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

by Jonathan Haidt

the history of race in America is a history of discrimination and intimidation, intertwined with a history of progress.

Our basic message in this book is that this way of thinking may be wrong; college students are antifragile, not fragile.

Sure, the oldest Millennials, born in 1982, searched for music and MapQuest directions using Netscape and AltaVista on their Compaq home computers in the late 1990s, but search engines don’t change social relationships. Social media does.

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.

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.

Twenge finds that 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. Notice anything about the difference between the two lists? Screen versus nonscreen.

Plus, if boys’ aggression is generally delivered in person, then the targets of boys’ aggression can escape from it when they go home. On social media, girls can never escape.

A 2016 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, using data from 139 colleges, found that by the 2015–2016 school year, half of all students surveyed reported having attended counseling for mental health concerns.35 The report notes that the only mental health concerns that were increasing in recent years were anxiety and depression.

Clearly universities were not causing a national mental health crisis; they were responding to one, and this may explain why the practices and beliefs of safetyism spread so quickly after 2013.

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.

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.

Twenge finds relationships that are statistically significant yet still generally small in magnitude. That doesn’t mean that the effects of smartphones are small; it just means that the amount of variance in mental illness that we can explain right now, using existing data, is small.

One conclusion that future research is almost certain to reach is that the effects of smartphones and social media are complicated, involving mixtures of benefits and harms depending on which kinds of kids are doing which kinds of online activities instead of doing which kinds of offline activities. One factor that is already emerging as a central variable for study is the quality of a teenager’s relationships and how technology is impacting it. In a recent review of research on the effects of social media, social psychologists Jenna Clark, Sara Algoe, and Melanie Green offer this principle: “Social network sites benefit their users when they are used to make meaningful social connections and harm their users through pitfalls such as isolation and social comparison when they are not.”

Girls may be suffering more than boys because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.

The abduction and murder of a child by a stranger is among the most horrific crimes one can imagine. It is also, thankfully, among the rarest. According to the FBI, almost 90% of children who go missing have either miscommunicated their plans, misunderstood directions, or run away from home or foster care,6 and 99.8% of the time, missing children come home.

The vast majority of those who are abducted are taken by a biological parent who does not have custody; the number abducted by a stranger is a tiny fraction of 1% of children reported missing—roughly one hundred children per year in a nation with more than 70 million minors.

A problem with this kind of thinking is that when we attempt to produce perfectly safe systems, we almost inevitably create new and unforeseen problems.

Thankfully, gone are the days when families routinely had five or more children and expected one or more of them to die.

Lenore Skenazy points out that most great children’s books involve kids going off on adventures without adult supervision. For parents who don’t want to put dangerous ideas in their kids’ heads, she and her readers offer a set of classic titles updated for the age of safetyism: Oh, the Places You Won’t Go! The Playdates of Huckleberry Finn Harold and the Purple Sofa Encyclopedia Brown Solves the Worksheet Harry Potter and the Sit-Still Challenge Dora in the Ford Explorer (But Not Without a Parent!)

Severe adversity that hits kids early, especially in the absence of secure and loving attachment relationships with adults, does not make them stronger; it makes them weaker.

Putnam summarizes the findings like this: Moderate stress buffered by supportive adults is not necessarily harmful, and may even be helpful, in that it can promote the development of coping skills. On the other hand, severe and chronic stress, especially if unbuffered by supportive adults, can disrupt the basic executive functions that govern how various parts of the brain work together to address challenges and solve problems. Consequently, children who experience toxic stress have trouble concentrating, controlling impulsive behavior, and following directions.

Skenazy sees discounting positives when parents overmonitor. “Any upside to free, unsupervised time (joy, independence, problem-solving, resilience) is seen as trivial, compared to the infinite harm the child could suffer without you there. There is nothing positive but safety.” Parents also use negative filtering frequently, Skenazy says. “Parents are saying, ‘Look at all the foods/activities/words/people that could harm our kids!’ rather than ‘I’m so glad we’ve finally overcome diphtheria, polio, and famine!’” She also points out the ways that parents use dichotomous thinking: “If something isn’t 100% safe, it’s dangerous.”

Paranoid parenting is a powerful way to teach kids all three of the Great Untruths.

Children today have far more restricted childhoods, on average, than those enjoyed by their parents, who grew up in far more dangerous times and yet had many more opportunities to develop their intrinsic antifragility. Compared with previous generations, younger Millennials and especially members of iGen (born in and after 1995) have been deprived of unsupervised time for play and exploration. They have missed out on many of the challenges, negative experiences, and minor risks that help children develop into strong, competent, and independent adults (as we’ll show in the next chapter).

Children in the United States and other prosperous countries are safer today than at any other point in history. Yet for a variety of historical reasons, fear of abduction is still very high among American parents, many of whom have come to believe that children should never be without adult supervision. When children are repeatedly led to believe that the world is dangerous and that they cannot face it alone, we should not be surprised if many of them believe it.

Peter LaFreniere, a developmental psychologist at the University of Maine, notes that children’s play “combines the expenditure of great energy with apparently pointless risk.”

Of greatest importance in free play is that it is always voluntary; anyone can quit at any time and disrupt the activity, so children must pay close attention to the needs and concerns of others if they want to keep the game going.

Almost all overreaction cases model the mental habit of catastrophizing, and communicate that disaster would result without the intervention of the administration.

Bergen Community College (New Jersey, 2014): An art professor was placed on leave without pay and sent to psychological counseling for a social media post. The post showed a photograph of his young daughter wearing a T-shirt that depicted a dragon and the words I WILL TAKE WHAT IS MINE WITH FIRE & BLOOD, which the school claimed was “threatening.” The professor explained that the shirt referenced the popular TV series Game of Thrones, but an administrator insisted that “fire” could refer to an AK-47.29

Overreaction and overregulation are usually the work of people within bureaucratic structures who have developed a mindset commonly known as CYA (Cover Your Ass). They know they can be held responsible for any problem that arises on their watch, especially if they took no action to prevent it, so they often adopt a defensive stance. In their minds, overreacting is better than underreacting, overregulating is better than underregulating, and caution is better than courage. This attitude reinforces the safetyism mindset that many students learn in childhood.

psychological experiments have consistently shown that to be human is to have biases. We are biased toward ourselves and our ingroups, toward attractive people, toward people who have done us favors, and even toward people who share our name or birthday.

Then, as more and more professors shy away from potentially provocative materials and discussion topics, their students miss out on opportunities to develop intellectual antifragility.

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. For example, in 2005, at the University of Central Florida, a student was charged with harassment through “personal abuse” for creating a Facebook group that called a student government candidate a “Jerk and a Fool.”

In 2013, the Departments of Education and Justice issued a sweeping new definition of harassment: any “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct.”57 This definition was not limited to speech that would be offensive to a reasonable person, nor did it require that the alleged target actually be offended—both requirements of traditional harassment claims. By eliminating the reasonable-person standard, harassment was left to be defined by the self-reported subjective experience of every member of the university community. It was, in effect, emotional reasoning turned into a federal regulation.

In a prescient essay in 2014, two sociologists—Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning—explained where this new culture of vulnerability came from and how administrative actions helped it to grow.64 They called it “victimhood culture,” and they interpreted it as a new moral order that was in conflict with the older “dignity culture,” which is still dominant in most parts of the United States and other Western democracies.

In an optimally functioning dignity culture, people are assumed to have dignity and worth regardless of what others think of them, so they are not expected to react too strongly to minor slights.

This is in contrast to the older “honor cultures,” in which men were so obsessed with guarding their reputations that they were expected to react violently to minor insults made against them or those close to them—perhaps with a challenge to a duel.

For example, one clear sign of a dignity culture is that children learn some version of “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me.” That childhood saying is of course not literally true—people feel real pain as a result of words. (If no one felt hurt by words, the saying would never be needed.) But “sticks and stones” is a shield that children in a dignity culture use to dismiss an insult with contemptuous indifference, as if to say, “Go ahead and insult me. You cannot upset me. I really don’t care what you think.”

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.”

In response to a variety of factors, including federal mandates and the risk of lawsuits, the number of campus administrators has grown more rapidly than the number of professors, and professors have gradually come to play a smaller role in the administration of universities. The result has been a trend toward “corporatization.”

This chapter is about social justice. We will explore the meaning of this term and embrace one version of it while criticizing another.

Intuitive justice is the combination of distributive justice (the perception that people are getting what is deserved) and procedural justice (the perception that the process by which things are distributed and rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy).

Developmental psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom reviewed the research on fairness in children and concluded that “humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones,” and “when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”9

Proportionality is the heart of “equity theory,” the major theory of distributive justice in social psychology.

Intuitive justice is not just about how much each person gets. It’s also about the process by which decisions about distributions (and other matters) are made.

There are two basic concerns that people bring to their judgments of procedural justice. The first is how the decision is being made. This includes whether the decision-makers are doing their best to be objective and neutral and are therefore trustworthy, or whether they have conflicts of interest, prejudices, or other factors that lead them to be biased in favor of a particular person or outcome. It also includes transparency—is it clear to all how the process works? The second basic concern is how a person is being treated along the way, which means primarily: Are people being treated with dignity, and do they have a voice—do they get to fully state their case, and are they taken seriously when they do?

Tyler’s findings are especially important for understanding how people respond to the police. When people perceive that the police are following fair procedures and treating them and people like them with dignity, they are much more willing to support the police, help them to fight crime, and even accept occasionally being stopped and frisked by the police, whom they see as working to keep their neighborhood safe. But if people think that the way the police select people to frisk is racially biased and that people like them are treated disrespectfully, with hostility, or, even worse, with violence, they will understandably be angry and will see the police as the enemy.

Using that definition of social justice, we’ll define proportional-procedural social justice as the effort to find and fix cases where distributive or procedural justice is denied to people because they were born into poverty or belong to a socially disadvantaged category.

This is why common-humanity identity politics—which emphasizes an overarching common humanity while calling attention to cases in which people are denied dignity and rights—was ultimately so effective. It did not try to force white Americans to accept a new conception of justice; it tried to help white Americans to see that their country was violating its own conceptions of justice, which had been so nobly expressed by the Founding Fathers but so imperfectly realized.

To take just one example of a subtle injustice: Suppose there’s a high school that is composed of 80% white students and 20% black students. The student committee planning the senior prom must decide what songs to play, and at this school, musical tastes tend to vary by race. The committee takes a vote on how to proceed, and the winning plan is to let students nominate a long list of songs, each of which will then be voted on by the entire student body. Democracy is all about voting, right? And the process itself was decided on democratically, so we have procedural fairness, right? Harvard legal scholar Lani Guinier explored cases like this in her 1994 book, The Tyranny of the Majority