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

by Jonathan Haidt

However, many of the examples offered by Sue do not necessarily suggest that the speaker feels hostility or holds negative stereotypes toward any group. His list of microaggressions includes a white person asking an Asian American to teach her words in the Asian American’s “native language,” a white person saying that “America is a melting pot,” and a white person saying, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

A charitable approach might be to say, “I’m guessing you didn’t mean any harm when you said that, but you should know that some people might interpret that to mean . . .”

Teaching people to see more aggression in ambiguous interactions, take more offense, feel more negative emotions, and avoid questioning their initial interpretations strikes us as unwise, to say the least.

In moral judgment as it has long been studied by psychologists, intent is essential for assessing guilt.

A faux pas does not make someone an evil person or an aggressor.

A portion of what is derided as “political correctness” is just an effort to promote polite and respectful interactions by discouraging the use of terms that are reasonably taken to be demeaning.

If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it.

Should a student saying “I am offended” be sufficient reason to cancel a lecture? What if it’s many students? What if members of the faculty are offended, too? It depends on what you think is the purpose of education. 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.”

Emotional reasoning is among the most common of all cognitive distortions; most people would be happier and more effective if they did less of it.

There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically . . . divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other. RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS, Not in God’s Name1

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.

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.

Any kind of intergroup conflict (real or perceived) immediately turns tribalism up, making people highly attentive to signs that reveal which team another person is on.

Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at The Brookings Institution, defines it as “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.”

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.

King’s most famous speech drew on the language and iconography of what sociologists call the American civil religion.38 Some Americans use quasi-religious language, frameworks, and narratives to speak about the country’s founding documents and founding fathers, and King did, too. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he proclaimed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “they were signing a promissory note.”39 King turned the full moral force of the American civil religion toward the goals of the civil rights movement: Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

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.

The common-humanity form of identity politics can still be found on many college campuses, but in recent years we’ve seen the rapid rise of a very different form that is based on an effort to unite and mobilize multiple groups to fight against a common enemy. It activates a powerful social-psychological mechanism embodied in an old Bedouin proverb: “I against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.”

In calling for the dismantling of power structures, the author was using a set of terms and concepts that are common in some academic departments; the main line of argumentation fell squarely within the large family of Marxist approaches to social and political analysis. It’s a set of approaches in which things are analyzed primarily in terms of power. Groups struggle for power. Within this paradigm, when power is perceived to be held by one group over others, there is a moral polarity: the groups seen as powerful are bad, while the groups seen as oppressed are good. It’s a variant of the pathological dualism that Rabbi Sacks described in the quotation at the start of this chapter.

The end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.

Marcuse was known as the “father” of the New Left; his ideas were taken up by the generation of students in the 1960s and 1970s who are the older professors of today, so a Marcusean view is still widely available.

students gain prestige for identifying small offenses committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders.

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.

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.

The protesters’ goal was to prevent the speech from happening. Many of them came from local radical anarchist groups that call themselves “antifascists,” or “Antifa.”

Taken at face value, the author seems to be engaging in a number of cognitive distortions. The most evident is catastrophizing: If Milo Yiannopoulos is allowed to speak, there will be “broken bodies” on our side. I might lose my “right to exist.” Therefore, violence is justified, because it is self-defense.

The author also engages in dichotomous thinking: If you condemn my side’s violence, that means you condone Yiannopoulos’s ideas. You must “pick a side.”

Outside of cultures of safetyism, the word “violence” refers to physical violence.

In her 2016 book, The War on Cops, Mac Donald argued that Black Lives Matter protests made the police more hesitant to enter and actively engage in minority neighborhoods, thereby leaving the people in those neighborhoods less protected and more vulnerable to crime. Her theory had been the subject of lively national debate. As Neil Gross, a left-leaning sociologist, wrote in The New York Times: “There is now some evidence that when all eyes are on police misconduct, crime may edge up. Progressives should acknowledge that this idea isn’t far-fetched.”

“If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist.” This sentence includes fortune-telling, as the students predict what Mac Donald would say. It also includes a rhetorical flourish that became common in 2017: the assertion that a speaker will “deny” people from certain identity groups “the right to exist.”60 This thinking is a form of catastrophizing, in that it inflates the horrors of a speaker’s words far beyond what the speaker might actually say. The students also called Mac Donald “a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, [and] a classist.” This is labeling running wild—a list of serious accusations made without supporting evidence.61

In a widely circulated essay in The New York Times in July 2017, the argument that words can be violence was made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a well-respected professor of psychology and emotion researcher at Northeastern University.87 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.” We responded in an essay in The Atlantic, in which we noted that it is a logical error to accept the claim that harm—even physical harm—is the same as violence.88 Barrett’s syllogism takes the form that if A can cause B and B can cause C, then A can cause C. Therefore, if words can cause stress and stress can cause harm, then words can cause harm, but that does not establish that words are violence. It only establishes that words can result in harm—even physical harm—which we don’t doubt. To see the difference, just rerun the syllogism by swapping in “breaking up with your girlfriend” or “giving students a lot of homework.” Both of these can provoke stress in someone else (including elevated levels of cortisol), and stress can cause harm, so both can cause harm. That doesn’t mean that they are violent acts.

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.

In 2017, the idea that speech can be violence (even when it does not involve threats, harassment, or calls for violence) seemed to spread, assisted by the tendency in some circles to focus only on perceived impact, not on intent. Words that give rise to stress or fear for members of some groups are now often regarded as a form of violence.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. ERIC HOFFER, The True Believer

Emile Durkheim, the nineteenth- to early twentieth-century French sociologist. 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. (You’ve probably felt this while doing things like playing a team sport or singing in a choir, or during religious worship.) People can move back and forth between these two levels throughout a single day, and it is the function of religious rituals to pull people up to the higher collective level, bind them to the group, and then return them to daily life with their group identity and loyalty strengthened. Rituals in which people sing or dance together or chant in unison are particularly powerful.

Bergesen notes that 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.

To Bergesen’s list we’ll add a fourth feature, which necessarily follows from the first three: Fear of defending the accused:

And here’s a related puzzle: Why were the protests strongest and most common at schools known for progressive politics in the most progressive parts of the United States (New England and the West Coast)?18 Are these not the schools that are already the most devoted to enacting progressive and inclusive social policies?

Solidarity can interfere with a group’s efforts to find the truth, and the search for truth can interfere with a group’s solidarity.

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.

It is no surprise that, on the whole, professors lean left. So do artists, poets, and people who love to watch foreign movies. One of the strongest personality correlates of left-wing politics is the trait of openness to experience, a trait that describes people who crave new ideas and experiences and who tend to be interested in changing traditional arrangements.40 On the other hand, members of the military, law enforcement personnel, and students who have well-organized dorm rooms tend to lean right. (Seriously. You can guess people’s political leanings at better-than-chance levels just from photographs of their desks.)41 Social conservatives tend to be lower on openness to experience and higher on conscientiousness—they prefer things to be orderly and predictable, they are more likely to show up on time for meetings, and they are more likely to see the value of traditional arrangements.

In a free society, therefore, it will simply never be the case that every occupation is evenly balanced, politically, and it will generally be the case that professors lean left, especially in the humanities and social sciences. This is not a problem as long as there are enough professors who don’t lean left to guarantee institutionalized disconfirmation in any field that addresses politicized topics. A left-to-right ratio of two or three to one should be enough to sustain institutionalized disconfirmation. And that’s about what the ratio was for most of the twentieth century.

In Jon’s field, academic psychology, the left-to-right ratio was between two to one and four to one from the 1930s through the mid-1990s, but then it began to shoot upward, reaching seventeen to one by 2016.44 The ratios in other core fields in the humanities and social sciences are nearly all above ten to one. The imbalance is larger at more prestigious universities and in New England.45 The only field among all of the humanities and social sciences that is known to have enough political diversity to allow for institutionalized disconfirmation is economics, where the left-to-right ratio found in a study of the voter registrations of professors was a comparatively low four to one.46

Many students graduate with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives, politics, and much of the United States.

There is a range of reasonable opinions on many factual questions. (For example: How much does raising the minimum wage cause employers to hire fewer low-skilled workers? How much of an influence do prenatal hormones have on the differing toy and play preferences of boys versus girls?)

Politically homogeneous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts, particularly when they feel threatened from outside.

In other words, Americans are now motivated to leave their couches to take part in political action not by love for their party’s candidate but by hatred of the other party’s candidate.

That distinction is recognized in law; the First Amendment does not protect credible rape or death threats. Those are criminal.

It is extremely difficult to obtain accurate statistics on hate crimes, and some widely publicized events have turned out to be hoaxes.