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

by Jonathan Haidt

A great deal of research shows that having an internal locus of control leads to greater health, happiness, effort expended, success in school, and success at work.26 An internal locus of control has even been found to make many kinds of adversity less painful.

Something began changing on many campuses around 2013,33 and the idea that college students should not be exposed to “offensive” ideas is now a majority position on campus. In 2017, 58% of college students said it is “important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.”34 This statement was endorsed by 63% of very liberal students, but it’s a view that is not confined to the left; almost half of very conservative students (45%) endorsed that statement, too.

Socrates, who described himself as the “gadfly” of the Athenian people. He thought it was his job to sting, to disturb, to question, and thereby to provoke his fellow Athenians to think through their current beliefs, and change the ones they could not defend.

Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”

There is a principle in philosophy and rhetoric called the principle of charity, which says that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.

Erika Christakis, a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and associate master of Silliman College (one of Yale’s residential colleges), wrote an email questioning whether it was appropriate for Yale administrators to give guidance to students about appropriate and inappropriate Halloween costumes, as the college dean’s office had done.14 Christakis praised their “spirit of avoiding hurt and offense,” but she worried that “the growing tendency to cultivate vulnerability in students carries unacknowledged costs.”15 She expressed concern about the institutional “exercise of implied control over college students,” and invited the community to reflect on whether, as adults, they could set norms for themselves and handle disagreements interpersonally. “Talk to each other,” she wrote. “Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.” The email sparked an angry response from some students, who interpreted it as an indication that Christakis was in favor of racist costumes.16 A few days later, a group of roughly 150 students appeared in the courtyard outside Christakis’s home (within Silliman College), writing statements in chalk, including “We know where you live.” Erika’s husband, Nicholas Christakis, was the master of Silliman (a title that has since been changed to “head of college”). When he came out to the courtyard, students demanded that he apologize for—and renounce—his wife’s email.17 Nicholas listened, engaged in dialogue ...

Erika later revealed that many professors were very supportive privately, but were unwilling to defend or support the Christakises publicly because they thought it was “too risky” and they feared retribution.

It’s as though some of the students had their own mental prototype, a schema with two boxes to fill: victim and oppressor. Everyone is placed into one box or the other.

Tajfel found that no matter how trivial or “minimal” he made the distinctions between the groups, people tended to distribute whatever was offered in favor of their in-group members.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of people who were watching videos of other people’s hands getting pricked by a needle or touched by a Q-tip. When the hand being pricked by a needle was labeled with the participant’s own religion, the area of the participant’s brain that handles pain showed a larger spike of activity than when the hand was labeled with a different religion.

When arbitrary groups were created (such as by flipping a coin) immediately before the subject entered the MRI machine, and the hand being pricked was labeled as belonging to the same arbitrary group as the participant, even though the group hadn’t even existed just moments earlier, the participant’s brain still showed a larger spike.28 We just don’t feel as much empathy for those we see as “other.”

The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of gr...

Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict.29 When the “tribe switch”30 is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves.

In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative.

Conditions of peace and prosperity, in contrast, generally turn down the tribalism.32 People don’t need to track group membership as vigilantly; they don’t feel pressured to conform to group expectations as closely. When a community succeeds in turning down everyone’s tribal circuits, there is more room for individuals to construct lives of their own choosing; there is more freedom for a creative mixing of people and ideas.

What happens when you train students to see others—and themselves—as members of distinct groups defined by race, gender, and other socially significant factors, and you tell them that those groups are eternally engaged in a zero-sum conflict over status and resources?

Identity can be mobilized in ways that emphasize an overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group, or it can be mobilized in ways that amplify our ancient tribalism and bind people together in shared hatred of a group that serves as the unifying common enemy.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., epitomized what we’ll call common-humanity identity politics.

This is the way to win hearts, minds, and votes: you must appeal to the elephant (intuitive and emotional processes) as well as the rider (reasoning).45 King and Murray understood this. Instead of shaming or demonizing their opponents, they humanized them and then relentlessly appealed to their humanity.

Because we are trying to understand what is happening on campus, in what follows in this chapter, we’ll be focusing on the identity politics of the campus left.

Provocations from the right mostly come from off campus (where the right is just as committed to identity politics as is the left).

Writing during the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx focused on conflict between economic classes, such as the proletariat (the working class) and the capitalists (those who own the means of production). But a Marxist approach can be used to interpret any struggle between groups.

The approach known as intersectionality was advanced by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies).57 In a 1989 essay, Crenshaw noted that a black woman’s experience in America is not captured by the summation of the black experience and the female experience.58 She made her point vividly by analyzing a legal case in which black women were victims of discrimination at General Motors even when the company could show that it hired plenty of black people (in factory jobs dominated by men) and plenty of women (in clerical jobs dominated by white people).59 So even though GM was found not to have discriminated against black people or women, it ended up hiring hardly any black women. Crenshaw’s important insight was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.”

By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, identify more distinct identity groups, and see more differences between people.67 They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent.

One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.

This is one reason social media has been so transformative: there is always an audience eager to watch people being shamed, particularly when it is so easy for spectators to join in and pile on.

Life in a call-out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship. Many in the audience may feel sympathy for the person being shamed but are afraid to speak up, yielding the false impression that the audience is unanimous in its condemnation.

Mobs can rob good people of their conscience, particularly when participants wear masks (in a real mob) or are hiding behind an alias or avatar (in an online mob). Anonymity fosters deindividuation—the loss of an individual sense of self—which lessens self-restraint and increases one’s willingness to go along with the mob.

Since then, many students on the left have become increasingly receptive to the idea that violence is sometimes justified as a response to speech they believe is “hateful.” At the same time, many students on the right have become increasingly eager to invite speakers that are likely to provoke a reaction from the left.

The other essays are similar in appearing to employ multiple cognitive distortions to justify physical violence as a reasonable way to prevent a speech. Some of the essays offer Orwellian inversions of common English words. For example, from another essay: “Asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”

now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents’ words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence. The rationale, as an essay in the Berkeley op-ed series argued, is that physically violent actions, if used to shut down speech that is deemed hateful, are “not acts of violence” but, rather, “acts of self defense.”

30% of undergraduate students surveyed agreed with this statement: “If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views.”

The Columbia University linguist John McWhorter describes how the term “white supremacist” is now used in an “utterly athletic, recreational” way, as a “battering ram” to attack anyone who departs from the party line.

But for some students, allowing Mac Donald to present her thesis would be allowing “violence” on campus, so she had to be stopped. These students mobilized with a call on Facebook to “show up wearing black” and “bring your comrades, because we’re shutting this down.”57 Protesting students prevented anyone from entering the building to hear the talk, which Mac Donald gave via livestream as protesters pounded on the clear glass wall of the nearly empty ground-level lecture hall. Mac Donald was later evacuated from the building through a kitchen door and into a waiting police car.

this kind of identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning.

The ACLU defends rights, not ideologies.

We teach people not what to think, but how to think.

In the months afterward, there was a big increase in efforts by off-campus white supremacist organizations to provoke students and recruit members by putting up racist posters, flyers, and stickers on hundreds of campuses.84 We understand why so many students embraced more active and confrontational forms of protest. But because their activism is often based on an embrace of the Great Untruths and a tendency to attack potential allies, and because aggressive protests are often exactly what right-wing provocateurs are hoping to provoke, we believe that many student activists are harming themselves as well as their causes.

The most common justification is that hate speech is violence, and some students believe it is therefore legitimate to use violence to shut down hate speech.

Barrett offered this syllogism: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of 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.

As Marcus Aurelius advised, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”

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

Historical and sociological analyses of witch trials have generally explained these outbreaks as responses to a group experiencing either a sense of threat from outside, or division and loss of cohesion within.

Durkheim saw groups and communities as being in some ways like organisms—social entities that have a chronic need to enhance their internal cohesion and their shared sense of moral order. Durkheim described human beings as “homo duplex,” or “two-level man.”6 We are very good at being individuals pursuing our everyday goals (which Durkheim called the level of the “profane,” or ordinary). But we also have the capacity to transition, temporarily, to a higher collective plane, which Durkheim called the level of the “sacred.” He said that we have access to a set of emotions that we experience only when we are part of a collective—feelings like “collective effervescence,” which Durkheim described as social “electricity” generated when a group gathers and achieves a state of union.

They arise quickly: “Witch-hunts seem to appear in dramatic outbursts; they are not a regular feature of social life.

Crimes against the collective: “The various charges that appear during one of these witch-hunts involve accusations of crimes committed against the nation as a corporate whole.

Charges are often trivial or fabricated: “These crimes and deviations seem to involve the most petty and insignificant behavioral acts which are somehow understood as crimes against the nation as a whole.

Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything.

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.