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

by Greg Lukianoff

This is a book about three Great Untruths that seem to have spread widely in recent years: The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

While many propositions are untrue, in order to be classified as a Great Untruth, an idea must meet three criteria: It contradicts ancient wisdom (ideas found widely in the wisdom literatures of many cultures). It contradicts modern psychological research on well-being. It harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.

I wonder can the reason for including the first criterion be expanded upon? The second two make sense, but why does it need to contradict ancient wisdom to be a great untruth? A lot of ancient wisdom is very bad, seems like the second two would be sufficient criteria!

When those speakers were not disinvited, students were increasingly using the “heckler’s veto”—protesting in ways that prevented their fellow students from attending the talk or from hearing the speaker.

The second half of that definition is important - a protest that didn't interfere with the event would be regular and legitimate use of free speech

But those efforts were not driven by health concerns. Students wanted to block people they thought were espousing evil ideas (as they do today), but back then, they were not saying that members of the school community would be harmed by the speaker’s visit or by exposure to ideas.

What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection. There is no expectation that students will grow stronger from their encounters with speech or texts they label “triggering.” (This is the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.)

We are not saying that students are never in real physical danger, or that their claims about injustice are usually cognitive distortions. We are saying that even when students are reacting to real problems, they are more likely than previous generations to engage in thought patterns that make those problems seem more threatening, which makes them harder to solve.

This is something that I haven't really experienced but I definitely agree is a problem where it exists - saying 'this idea is putting me in danger' is a much more difficult issue to resolve than 'I don't like this idea'

Based on Greg’s personal and professional experience, his theory was this: Students were beginning to demand protection from speech because they had unwittingly learned to employ the very cognitive distortions that CBT tries to correct. Stated simply: Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.

So most kids don’t have easy, pampered childhoods. But as we’ll show in this book, adults are doing far more these days to protect children, and their overreach might be having some negative effects. Dictionary definitions of “coddle” emphasize this overprotection; for example, “to treat with extreme or excessive care or kindness.”20 The fault lies with adults and with institutional practices, hence our subtitle: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”

To repeat, we are not saying that the problems facing students, and young people more generally, are minor or “all in their heads.” We are saying that what people choose to do in their heads will determine how those real problems affect them. Our argument is ultimately pragmatic, not moralistic: Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals if you do the opposite of what Misoponos advised. That means seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).

I like how this is being framed - though I suspect there will be some readers disappointed not to find a polemic raging about the kids these days (and perhaps some who find one anyway!)

We identify six explanatory threads: the rising political polarization and cross-party animosity of U.S. politics, which has led to rising hate crimes and harassment on campus; rising levels of teen anxiety and depression, which have made many students more desirous of protection and more receptive to the Great Untruths; changes in parenting practices, which have amplified children’s fears even as childhood becomes increasingly safe; the loss of free play and unsupervised risk-taking, both of which kids need to become self-governing adults; the growth of campus bureaucracy and expansion of its protective mission; and an increasing passion for justice, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires.

Among the children who had been “protected” from peanuts, 17% had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that had been deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3% had developed an allergy.

Makes total sense, that's how our immune systems work!

The foolishness of overprotection is apparent as soon as you understand the concept of antifragility. Given that risks and stressors are natural, unavoidable parts of life, parents and teachers should be helping kids develop their innate abilities to grow and learn from such experiences.

Yes, agree strongly with this

The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is, we believe, one of the (several) causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide, which we’ll explore in chapter 7.

You can see the conflation of safety and feelings in another part of the memo, which urged faculty to use each student’s preferred gender pronoun (for example, “zhe” or “they” for students who don’t want to be referred to as “he” or “she”), not because this was respectful or appropriately sensitive but because a professor who uses an incorrect pronoun “prevents or impairs their safety in a classroom.” If students have been told that they can request gender-neutral pronouns and then a professor fails to use one, students may be disappointed or upset. But are these students unsafe? Are students in any danger in the classroom if a professor uses the wrong pronoun?

Ah, and this is an important point. The winning argument is that it's treating the student with respect, not that failing to do so is dangerous. The latter seems obviously untrue to me, and may undermine the legitimacy of the broader argument in others who see this.

If you see yourself or your fellow students as candles, you’ll want to make your campus a wind-free zone.

Research on “post-traumatic growth” shows that most people report becoming stronger, or better in some way, after suffering through a traumatic experience.30 That doesn’t mean we should stop protecting young people from potential trauma, but it does mean that the culture of safetyism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and of the dynamics of trauma and recovery. It is vital that people who have survived violence become habituated to ordinary cues and reminders woven into the fabric of daily life.31 Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.

Yes, this seems right, and it's probably particularly unhelpful to try and 'remove the wind' on college campuses and the like. Life outside of controlled environments is unpredictable, so a good use of a controlled environment should be habituation to potentially distressing phenomena.

A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.

When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient.

For many years, sociologists and marketers assumed that the “Millennial generation” encompassed everyone born between (roughly) 1982 and 1998 or 2000. But Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University and an authority on intergenerational differences, has found a surprisingly sharp discontinuity that begins around birth-year 1995.

Not sure how this applies to Ireland, but maybe I just missed it!

First, members of iGen are “obsessed with safety,” as Twenge puts it, and define safety as including “emotional safety.”

The second point we want to note about iGen is that the campus trends that led us to write our original Atlantic article—particularly the requests for safe spaces and trigger warnings—started to spread only when iGen began arriving on campus, around 2013.

We are not blaming iGen. Rather, we are proposing that today’s college students were raised by parents and teachers who had children’s best interests at heart but who often did not give them the freedom to develop their antifragility.

Children, like many other complex adaptive systems, are antifragile.

Concepts sometimes creep.

Safetyism is the cult of safety—an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.

The rider represents conscious or “controlled” processes—the language-based thinking that fills our conscious minds and that we can control to some degree. The elephant represents everything else that goes on in our minds, the vast majority of which is outside of our conscious awareness. These processes can be called intuitive, unconscious, or “automatic,” referring to the fact that nearly all of what goes on in our minds is outside of our direct control, although the results of automatic processes sometimes make their way into consciousness.

The rider-and-elephant metaphor captures the fact that the rider often believes he is in control, yet the elephant is vastly stronger, and tends to win any conflict that arises between the two. Jon reviewed psychological research to show that the rider generally functions more like the elephant’s servant than its master, in that the rider is extremely skilled at producing post-hoc justifications for whatever the elephant does or believes.

Beck saw a close connection between the thoughts a person had and the feelings that came with them. 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. Beck noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the “cognitive triad” of depression: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.” Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure.

But it is possible to train people to learn Beck’s method so they can question their automatic thoughts on their own, every day. With repetition, over a period of weeks or months, people can change their schemas and create different, more helpful habitual beliefs (such as “I can handle most challenges” or “I have friends I can trust”).

There is no universally accepted definition of “critical thinking,” but most treatments of the concept12 include a commitment to connect one’s claims to reliable evidence in a proper way—which is the basis of scholarship and is also the essence of CBT.

A prime example of how some professors (and some administrators) encourage mental habits similar to the cognitive distortions is their promotion of the concept of “microaggressions,” popularized in a 2007 article

Sue and several colleagues defined microaggressions as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”

But aggression is not unintentional or accidental. If you bump into someone by accident and never meant them any harm, it is not an act of aggression, although the other person may misperceive it as one. Unfortunately, when Sue included “unintentional” slights, and when he defined the slights entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation, he encouraged people to make such misperceptions.

This is a good criticism of microagressions imo, it's not a topic I've read much about but I'm quite sympathetic to this explanation for why it's harmful (the concept itself, that is)

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.” These all hinge on the fact that listeners could choose to interpret the statement or question in a way that makes them feel insulted or marginalized.

If a student feels a flash of offense as the recipient of such statements, is he better off embracing that feeling and labeling himself a victim of a microaggression, or is he better off asking himself if a more charitable interpretation might be warranted by the facts? A charitable interpretation does not mean that the recipient of the comment must do nothing; rather, it opens up a range of constructive responses. 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 …”

Yrs, this is the value of reading people charitably!

We all can be more thoughtful about our own speech, but it is unjust to treat people as if they are bigots when they harbor no ill will. Doing so can discourage them from being receptive to valuable feedback. It may also make them less interested in engaging with people across lines of difference.

Yes - it's better to give a constructive comment on why there might be an issue with a statement. I suspect self-censorship as a deleterious consequence will be mentioned soon, and that of course prevents us from airing out potentially damaging (but well meaning/thought to be inconsequential) beliefs in open discussion.

By Sue’s logic, however, CBT itself can be a microaggression, because it requires questioning the premises and assumptions that give rise to feelings. Sue gives the example of a therapist asking a client, “Do you really think your problem stems from racism?” Depending on the therapist’s intention, such a question could indeed be improperly dismissive. But if the intention of the therapist is to help the client talk back to his emotions, search for evidence to justify interpretations, and find the realistic appraisal of events that will lead to the most effective functioning in a world full of ambiguities, then the question may very well be appropriate and constructive.

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. It is also contrary to the usual goals of good psychotherapy.

Yeah I agree with this. It seems like a recipe for constant distress and escalation of misunderstanding into hostility.

More generally, the microaggression concept19 reveals a crucial moral change on campus: the shift from “intent” to “impact.” In moral judgment as it has long been studied by psychologists, intent is essential for assessing guilt.

Most people understand concepts related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry in this way—they focus on intent.

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

Yes - and faux pas may be common!

It is undeniable that some members of various identity groups encounter repeated indignities because of their group membership. Even if none of the offenders harbored a trace of ill will, their clueless or ignorant questions could become burdensome and hard to tolerate.

This seems very important to understand too, in any critique of microaggressions - the concept does stem from a real difficulty that can very often plague minorities. Dismissing that a problem similar to what the concept is getting at exists doesn't seem helpful.

That’s when I had the epiphany that what I had experienced wasn’t racism. No one was being malicious because I was black and my spouse was white. But for them to fully comprehend our relationship, they had to change their default ideas of what a married couple looks like.

And being the fluffy optimist that I am, I have to imagine that this is very often what is actually happening - people are more likely to be obtuse than bigoted!

By encouraging students to interpret the actions of others in the least generous way possible, schools that teach students about microaggressions may be encouraging students to engage in emotional reasoning and other distortions while setting themselves up for higher levels of distrust and conflict. Karith Foster offers an example of using empathy to reappraise actions that could be interpreted as microaggressions. When she interpreted those actions as innocent (albeit insensitive) misunderstandings, it led to a better outcome for everyone. The number of efforts to “disinvite” speakers from giving talks on campus has increased in the last few years; such efforts are often justified by the claim that the speaker in question will cause harm to students. But discomfort is not danger. Students, professors, and administrators should understand the concept of antifragility and keep in mind Hanna Holborn Gray’s 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.

And it's a good one - especially when interacting with new people where you don't have good reason to think might be contrarians or other kinds of bad faith actors.

Profoundly affected by his experiences as a Jew during that period in Europe, including having his entire family in Poland murdered by the Nazis, Tajfel wanted to understand the conditions under which people would discriminate against members of an outgroup. So in the 1960s he conducted a series of experiments, each of which began by dividing people into two groups based on trivial and arbitrary criteria, such as flipping a coin. For example, in one study, each person first estimated the number of dots on a page. Irrespective of their estimations, half were told that they had overestimated the number of dots and were put into a group of “overestimators.” The other half were sent to the “underestimators” group. Next, subjects were asked to distribute points or money to all the other subjects, who were identified only by their group membership. 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.

The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism.

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

But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways.

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.