The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

by Jonathan Haidt

some portion of what is commonly called political correctness is just being thoughtful or polite—using words in a way that is considerate to others.86 But students make a serious mistake when they interpret words—even words spoken with hatred—as violence.

Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond. If you interpret a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos as a violent attack on your fellow students, then you have a moral obligation to do something about it, perhaps even something violent. That is precisely how trolls manipulate their victims.

But if you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you.

There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus—not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech—“you are an n-word,” or whatever—I am perfectly fine with that. But there’s another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that “I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else, including the [university] administration.”

I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.

there are three features common to most political witch hunts: they arise very quickly, they involve charges of crimes against the collective, and the offenses that lead to charges are often trivial or fabricated.

Research shows that synchronous movements like singing and swaying make groups more cooperative and make people who participate physically stronger in challenges they undertake right afterward.

This is why viewpoint diversity is so essential in any group of scholars. Each professor is—like all human beings—a flawed thinker with a strong preference for believing that his or her own ideas are right. Each scholar suffers from the confirmation bias—the tendency to search vigorously for evidence that confirms what one already believes.36 One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases. Even if professors often cannot see the flaws in their own arguments, other professors and students do them the favor of finding such flaws.

It is the risk that some academic communities—particularly those in the most progressive parts of the country—may attain such high levels of political homogeneity and solidarity that they undergo a phase change, taking on properties of a collective entity that are antithetical to the normal aims of a university. A collective entity mobilized for action is more likely to enforce political orthodoxy and less likely to tolerate challenges to its key ideological beliefs. Politically homogeneous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts, particularly when they feel threatened from outside.

From the 1940s to around 1980, American politics was about as centrist and bipartisan as it has ever been. One reason is that, during and prior to this period, the country faced a series of common challenges and enemies, including the Great Depression, the Axis Powers during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War. Given the psychology of tribalism that we described in chapter 3, the loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict.

Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

Our basic message in this book is that this way of thinking may be wrong; college students are antifragile, not fragile. Some well-intended protections may backfire and make things worse in the long run for the very students we are trying to help.

But Facebook and other social media platforms didn’t really draw many middle school students until after the iPhone was introduced (in 2007) and was widely adopted over the next few years. It’s best, then, to think about the entire period from 2007 to roughly 2012 as a brief span in which the social life of the average American teen changed substantially. Social media platforms proliferated, and adolescents began using Twitter (founded in 2006), Tumblr (2007), Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), and a variety of others.

Earlier in the interview, he said, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” In short, iGen is the first generation that spent (and is now spending) its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media. What could go wrong?

Of special importance, the combination of helicopter parenting, fears for children’s safety, and the allure of screens means that members of iGen spend much less time than previous generations did going out with friends while unsupervised by an adult.

when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation. As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”

Applying labels to people can create what is called a looping effect: it can change the behavior of the person being labeled and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.14 This is part of why labeling is such a powerful cognitive distortion. If depression becomes part of your identity, then over time you’ll develop corresponding schemas about yourself and your prospects (I’m no good and my future is hopeless).

What is driving this surge in mental illness and suicide? Twenge believes that the rapid spread of smartphones and social media into the lives of teenagers, beginning around 2007, is the main cause of the mental health crisis that began around 2011. In her book, she presents graphs showing that digital media use and mental health problems are correlated: they rose together in recent years.

there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV.

On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.

time spent using electronic devices was not generally harmful for highly sociable kids—the ones who spent more time than the average kid in face-to-face social interactions.26 In other words, the potentially negative impact of screens and social media might depend on the amount of time teens spend with other people.

There are at least two possible reasons. The first is that social media presents “curated” versions of lives, and girls may be more adversely affected than boys by the gap between appearance and reality.

Another consequence of social media curation is that girls are bombarded with images of girls and women whose beauty is artificially enhanced, making girls ever more insecure about their own appearance. It’s not just fashion models whose images are altered nowadays; platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram provide “filters” that girls use to enhance the selfies they pose for and edit, so even their friends now seem to be more beautiful.

The second reason that social media may be harder on girls is that girls and boys are aggressive in different ways. Research by psychologist Nicki Crick shows that boys are more physically aggressive—more likely to shove and hit one another, and they show a greater interest in stories and movies about physical aggression. Girls, in contrast, are more “relationally” aggressive; they try to hurt their rivals’ relationships, reputations, and social status—for example, by using social media to make sure other girls know who is intentionally being left out.

One large survey of university counseling centers found that only 37% of students who came through their doors in 2009 and prior years had complained about problems with anxiety—roughly on a par with the two other leading concerns, depression and relationships.37 But beginning in 2010, the percentage of students with anxiety complaints began to increase. It reached 46% in 2013 and continued climbing to 51% in 2016.

Safetyism also inflicts collateral damage on the university’s culture of free inquiry, because it teaches students to see words as violence and to interpret ideas and speakers as safe versus dangerous, rather than merely as true versus false. That way of thinking about words is likely to promote the intensification of a call-out culture, which, of course, gives students one more reason to be anxious.

Depression distorts cognition, too, and gives people much more negative views than are warranted about themselves, other people, the world, and the future.41 Problems loom larger and seem more pervasive. One’s resources for dealing with those problems seem smaller, and one’s perceived locus of control becomes more external,42 all of which discourages efforts to act vigorously to solve problems. Repeated failures to escape from what is perceived to be a bad situation can create a mental state that psychologist Martin Seligman called “learned helplessness,” in which a person believes that escape is impossible and therefore stops trying, even in new situations where effort would be rewarded.

Furthermore, when people are depressed, or when their anxiety sets their threat-response system on high alert, they can succumb to a “hostile attribution bias,” which means that they are more likely to see hostility in benign or even benevolent people, communications, and situations.44 Misunderstandings are more likely, and more likely to escalate into large-scale conflicts.

the fear of crime did not diminish along with the crime rate, and the new habits of fearful parenting seem to have become new national norms. American parenting is now wildly out of sync with the actual risk that strangers pose to children.

efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience—such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors—are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment.

by placing a protective shield over our children, we inadvertently stunt their growth and deprive them of the experiences they need to become successful and functional adults.

Paranoid parenting is a powerful way to teach kids all three of the Great Untruths. We convince children that the world is full of danger; evil lurks in the shadows, on the streets, and in public parks and restrooms. Kids raised in this way are emotionally prepared to embrace the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people—a worldview that makes them fear and suspect strangers.

Play is essential for wiring a mammal’s brain to create a functioning adult. Mammals that are deprived of play won’t develop to their full capacity.

Vigorous physical free play—outdoors, and with other kids—is a crucial kind of play, one that our evolved minds are “expecting.” It also happens to be the kind of play that kids generally say they like the most.

Compared with previous generations, members of iGen have therefore had much less of the kind of unsupervised free play that Gray says is most valuable. They have been systematically deprived of opportunities to “dose themselves” with risk. Instead of enjoying a healthy amount of risk, this generation is more likely than earlier ones to avoid it.

Denying children the freedom to explore on their own takes away important learning opportunities that help them to develop not just independence and responsibility, but a whole variety of social skills that are central to living with others in a free society. If this argument is correct, parenting strategies and laws that make it harder for kids to play on their own pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from “figure out how to solve this conflict on your own” to “invoke force and/or third parties whenever conflict arises.”

A society that weakens children’s ability to learn these skills denies them what they need to smooth social interaction. The coarsening of social interaction that will result will create a world of more conflict and violence, and one in which people’s first instinct will be increasingly to invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems they ought to be able to solve themselves.

This is what Greg began to see around 2013: increasing calls from students for administrators and professors to regulate who can say what, who gets to speak on campus, and how students should interact with one another, even in private settings. The calls for more regulation and the bureaucratic impulse to provide that regulation are the subject of our next chapter.

he saw administrators acting in ways that encouraged students to embrace a distorted sense that they lacked resilience—acting as if students could not handle uncomfortable conversations with, or relatively small slights from, their fellow students.

Some administrative growth is necessary and sensible, but when the rate of that expansion is several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring,15 there are significant downsides, most obviously the increase in the cost of a college degree.16 A less immediately obvious downside is that goals other than academic excellence begin to take priority as universities come to resemble large corporations—a trend often bemoaned as “corporatization.”

efforts to protect students by creating bureaucratic means of resolving problems and conflicts can have the unintended consequence of fostering moral dependence, which may reduce students’ ability to resolve conflicts independently both during and after college.

there is a window of higher impressionability running from about age fourteen to twenty-four, with its peak right around age eighteen. Political events—or perhaps the overall zeitgeist as people perceive it—are more likely to “stick” during that period than outside that age range.

do an internet search for “Chuck Braverman 1968.” The five-minute video montage5 will leave you speechless.

They do this more in work relationships and less in intimate relationships, but even in marriages, people are not oblivious to these ratios, and because of the power of self-serving biases, they often have a sense that they are doing more than their “fair share” of some or all tasks.

If you want to motivate people to support a new policy or join a movement in the name of justice, you need to activate in them a clear perception, or intuition, that someone didn’t get what he or she deserved (distributive injustice) or that someone was a victim of an unfair process (procedural injustice).

Some schools invite men to practice with the women and then count the men on the women’s team roster. The exposé gives the impression that U.S. universities are sneaky and dishonest institutions, but this is the predictable response of a bureaucracy, as we described in the previous chapter. When the federal government pressures universities to achieve equal outcomes in the face of unequal inputs, administrators do what they can to protect the institution. That might require them to violate procedural justice, distributive justice, and honesty along the way.

This time-intensive, labor-intensive strategy involves overprotecting, overscheduling, and overparenting children in hopes of giving them an edge in a competitive society that has forgotten the importance of play and the value of unsupervised experience.

Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.

Assume that your kids are more capable this month than they were last month. Each month, ask them what tasks or challenges they think they can do on their own—such as walking to a store a few blocks away, making their own breakfast, or starting a dog-walking business. Resist the urge to jump in and help them when they’re struggling to do things and seem to be doing them the wrong way. Trial and error is a slower but usually better teacher than direct instruction.

Let your kids take more small risks, and let them learn from getting some bumps and bruises. Children need opportunities to “dose themselves”