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

by Jonathan Haidt

Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously. He notes that muscles, bones, and children are antifragile:

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”5

Emotional reasoning is the cognitive distortion that occurs whenever the rider interprets what is happening in ways that are consistent with the elephant’s reactive emotional state, without investigating what is true. The rider then acts like a lawyer or press secretary whose job is to rationalize and justify the elephant’s pre-ordained conclusions, rather than to inquire into—or even be curious about—what is really true.

He noticed that his patients tended to get themselves caught in a feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, which in turn seemed to drive patients’ reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative beliefs.

Schemas refer to the patterns of thoughts and behaviors, built up over time, that people use to process information quickly and effortlessly as they interact with the world. Schemas are deep down in the elephant; they are one of the ways in which the elephant guides the rider. Depressed people have schemas about themselves and their paths through life that are thoroughly disempowering.

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.

In short, as a result of our long evolution for tribal competition, the human mind readily does dichotomous, us-versus-them thinking. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity. Instead, some theoretical approaches used in universities today may be hyperactivating our ancient tribal tendencies, even if that was not the intention of the professor. Of course, some individuals truly are racist, sexist, or homophobic, and some institutions are, too, even when the people who run them mean well, if they end up being less welcoming to members of some groups.

They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent.

Eady identifies four features of the culture: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism.

The other essays are similar in appearing to employ multiple cognitive distortions to justify physical violence as a reasonable way to prevent a speech.

President Trump’s. The president had by that time demonstrated a willingness to condemn many people harshly and promptly, yet he was restrained and slow in his criticism of the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville. On the day of Heyer’s death, when most Americans were looking to the president to clearly and unambiguously condemn neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, he condemned hatred, bigotry, and violence “on many sides.” Two days later, he read aloud a written statement that offered condemnation, but the very next day, in unscripted remarks, he said that there were “very fine people on both sides.”67 With those three words—“very fine people”68—the president showed that he was sympathetic to the men who staged the most highly publicized march for racism and antisemitism in the United States in many decades.

But William & Mary students chanted, among other things, “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution!” and “Liberalism is white supremacy!”76

As historical events, the two movements are radically different, most notably in that the Red Guards were supported by a totalitarian dictator who encouraged them to use violence, while American college students have been self-organized and almost entirely nonviolent.

are you sure?

He wrote, “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles” and “encouraging another group to go away.”60 In a shared space, “one’s right to speak—or to be,” he said, “must never be based on skin color.” He also feared that white students and faculty who did not support the structure of the Day of Absence and chose to come to campus that day would be viewed negatively; their very presence might be interpreted to mean they did not support the goals of the event.61

Sometimes the targets were on the right (such as Heather Mac Donald and Amy Wax), but more often the targets were themselves on the left (such as Nicholas and Erika Christakis, Rebecca Tuvel, Bret Weinstein, and the professors who taught the humanities course at Reed College).

A set of new ideas about speech, violence, and safety has emerged on the far left in recent years, and the debate on campus is largely a debate within the left, pitting (mostly) older progressives, who generally have an expansive notion of free speech, against (mostly) younger progressives, who are more likely to support some limitations on speech in the name of inclusion.

In a polarization spiral, however, for every action there is a disproportionate reaction.

calling someone racist or demanding that they be disinvited is in no way equivalent to making rape threats or death threats. That distinction is recognized in law; the First Amendment does not protect credible rape or death threats. Those are criminal.

Many free-speech advocates watched the unveiling of TPUSA’s watchlist with concern—after all, the keeping of lists of disfavored ideas and the people who hold them has a distinct and ugly history in the United States.46

Nevertheless, 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.

Safety rules and programs—like most efforts to change complex systems—often have unintended consequences. Sometimes these consequences are so bad that the intended beneficiaries are worse off than if nothing had been done at all.

They invest more time in these fewer, healthier children.30 In fact, even though mothers today have fewer children and spend far more time working outside the home than they did in 1965, they are spending more total time taking care of their children.31 Fathers’ time with kids has increased even more.

Engaging in any discussion of suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions with other students interferes with, or can hinder, their pursuit of education and community. It is important that you refrain from discussing these issues with other students and use the appropriate resources listed below. If you involve other students in suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions, you will face disciplinary action. My

direct violation of first amendment rights!

Few schools imposed any kind of penalty on students for shouting down speakers or disrupting classes, even though these actions usually violated their own codes of conduct.

Under these statutes, the bar for what counts as harassment is high: a pattern of severe behavior that “effectively denies access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”48 The pattern of behavior must also be discriminatory—that is, directed at someone who belongs to a protected class named in the statute, such as gender, race, or religion.49 In practice, however, the bar has been lowered; many universities use the concept of harassment to justify punishing one-time utterances that could be construed as offensive but don’t really look anything like harassment—and some don’t have anything to do with race or gender.

They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes: First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight”; second, they “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties”; and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”65

It is useful to have specialists within the domain of justice research who focus on this subset of injustices. Furthermore, when such injustices are pointed out, members of the majority group are often motivated to ignore or deny them.22 It is among the most important requirements of a democratic society that it provide a way for people and groups to make new claims about justice. An open democratic society considers such claims, debates them, and then acts on claims that combine compelling arguments with effective political pressure. If the outcome is new laws that are supported by widely shared new norms, as happened in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, that’s pretty much the definition of moral and social progress in a democracy.

Harvard legal scholar Lani Guinier explored cases like this in her 1994 book, The Tyranny of the Majority.23 She pointed out that seemingly fair processes can sometimes lead to a group that is in the minority getting entirely shut out at the end of the process.

Nowadays, when someone points to an outcome gap and makes the claim (implicitly or explicitly) that the gap itself is evidence of systemic injustice, social scientists often just nod along with everyone else in the room.

If professors and students are hesitant to raise alternative explanations for outcome gaps, then theories about those gaps may harden into orthodoxy. Ideas may be accepted not because they are true but because the politically dominant group wants them to be true in order to promote its preferred narrative and preferred set of remedies.43

That is the epitome of safetyism: If we can prevent one child from getting hurt, we should deprive all children of slightly risky play.

Of course, if a student or faculty member’s speech or behavior, whether online, in class, or in other campus settings, includes true threats, harassment, incitement to imminent lawless action, or any other kind of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment, the university should act.

Do not allow the “heckler’s veto.” University presidents must make it clear that nobody has the right to prevent a fellow member of the community from attending or hearing a lecture. Protest that does not interfere with others’ freedom of expression is protected speech and is a legitimate form of productive disagreement. Boisterous protests that briefly interfere with the rights of other audience members may even be allowed. But if the sum total of protesters’ actions substantially interferes with the ability of audience members to listen, or the speaker to speak, then those who are responsible for the interference must face some punishment. Prospective students should avoid attending colleges that allow hecklers to disrupt events with no penalty.10

Universities must pay for adequate security; they must respond vigorously and work with campus police, local police, the FBI, and other authorities to investigate and punish threats and acts of violence, and they must do so consistently.

What we have is the far right depicting Islamist extremists as representative of the whole Muslim community, while Islamist extremists depict the far right as representative of the entire West. As the extremes [pull more people from] the political center, these ideas become mainstream, and the result is a clash-of-civilizations narrative turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.6