the Atlantic. Well, we didn't know it at the time. This is 2015.
Speaker 2:We didn't know it at the time, but the mental health epidemic, the depression and anxiety epidemic, had begun in 2012, 2013 among American teenagers. We were among the first to really see the full force of it on college campuses because, all of a sudden, all of our mental health centers were flooded Right around. 2015 is when the flood hit and we began to see this weird moral system that had no name at the time, but it was later called wokeness. And then, only a year or two ago, did we get the data from 2015, that show that something strange happened to white people, to white liberals, especially white liberal women, that their attitudes really, really changed on matters of race and immigration in 2015. And it's stunning the graphs so anyway. In other words, white liberals suddenly moved to the left of African Americans on all kinds of questions about race, racial justice and immigration.
Speaker 1:Right and this is pre-Trump. This is not 20th century Exactly.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. So this is called the Great Awokening. Matt Iglesias at Vox coined the term because it was like a religious revival, and some of the doctrines of it are you know, everything is to be understood through the lens of power and privilege. Everyone can be assigned identities, you know, white or non-white, male or non-male, tall or not tall, fertile or not fertile almost anything you can imagine Make it a binary dimension. And the people who have the powerful side are the bad people who oppress everyone else. So everyone else has to unite against the bad people. So the victims are the good people. Anyway, it's you know. It's not that there's zero truth to this way of looking at things, but if this is the primary lens that young people are adopting in college, you know they're crippling their ability to understand the world or to influence it or to enjoy it.
Speaker 2:And here's the most stunning thing, which in this was not known a year ago, and I've just been digging into the data recently. When you look at the mental health crisis and you zoom in on what's happened, it turns out that there's a correlation with ideology. So people who say they're liberal are more depressed, but this is only true for white people. And so when Zach Goldberg, a graduate student, first put this out on Twitter, digging into public data sets from Pew and American National Election Survey, when he first put this out, I said, you know. I said, can you zoom in? You know, zoom in for just women and then just young women, because Gen Z is really where the most problems, the problems are. The depression is. Most problems the problems are the depression is. And it turns out that the percentage that have a mental disorder, that say that they have a mental disorder, goes up and up and up so that when you look at just so, no group is above 35% saying yes, I have a mental disorder, and the conservative groups are all below 25%. But if you zoom in on young, so, uh, 18 to 30 years old, uh, women who say white women, who say that they are on the left, you get 54 percent of them say they've been told they have a mental disorder. And this it's unbelievable, it's absolutely stunning. But this really vindicates greg's initial idea that if you embrace this way of thinking, you know that as American society has gotten better and better, fairer and fairer, more civil rights for everyone, you know amazingly speedy increase in rights for LGBT, so you know, everything's getting better and better. The environment is getting better other than global warming, but there's all kinds of good things happening is getting better other than global warming, but there's all kinds of good things happening as this is happening.
Speaker 2:If some young people buy into this ideology that everything is power structures, everything is shot through with white supremacy, well yeah, of course they're depressed. You know they're missing the greatest. You know what Deidre McCluskey has called the great enrichment that began in the 1600s. Like you know, it's. Things are getting better and better. Poverty is going down. All sorts of good things are happening, but some people are trapped in this ideology that tells them not just everything is terrible, but that the power structures hate them and will only pay them 78 cents for every dollar that they will pay to the man next to them, which is not true at all. That wage gap statistic is only true if you just look at raw numbers and you don't take account of hours worked or occupation worked in.
Speaker 1:Anyway, sorry I'm going on. No, this is great. So my question to you about that is do you think it is actually a higher incidence of mental disorder, or is it also by both both and a high embracing or looking for mental disorder in the sense that victimization now confers prestige and status?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right. So I see the point of your question. That's a very good question. So first, is it just that because it's prestigious to be, to to be mentally ill or to have depression, anxiety, um, it's prestigious to be a victim? Is it just that people are claiming this but they're not really depressed or anxious, they're not really feeling like that, to which I would say first um, there's a lot of research in psychology, including clinical psychology, that when you label people and they embrace the label, it becomes self-fulfilling.
Speaker 2:So it is incredibly foolish, you know. I mean the idea of encouraging. You know, if a gay student comes to NYU, this is like the most gay-friendly school in the most gay-friendly neighborhood, the West Village. You know that you could possibly find. But if a gay student comes to NYU, that student will be, will refer to him or herself as a marginalized student. I am marginalized, I have a marginalized identity, you know. So the point is, if you could label people and then they embrace it, it actually becomes self-fulfilling. The second thing is we know that the mental illness stats it's not just that they're changing the threshold or they're changing their embracing identity, because you see the same pattern for self-harm and suicide. Those are not self-report. Those are hard data on hospital admissions and actual deaths.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that's what I actually thought of that after I asked the question that one doesn't fake that sort of thing. That is, they say hard data doesn't self-report. At the same time, isn't it also the case and I like that we're just sort of veering wherever we want to go here? Isn't it also the case that isn't suicide and certainly lifespan suicide up and lifespan down among white males?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right. That's a somewhat different problem that I'm not at all an expert in, but yes, life expectancy is decreasing among non-college educated people, particularly white people, particularly white men, and that's in part because of the opioid crisis. It's also partly the collapse of institutions back to 1960, I think it is. If you look at the top quarter and the bottom quarter, the income distribution, their likelihood to be married wasn't very different. Their likelihood to be going to church regularly or religious worship regularly wasn't very different, and since then, many people have observed that the college educated have stayed with these good habits. The college educated, you know they might talk like liberals on matters of sex and marriage, but they act like conservatives, whereas you know more the working class and in some cases you know some conservatives will talk like conservative, acts like libertines.
Speaker 2:And so, getting back again to you, know what you write about, about the importance of meeting institutions and civil society, about churches, synagogues, rotary clubs. These are the in the righteous mind. I call these the moral exoskeletons that we need, that human beings can't just figure out their own morality. They need a sort of a moral exoskeleton that's given to them by religion or something, attempt is given to them by religion or something, and if there's nothing there, if you tear down religion, as has happened in a stunningly rapid turn since 2000,.
Speaker 2:Recent data just came out last week showing a stunning decline in people who even identify as belonging to a religion. It dropped below 50%, I believe, just recently. So if you have this quick drop in religion, many have been writing about including me and Greg about how people still have religious minds and what they're going to do is they're going to embrace something that fits the same slots as religion but is not tested by time, and that is wokeness. You know it's also on the far right, you also have all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories and you have neo-Nazis. So you know I'm a nonpartisan. I see the madness on both extremes. But yes, wokeness I do believe functions structurally just like a religion and specifically Christianity. It's kind of a form of Christianity with no grace, no redemption, no forgiveness, just bitterness.
Speaker 1:None of the good stuff.
Speaker 2:None of the good stuff. You got it.
Speaker 1:That's right, that's right, We'll be right back with Dr Jonathan Haidt and he keeps talking about his book, the Righteous Mind and the coddling of the American mind, what they mean for the Art of Association. Here in a second the American mind of what they mean for the Art of.
Speaker 3:Association here in a second. Hi, this is Joe Gerecht, the director of the Center for Civil Society. The Center for Civil Society, also known as C4CS, is proud to produce the Givers, Doers and Thinkers podcast. At C4CS, our mission is to strengthen civil society. We do this by conducting programs and activities that increase the knowledge and efficacy of America's nonprofit organizations, charitable foundations and individual donors. We offer classes, webinars, conferences and more to help your organization have a bigger impact. If you'd like to learn more about the Center for Civil Society and our programs, please visit us online at centerforcivilsocietyorg. Thank you for listening to the GDT podcast.
Speaker 1:All right, we are back with Dr Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at New York University, author of the Righteous Mind, also co-author of the Coddling of the American Mind. There's a I want to talk about one. There's a lot to talk about and we've been going all over the place, which is great. One part of the calling of the American mind that I want to make sure that we do talk about, because it's um very germane to um our concerns about civil society and mediating institutions and that sort of thing, and it's um about play. It's very surprising. It's one of the um. I guess when you hear it it's not surprising, but I was surprised to read it on how um surprised to read it on how the death of unsupervised play, unscheduled play, is very corrosive and it turns out in the art of democracy the habits of democracy that we need to cultivate in order to have a democracy. Can you?
Speaker 2:explain that. Yes, so this was the most fun chapter to write all the research on the effects of play. And so the thing to realize is that we're mammals and all mammals play. So if you look at, you know baby mice, baby dogs, baby whales. If you're a mammal, you have this big brain, comparatively, and you have an extended childhood in which your mother or parents invest a lot in you in order to grow your brain. But if you just stay with your parents, you don't get to grow your brain. That's where you're safe. So mammals are programmed to you know you find your safe to grow your brain. That's where you're safe. So mammals are programmed to you know you find your safe base, your parent, your attachment figure, and then that gives you the confidence to go out into the world, at first just a little bit at a time, and then you get more confidence to go out further and further. And this is the way mammals always have been, and this is the way Homo sapien mammals were up until about 1990. And so I was born in 1963. And so my entire life.
Speaker 2:There was a giant crime wave. It began in the late 60s and it just vanished mysteriously during the 90s. So even Gen X. I'm at the end of the baby boomers. But baby boomers and Gen X and the early millennials we all went out to play between ages of six and eight is when we were let out. I've done this poll all over the country. It was, you know, first it's first, second or third grade. That's when kids got to play without supervision. And when you're playing without supervision you have to make the rules consensually. You have to learn to enforce the rules. You have to learn that. You know what. Sometimes there are reasons to have exceptions to the rules. You know, this kid has a broken leg so we'll give him an extra five seconds or whatever it is. So you learn. Kids learn so much by having to work out problems and conflicts themselves. And we did that all during the crime wave.
Speaker 2:And then suddenly in the 1990s we began to freak out about child abduction. Now there are almost no child abductions in this country other than by the non-custodial parent in a divorce case. It's 100 times a year. A stranger kidnaps a kid. It's almost unheard of, but because of cable TV we suddenly all heard about it all the time. So we freak out that we think if your kid is outside unsupervised they'll be snatched. So we lock them up, we don't let them out, and so, anyway, I could go on and on about this.
Speaker 2:But the point is, the point is that free play is as essential, it's much more essential than vitamin C. I mean, well, okay, you need vitamin C, it's as essential as vitamin C. And it would be as if, in the early 90s, we just decided no more vitamin C because there were three cases of kids who overdosed on vitamin C. So no more vitamin C. And I think that's what the CDC would say if they were in charge of things back then. But anyway, just referring to the fact that they just suspended the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because there were six cases of blood clots, yeah, out of millions and millions of doses given, there were six cases in which there were blood clots and two of them were somewhat serious. Anyway, don't get me started on that. But actually you know what? Again, it is this safety as a mindset. It's this mindset let's always go for the worst.
Speaker 1:That would be. The next word I introduced into our discussion is safetyism. This is sort of a brutalist ideology that cuts across even partisan lines in many ways, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:So safetyism is the irrational worship of safety. Of course we want our kids to be safe and I'm glad that consumer products are safer for kids. But as the world's gotten physically safer and safer and safer and safer from crime, we've lowered the bar and we freak out about any conceivable risk to our kids, not realizing that by overprotecting them, by denying them free play, by protecting them from stress, by protecting them from insults, by protecting them from unpleasant situations, it's as if we are preventing them from walking. You know, if we said, oh, walking is too dangerous because you might fall, well, that would be really stupid and in a sense we're saying free play is too dangerous because you might get hurt.
Speaker 1:So anyway, is our conception of health just too narrow. It's only biological health. You've already brought up all these real mental health epidemics and crises that don't seem to me get all that much attention.
Speaker 2:I would say that our conception is not at all just physical. It's become very much about emotional, mental health, which in general I'm in favor of, but only if it's done right. And what we've done is we have embraced some kind of wacky California. You know psychological, progressive ideas about stress and self-esteem. You know that was a terrible mistake to embrace self-esteem in the 1980s. Yeah, you know, healthy people have higher self-esteem, but it's because they did things to earn it. If you just tell kids you're great and they don't learn how, to earn it.
Speaker 2:You're setting them all self up for disappointment and failure. So, anyway, and then we did the same thing with stress. Yes, stress is bad, but only chronic stress. Chronic stress, you know, if you keep your stress systems turned on every day, you know, for months, yeah, you're going to get stress-related disorders and your brain is going to change and see the world as more threatening. And you might be right that it's more threatening. So chronic stress is bad. But we overcorrected and we got the stupid idea that stress is bad. No, stress is essential.
Speaker 2:Kids have to experience stress. And then they learn that situations, uh, they can face situations, and then they're not. They're not stressed about them, Uh. And so we, we see the things like it's freaky. You know, kids come to college now and they'll freak out if they if you know, if there's a cockroach in their room or if there's a mouse or something you know, they'll call the police because they've been protected from things, They've never had to deal with things.
Speaker 2:So I don't want to be critical of Gen Z, because it's not at all their fault.
Speaker 2:They are the generation that had the bad luck to be born, just as their parents and everyone else in America and Canada and the UK to some extent, were freaking out about smaller and smaller and non-existent fears, and then they got anti-bullying policies after Columbine.
Speaker 2:So that was 1999. By 2001, most states have mandated anti-bullying, and while I can't prove that this is causal and of course bullying that goes on for more than a day is terrible and should be stopped but what happened once again was conflict is often seen as bullying. The bar for what counts as bullying has come down so low that kids don't get practice and conflict resolution. So the subtitle of our book is how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. And that's exactly what we've done over and over trying to help kids without a proper understanding that they're anti-fragile, they need challenge, they need free play, they need to sometimes be afraid of something and overcome it. Not realizing all of these things. We've protected them and protected them and protected them, and now they're more anxious than ever and more fragile.
Speaker 1:What has the role of? You mentioned social media earlier. One of my questions I was going to ask you is on a one to 10 scale, how much of a disaster has social media been for humanity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's two different major harms. So just to be clear, the internet is absolutely fantastic. It does some bad things, but the cost benefit ratio for the internet is wildly positive. Now let's zoom in on social media, that is, platforms on which users create content and others, including strangers, rate and evaluate that content. Are we better off because we have that? Well, you know, maybe there are some things that are good about it, but there are clearly some things that are terrible about it, especially for teenagers and especially for teenage girls. And so on the democracy front, social media has made it really easy to tear things down.
Speaker 2:We thought in the beginning of the Arab Spring back in 2009, many people thought that social media was going to be a great boon for democracy. It's going to depose tyrants. But it turns out social media is really good at tearing things down, but it never. It builds up. So we have more and more instability, more and more distrust of everything and everyone, almost all institutions, and so social media, I believe, has been terrible for democracy and terrible for the United States. All kinds of conspiracy theories, all kinds of polarization, hatred. So that's one battle I'm fighting is to find ways to reform social media, since it's not such an outrage platform, but the other domain in which it's harmful is mental health, and we have a sudden, very steep, almost like a hockey stick shaped graph of depression, anxiety and self-harm for girls girls even more than boys. It begins in 2020. Uh, plus or minus a year, depending on whether you're where you are in the us, or canada or the uk.
Speaker 2:Um, so it just comes out of nowhere, starts shooting up, and that's what greg began to see in 2013-14 and, not coincidentally, even though social media comes out in the early 2000s, it only gets really engaging between 2009, 2011. Because that's when Facebook introduces the like button, twitter copies it. Twitter introduces the retweet button, facebook copies it and suddenly there's a lot more feedback and we turn an entire generation of kids. They flood onto social media around 2010, 2011. They're all on it every day, daily, by 2011,. They weren't on it daily 2008. So kids are flooding onto it and it's a system in which other kids are doling out reinforcements and punishments, just like bf skinner training pigeons. And what is he training and what is he training? What are people training each other to do? Um, well, um, especially instagram. Um, you know instagram, which is visual. Instagram has a. You know twitter is, which is visual. Instagram has a. You know Twitter is a dumpster fire. Twitter is full of nasty stuff. Instagram is not.
Speaker 2:But it turns out that even the nice stuff is really bad for young girls because all these other girls are showing off their perfect lives and if I mean, they're just stunning demonstrations of the beauty filters so girls now are. They show themselves as being much more beautiful than they are in real life, which you know. Girls already had huge problems with eating disorders, social comparison, objectification. Social media multiplies all of that by 10. So it's not a coincidence that the girls' rate goes up much higher than the boys'. It's not a coincidence that the steepest percentage increase are the 10 to 14 old girls, the preteens who should not even be on social media.
Speaker 2:But they just lie about their age. There's no stop, there's no check, there's no obstacle. They just lie about their age. They're on Instagram by sixth grade, at least in New York City, by kids school. So anyway, I could talk forever about this. But social media, social media, it wasn't bad until 2009. And by 2012, it has changed the fabric of social space-time. So everything is going haywire Our politics, politics and democracies around the world, misinformation, teen mental health, craziness at universities. We now live in a topsy-turvy world that is rapidly changing, in which truth is hard to find and in which there is no more authority, no more trust. Now ask me what I think about social media.
Speaker 1:I think that gets to some of the major points. Yeah, just somewhat disastrous for both our civic health and mental health, especially in certain demographics. But you mentioned let's just go on to this at this point um, is there anything that can be done about it? You said you were.
Speaker 2:You mentioned just in passing that there was something you were trying to, uh, to do with respect to it I spent my career at the university of virginia in the psychology department and in 2011, I moved to nyu stern to a business school. Um, just sort of a fluke that I that I came here and they liked me. I like them. Once I got here, I I decided to write a mission statement, because, you know, in business you have a mission statement and all that. So my mission statement, um, is to use, uh, my research and that of others in moral and social psychology to help important institutions work better. So I wrote that in 2012, which is actually just before everything got weird, but I think it really has stood the test of time as to what I can focus on and what America can focus on, because we have to look institution by institution and strengthen them. And then we have to look at the causes, especially of what is devastating Gen Z. So let's start with the Gen Z thing. So, if there are two major causes, there's the vast overprotection and there's the too early exposure to social media. Well, for the overprotection, I co-founded an organization with Lenore Skenazy, the wonderful woman who wrote the book Free Range Kids, wonderful woman who wrote the book Free Range Kids, and so if listeners go to letgroworg, they'll find all kinds of great ideas, especially if your kids are under 12, elementary and middle school. All kinds of great ideas for how to help your kids become healthy mammals who have learned how to deal with things and do things themselves, and your own life will be happier and there'll be less conflict and your kids will actually be successful as adults rather than miserable failures. So I would urge people to go to letgroworg and, on the social media thing, there are a variety of organizations that are working on this. If listeners go to thecoddlingcom the website for my book with Greg and then they click on solutions better social media We've got a lot more information there they can they can learn about and it'll help them set policy in their own homes if they have teams.
Speaker 2:And then we have to work on institution by institution. So that means we have to look at K-12 schools. We have to look at universities. So I co-founded Heterodox Academy in 2015,. Not because of the students, it was originally just because I noticed that the social sciences I'm a social psychologist and in all the social sciences they lean very far left. Now, leaning is okay as long as there are people on the other side to push back, but in many fields there's nobody on the other side to push back. But in many fields there's nobody, and so all of these are, I think you say in your book.
Speaker 1:the average ratio is like three or four to one or two or three to one. Three or four to one is fine.
Speaker 2:We'd be fine if we had three or four to one left or right, but in my field it's over 20 to one and in fact I know the one guy. There's only one. No, I'm joking. There's several, but there's only one who's out. There's only one who's publicly known to be conservative.
Speaker 1:I knew him when I was in graduate school too. Yeah right.
Speaker 2:That guy, yeah. And so we advocate for increasing viewpoint diversity, not as an end in itself, not because we love conservatives I'm a centrist Democrat myself but because we need viewpoint diversity. We need people to challenge viewpoint diversity. We need people to challenge. Otherwise we get ridiculous, poorly thought out, dogmatic, politicized thinking about the most important social problems like race and gender and immigration and child rearing and everything else. I know many philanthropists give to their alma mater. Many philanthropists probably the majority seem to be interested in education. If you're interested in supporting improvements to education, the educational climate, I urge you to check out heterodoxacademyorg.
Speaker 1:Consider supporting our work, learn more about it, yeah it's a fantastic organization, and then we just add on.
Speaker 2:So, within Heterodox Academy, something that we created was called Open Mind. It's a program to actually expose people to the best thinking left, right and libertarian and teach them how to deal with it. Teach them why we draw a lot on John Stuart Mill. He said, well, you're better off engaging with people who think differently than you than people who think just like you. And so we ended up spinning it out.
Speaker 2:It's its own 501c3, because it turns out, even though we created for college students, it turns out the need for in the corporate world is exploding because gen z, gen z you know kids born in 1996 and later they graduated from college. In 2018, they began to graduate and enter the work world, and so, just after our book was published in 2018, suddenly we're hearing all these reports from corporate, from the corporate world, about students who, you know, they get a bad performance review and they freak out and their mother calls them. So all kinds of weird things are happening in not in all industries, but in industries that hire from the most progressive elite, liberal arts schools and top universities. Those industries the creative industries, tech and many nonprofits are really suffering from a huge rise of internal conflict as they try to figure out how to incorporate Gen Z. So openmindplatformorg is another organization that I co-founded to try to strengthen institutions.
Speaker 1:What is your thought about the future here, besides the kind of work you're doing front lines, these organizations, all of which are clearly doing wonderful work is a way to kind of overcome these really bad, health-inducing trends lie in that kind of work, or is there any kind of course? Do you see any sort of internal, intrinsic sort of course corrector that will kick in at some point? You know, you feel like it's so unhealthy, so mentally, you know, distraught, so much disorder, before people sort of light bulbs go on in a kind of a mass way.
Speaker 2:So I used to. I used to sort of lean pessimistic, but with with some real hope and some clear visions of how things could turn around. Now that I see just how much social media has destroyed any possibility of shared truth, of shared facts, of consensus, now I'm more pessimistic. So I think that if we look in on America in 30 or 40 years, things will probably be better. Things will probably be much better, just because things generally do get better over time. I agree with Steve Pinker and various others who pointed out that every age people think things are going to hell. But yet you know, century after century, life gets better and better. But I think for the next five or 10 years, I suspect, things are going to get worse, worse for mental health, worse for increasing conflict in our schools and institutions, corporations, and worse in our politics. So I don't see anything turning around very soon. But when it does turn around, I think what will need to happen is that the new dynamics that social media has really given a huge megaphone to the far right and the far left, to extremists, people who are angry, people who are posturing and virtue signaling and great research by More in Common, if listeners Google the Hidden Tribes Report, a brilliant report going into exactly what are the different subgroups, politically and psychologically, of Americans, and so the extremes are only about 12%, 13% of the country, and the rest of us are what they call, or almost the rest of us are what they call, the exhausted majority. And so and that includes, so that includes, you know, what I'm hoping is that basically center left and center right and a large number of people who aren't really affiliated can really come together and stand up to their extremes.
Speaker 2:Now we're not seeing that. On the right, I mean, we are seeing a few people have stood up to the kind of the Trumpist, you know, conspiracy theory stuff. There are a few in the Senate House who've done that, but not very many. And on the left, we're seeing it. We're seeing a few professors standing up to the sort of the woke mania, the critical race theory stuff, but it's very few. And because people are afraid, I mean your reputation can be destroyed, and it's not just your reputation. Things are so nasty now. Person left stands up to the far left like you're actually putting your family at a little bit of risk, like people, you know people will send threatening letters and death threats. Um, I don't know if anyone's been murdered yet because of this, but it's very scary to have people threatening the life of your children so, and that happens, so I don't know what. You know how we get past this.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking a lot about victor navalny these days, the russian dissident who has just risked his life over and over again, and I'm trying to use him for inspiration to be a little bolder myself. But it's good, I think, if the center left and center right and I think here philanthropy could really do a lot, and we're seeing some of this. We are actually seeing some really nice collaborations, you know, like the Koch Foundation and Soros. Thankfully. Yes, koch and Soros, thank you. Yes, koch and Soros teamed up a lot, and we are seeing. When I've been to events for democracy, I'm very involved with various efforts to improve American democracy and we often do see center-right and center-left coming. You don't see, I don't know any far-right foundations, but the far-left ones tend not to show up. But I do think that philanthropy can play a big role in building bridges, and they are. There actually is a lot of support for bridge-building organizations such as Open Mind.
Speaker 1:Dr Haidt, thank you for being with us today. Where can people find you online? Are you in the dumpster fire known as Twitter, or do you stay away from that dumpster fire?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I'm in it and stay away from that. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm in it and I, you know I've kind of enjoy and hate it at the same time. And you know, if you're a journalist or a social scientist, you kind of need to be. But my homepage is jonathanheitcom and that links to all the other pages and again, the it's heterodoxacademyorg and openmindplatformorg are my philanthropic projects that are trying to address these problems. So thank you very much, jeremy, for giving me this chance to talk to your listeners and to talk with you. As you can see, I kind of enjoyed talking about you.
Speaker 1:I was very much the pleasure. It was ours. Thank you so much. It was an honor to talk to you and good luck with your work. Thank you for joining us for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, we invite you to subscribe and or rate and review this discussion on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to our podcasts and have a guest you'd like to hear from. Send your requests to our producer, katie Janus, at kjanusatamphilcom. That's K-J-A-N-U-S at amphilcom.