Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind
2018-09-08 · Guest: Jonathan Haidt (Social Psychologist and Author) · 51:58
Safetyism and the psychological fragility of Generation Z
Bob Zadek interviews social psychologist Jonathan Haidt about the rise of “safetyism” on college campuses and the psychological fragility of Generation Z. They explore the roots of this trend in overprotective parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the pervasive influence of social media on mental health and democratic discourse.
Topics: Gen Z, safetyism, overparenting, social media, mental health, free speech, higher education, call-out culture, moral psychology
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Jonathan Haidt: Social Psychologist and Author
- Caller (Michael): Listener
Introduction [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. The show always of ideas, never the show of attitude. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning.
This morning, I am going to share with you an hour of time with one of my very special private tutors. Jonathan doesn’t know he’s been my private tutor, but there are several, dare I say, public figures who have points of view, opinions, observations, or knowledge that is so important to me and it should be to everybody that I absorb everything I can from my family, my group of private tutors. They’re my private tutors because I listen to their podcasts, I read their writing, I read their blogs, I watch them when they are being interviewed by others.
And Jonathan Haidt, this morning’s guest, is one of that somewhat small group of my private tutors. So we have had a very long relationship. Jonathan wasn’t aware of it, but he has helped me understand so much. Jonathan has written with Greg Lukianoff, a former guest on my show several times, a very, very important book entitled The Coddling of the American Mind. The book followed up on an article in The Atlantic magazine—I think it’s been said to be the most widely read article in the history of the publication—entitled “How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus.” Jonathan writes about how students are arriving on college campuses ill-prepared to learn, to absorb, to learn how to process adverse points of view. And that has already had and will have profound implications both for the mental health of that generation, for the mental health of future generations, and for the political health of our country. So Jonathan, welcome to the show this morning and thanks so much for your article, for your book, and being so generous with your knowledge to help me understand so much about the world around me.
Jonathan Haidt: Well, that is a red carpet rollout. Hello, Bob. Thanks so much for having me on the show.
The Shift in Campus Culture [02:57]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, Jonathan. Now, Jonathan, your writing and a lot of your attention these days has been directed to a phenomenon that seems to me to have sprung into life full-grown, like leaping from Athena’s temple. It didn’t exist at all. Nobody wrote about it or mentioned it—perhaps Lenore Skenazy observed it a little bit with her writing and her work on free-range kids—but then boom, it appeared on college campuses and now news about it, articles about it are impossible to avoid—not that anybody should try, but impossible to avoid. So tell us about the phenomenon you write about and in your opinion, how did it become so robust so quickly?
Jonathan Haidt: Right. So that’s the way it felt, is that in about 2014, 2013 to 2014, that academic year, Greg Lukianoff, my co-author—he is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—so he’d been working since around the year 2000 pushing back against speech codes and all the restrictions on speech that universities often put on students. And he was used to the problem being the administrators being overprotective and treating students as though they were fragile and they had to be protected from this and that.
And suddenly in 2013 to 2014, Greg noticed for the first time students saying, “Protect us from this. This is not just wrong, this idea or this book or this speaker, this is dangerous. If this person speaks on our campus, people will be traumatized.” And this is what was new, was the medicalization of it—the idea that students are fragile and that adults have to protect the students from these threats. Now, it seemed, as you say, to spring full-blown, full-grown, and we wrote about that in our Atlantic article in 2015, which—the official title of it was “The Coddling of the American Mind”—and it was at the time it was one—I think it was the fourth or fifth most widely circulated article in The Atlantic’s history, at least online, which I guess does dwarf everything that happened in the 19th century, I suppose. At any rate, in that article, we analyzed what was going on, but we didn’t have the space or time to go into where it came from, because of course, it couldn’t have just appeared from out of nowhere.
And in our book, which is also called The Coddling of the American Mind, although now we have a subtitle, which is really what the book is about: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.” That’s what the book is about, and we show six different trends or causal threads stretching back to the 1980s in how we were raising kids that meant that the kids born after 1995—who we often call iGen or Gen Z—it’s when that generation shows up on campus, which begins around 2013, when they show up on campus, we get these new ideas. So they didn’t spring from out of nowhere, but those of us working on college campuses, we thought we’d finally come to understand the millennials and then bang, we get hit by a new generation, which has very different thoughts and needs.
The End of Unsupervised Play [06:36]
Bob Zadek: So now, so it started—you mentioned this is a generation born after 1995. Well, what’s other than 1995—I’m sorry, 1995. Now, what’s what happened in 1995 that start—that created—because you would seem to be saying something was special about 1995 or the generation before 1995. Is there a history earlier than 1995 from which you can trace this trend?
Jonathan Haidt: Yes. So when you look at generational differences, it’s not that the world changed the year they were born, it’s that the world changed during their critical or sensitive periods of development. And so if you think what it was like if you were born in 1980 or ‘82, so if you’re Gen X or the beginning of the millennials, even though there was a crime wave—there was a huge crime wave in America in the 1970s and ’80s, and it only began to end in the mid-1990s—even still, we let our kids out. That is, kids played outside, they played in groups, they played without supervision of adults.
And so even though there was crime, that happened from the, you know, in the 1950s when there was low crime, ’60s, ’70s, and into the ’80s. It’s only after we get cable TV in the early ’80s and there’s a few high-profile abductions—Etan Patz in New York City for one—that gradually we start seeing photos of missing kids everywhere. We start getting the idea that things are so dangerous that if we—if our kids are not supervised, they will be snatched. And so it isn’t really until the 1990s that we have the idea that kids must always be supervised. And it’s not until the early 2000s that we hear the first reports of parents being arrested—arrested—because their kids were found playing in a park unsupervised.
And so it’s the kids who were born after 1995—this is not their fault, this is what we did to them. We overprotected them. We also over-educated them early. That is, the business of childhood is play. Kids need to play to develop social skills. And in the ’90s, we got this stupid idea that if you expose your kids to Mozart in the womb or, you know, when they’re one year old, they’ll grow up to be smarter. Now, that’s been completely debunked, but the idea that if we just cram more and more, you know, classical music and math and reading into the early years, that this is somehow good for kids—completely wrong, but we went for it, especially upper-middle classes where people were just desperate to get their kids into college as college became increasingly competitive. Anyway, I could narrate the whole book for you. The point is just that with the best of intentions, grown-ups changed childhood for kids in the late ’90s and into the 2000s. As a result, essentially, kids have been deprived of what they most need, which is thousands of hours of free play, thousands of hours of unsupervised time, practice getting into arguments and getting out of them, practice falling down, hurting themselves, and getting themselves home on their own without being picked up. All the things that were a normal part of childhood, we’ve tried to take them out for the kids’ benefit, and in the long run, overprotection is harmful.
Socioeconomic Factors and “Concerted Cultivation” [10:29]
Bob Zadek: It’s so interesting in your comment of a second ago, it is so interesting because in preparing for my show, I had made a note of a bunch of questions and I say to myself, “Gee, I wonder if Jonathan has thought of this.” And you just showed you had, but I’m going to ask the questions anyway, and one at a time. But it was in my notes, it’s here longhand on my desk. But my first observation is, you mentioned about a lot of one strong causal feature is the desire of parents to get their kids into elite colleges so they can get fabulous jobs or whatever the motivation is. And my question is, not every parent and not every child is suited to or even aspires to get into a quote “elite college.” By the way, I reject even the concept that they’re elite; they’re special in certain ways. But putting that aside, so therefore the phenomenon, to the extent that you are overprotecting your child to get them to prepare them for college the moment they leave the womb, doesn’t that only describe a very small minority of all of the youngsters brought into the world in the United States? And therefore, why is the phenomenon limited to a certain socioeconomic class and not the country at large?
Jonathan Haidt: Right. So that’s a good question. Our elite colleges are dominated by the children of the top 1%. And so you might think, “Oh, isn’t this just a problem of the, you know, the kids who were being groomed to go to the Ivy Leagues?” So we did a lot of research for this on the book, and two books that were particularly helpful were Unequal Childhoods by the sociologist Annette Lareau and Our Kids by the political scientist Robert Putnam. And they both observe that the line is not between the 1% and everyone else. It’s sort of between like the top half or top 60%, something like that, and the bottom—well, let’s actually call it like the top third and the bottom third. That’s where it’s clearest.
And so the top third parenting is what Annette Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” So this isn’t just the top 1%. This is basically the middle class, upper-middle class, all of them. They see childhood—the job of the grown-up is to give the kids lots of experiences that will help them grow. They’re very focused on education; they almost never hit or spank their kids. Whereas the bottom third is much more clear—this is more the working class and kids born into poverty—there’s a lot more spanking, a lot more strictness, but they have what she calls “natural growth parenting.” That is, they think kids are going to grow up to be grown-ups and you have to protect them from crime or from harm, but otherwise, you leave them to play, you leave them to do their thing. And in some ways, that’s healthier—that is actually healthier.
But the problem is that kids born in the bottom third are exposed to a lot more trauma, more violence, more family instability. So they have a very different set of challenges. The minority of them who go on to a four-year college have a very different psychological makeup; they’ve got their own problems. The upper-middle class, which is exposed to very little trauma—I mean, of course, it’s everywhere, but comparatively speaking, less than poor kids—the upper-middle class is the one that’s been mostly overprotected. So it is not just the top 1%. Our colleges, our four-year colleges are full of kids who’ve been raised with this concerted cultivation idea. And while the concerted cultivation is probably good for their mathematical and reading skills, it often comes at the expense of their social skills. And this is one reason—and we’ll get into the other big one, which is social media—but this is one reason why depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm rates have been skyrocketing since 2011.
The Mental Health Crisis [14:03]
Bob Zadek: When you say skyrocketing, those are the phrases that media uses followed by “epidemic.” Is that too dramatic a concept? Less dramatic phenomena are labeled as epidemics. The word is wrongly used, of course, but it sounds like you are describing an epidemic, not one that is transmitted by contact as many epidemics are described as today, but it sounds like in terms of its result, it’s kind of in a somewhat of a dramatic way sweeping the country. Is epidemic too dramatic and too inflammatory a word?
Jonathan Haidt: Well, okay, let me ease into this. The short answer is no, it’s not, but I don’t want to be alarmist, so let me set up a few hedges or a few constraints here. The first is that the problems we’re talking about on campus are not happening on most college campuses. What I mean is there are 4,500 institutions of higher education in America. Most of them are be it two-year or they’re non-residential. At most schools, none of this dramatic stuff—the trigger warnings, safe spaces, the shutting down of speech and speakers—at most schools, none of that is happening.
But if you look at, say, the top 50 or 100, especially those in the Northeast or along the West Coast where you are, at those schools, it seems to be these problems are—do seem to be found at the great majority of those schools. We don’t know how far down the list it goes, and it’s changing very quickly, so it might be spreading quite rapidly at other schools. We don’t really know. But most kids are doing fine. Most kids are perfectly happy. Most kids go to college and want to learn. So I definitely don’t want to give the impression that there’s been an invasion of the body snatchers, that this new generation has lost its minds and that they’re all fragile. That is not true.
But at the same time, there is a new dynamic, a new social dynamic among the youngest generation, iGen or Gen Z, brought to them by overprotection and social media. So this new way of relating that they are—that they fell into, perhaps—is really bad for girls especially. If you look at the numbers—let me give you a couple of numbers, I’ve got the exact numbers here. If you look at the numbers, I think epidemic is the proper word for teenage girls’ mental health. For boys, it might be accurate, but it would be a little strong—a little too much, perhaps. So here are the numbers.
Certainly, depression and anxiety rates are way, way up. But some people say—I have a graph here somewhere—depression and anxiety rates are way up, but some people say, “Oh, well, that’s just self-report. You know, the kids are saying they’re depressed. That’s just because they’re so comfortable with the psychotherapy language. We can’t take that seriously. That’s not real.” Well, Greg and I took those objections very seriously, and we were convinced that the graphs showing skyrocketing rates for girls especially are correct because here’s the rate for suicide. From—what I did was I took the average—this is federal data, Centers for Disease Control. You take—the rates for suicide were pretty stable in the early 2000s. So from 2001 to 2010, the boys’ rate was 14.8—no, I’m sorry, it was 11.9 per 100,000 teenage boys. That’s how many killed themselves each year. And then it begins going up around 2010, 2011. The rate begins shooting up. And by 2016, 2017, in those two years, the rate is 14.8 per 100,000. That’s an increase of 25%. So the boys’ suicide rate is up 25%. That is huge. That is a lot of dead boys. That is a lot of tragedy.
Here are the numbers for girls. It used to be 2.9 per 100,000 in the early 2000s. Girls make more attempts at suicide, but they tend to use reversible methods, so the girls’ rate is lower than the boys’. But it was 2.9 in the first decade of the century. And for the last couple of years, it’s been 5 per 100,000. From 2.9 to 5. That’s an increase of 70%. 7-0. I don’t know, Bob, what do you think? Do you think a 70% increase in suicide for teenage girls in this country is an epidemic? Do you think it’s something that people should be alarmed about, or do you think we should say, “Nothing to see here”?
The Impact of Social Media [18:44]
Bob Zadek: Now, the question is, does that happen because of existential factors? Has the world become meaner and therefore the victims haven’t changed, but the environment has changed—in effect, become psychologically a more dangerous place? Or has the sensitivity increased, so it’s an inability to cope with the same level of danger? And I think the latter is the point of your book.
Jonathan Haidt: That’s right. So it is often said—I often hear the objection, “Well, but the world is so much, you know, harder and meaner and more dangerous, and school shootings.” And yes, school shootings are a new threat, although until a year ago, those were still very few and far between. It was after Parkland now, I think kids are really scared. But these problems began around 2011, 2012, the rates begin shooting up. They’re much more closely related to social media than to real threats in the world.
And let’s look at the big picture here. As you and I talked about in our call the other day, and I was just—oh yeah, I was just reading this. Oh, you sent me the link about Simon and Garfunkel who went to your high school—your elementary school. Something in the class notes there, they were talking about the nuclear war drills. Your generation, my generation, we grew up really feeling, fearing the annihilation of all life on earth. And while we were fearing that—and this is my generation, not yours—while we were fearing that, there was a hell of a lot of crime. I mean, we really were in danger of being mugged and beaten. There was a lot of crime back then. And a lot of kids—not a lot, but kids died in accidents. So the world has gotten amazingly safe. The rates of death for children have plummeted. Children are so safe these days.
The only exception being the internet. Meaning, the world is objectively vastly safer. Kids have much less to worry about than they did in the past. Rates of bullying, I think, are down. We’re much more careful about that now. But the provocation of the internet is obviously new. And so the question is, are kids right to be—to have a fearful approach to life because of the internet, even if nuclear war has gone away? That’s not a rhetorical question; that’s a serious—that’s a real question because kids are very focused on their social relationships, and that’s what matters to them more than nuclear war.
So that—let’s talk about the second aspect here. I talked about the overprotection. The other big piece of the puzzle is the arrival of the internet. And so you said, “Well, what is it that happened in 1995?” And I said, “Nothing.” What happened is as these kids were growing up, Facebook opens up to the public in 2006. So these kids are 11—the oldest people of iGen or Gen Z, they’re 11. So they could lie and say they’re 13 and then they could get a Facebook account. Now, hardly any of them do that in 2006 or 2007. But the iPhone comes out in 2007, and hardly any teenagers have one in 2007, 2008. But by 2009 and 2010, most of them do. So by 2009, 2010, when the oldest members of iGen are around 15, 15-16, these kids are now immersed in social media. And this changes their social relationships. It exposes the girls to a lot more bullying and social comparison. The boys, as any parent knows, the boys will use those iPhones to play video games all day long. And it turns out video games aren’t actually that harmful. Many of them are actually quite social. You join up with your friends and you kill other groups of friends. And that actually is not so bad for boys to practice, as long as it’s virtual. But for girls, it’s a lot of social comparison, and that’s very, very painful to teenage girls, especially younger teenage girls. And so that’s the other big, big piece of the puzzle. Why did things change so quickly on college campuses in 2014 or so? Because the first members of iGen arrived, and their childhoods had been changed in ways we still don’t understand by immersing them in a giant experiment of social media.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m spending a wonderful morning speaking with Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan Haidt, sorry, sorry, has written The Coddling of the American Mind, which was a follow-up on an article that he wrote in 2015 in The Atlantic. We’ll be back in 30 short seconds. Before we go to break, Jonathan, while the world, while I was experiencing in public school practicing for a nuclear attack, we didn’t feel threatened. I didn’t think it was very real. I even had to have dog tags, and as Robert Klein, a great ’50s comic observed, we were given dog tags so that way our body can be identified if we are burned beyond recognition. That’s what I wore every day in public school. But I wasn’t very frightened; I didn’t think it was going to happen. But as I was told, if I didn’t face the window when the atom bomb went off, I was going to be okay as long as I was under my desk. So I felt pretty safe, actually. It wasn’t that threatening. And while there was a lot of crime, I didn’t think it was going to happen to me anyway. So we weren’t fearful—we, being my generation, wasn’t fearful at all. We are discussing The Coddling of the American Mind, and when we come back from break, I would like to explore what it means to us uncoddled American minds. What does this mean for the future of our country and for education, and most importantly, how do we stem the tide and get back to the world as it was before the iGen generation and their fears reached college campuses? Lots more to follow. We’ll be back in 30 incredibly short seconds.
[Sponsor Break]
The Call-Out Culture [25:18]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. This morning, we are discussing The Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt. We are looking into the phenomenon on American college—some American college campuses where students arrive in the ivy-covered walls and they are apparently ill-prepared to deal with conflict. They bring somewhat exaggerated—not somewhat, exaggerated fears and anxieties to the campus. The anxiety is truly felt, as Jonathan pointed out, measured by objective factors such as increase in suicide rate and visits to mental health professionals and the like. So it’s not a manufactured phenomenon; it’s a real phenomenon. Jonathan has explained to us before the break how in his opinion how we got here. And Jonathan, tell us what it’s like on college campuses where this phenomenon in East and West Coast colleges, mostly on the coast as you have observed. What is day-to-day college life on campus like, both for the professors, which of course you are one, and for the students? And what does that in your opinion tell us about what we can expect when this cohort of college students assume positions of power in our society, whether it’s political, law enforcement, or in business?
Jonathan Haidt: Yeah. So the key thing to keep your eye on is not that the individuals are so different, although the anxiety and depression rates are up. It’s that their fears about speech and words are different, and for a very good reason: that the consequences of misspeaking have suddenly gotten very, very large because of social media. So when you and I were in college—I’m 54, I went to college in the ’80s—you would say something stupid in a class and you’d feel embarrassed, but there was very little chance it was going to ruin your life or your reputation everywhere. Whereas kids born after 1995 raised with social media, there is an unlimited downside. That is, if you say one wrong word, it could go viral among your friends and it could even make it to Fox News or to one of the sites that tries to humiliate universities.
So I’ll just give you some examples of what—how students are a little different now. For one, professors—and I’ve found this too—say that it’s harder to get students to talk in a seminar class, especially if it’s about anything controversial. They’re much more defensive. Here’s a couple of anecdotes. The woman who runs Heterodox Academy, an organization that I co-founded to promote viewpoint diversity in the academy, she was a professor at Harvey Mudd College and a student came in to talk to her. And he was talking about how, “Oh yeah, that would be a good idea because that would kill two birds with—” and he stopped and he put his hand over his mouth. And she said, “What? Were you going to say kill two birds with one stone?” And he nodded. And she said, “Why won’t you say that?” And he said, “Well, that—that’s violent. That’s a violent phrase.” And so there’s a real sensitivity, a hypersensitivity around things like that.
The spectacular things we see—the protests, the calls for faculty to be fired—those often revolve around a single word. Somebody objects to a word. So what we have now, what students have now, is called a “call-out culture.” I’ll read you a little passage from the book where a student at Smith—and this is from 2014—this call-out culture was already there in some of the elite private schools, some of the women’s colleges especially. It comes out there a little earlier. So this sophomore at Smith College in Massachusetts, she says, “During my first days at Smith, I witnessed countless conversations that consisted of one person telling the other that their opinion was wrong. The word ‘offensive’ was almost always included. Within a few short weeks, members of my freshman class had quickly assimilated to this new way of non-thinking. They could soon detect a politically incorrect view and call the person out on their mistake. I began to voice my opinion less often to avoid being berated and judged by a community that claims to represent the free expression of ideas. I learned along with every other student to walk on eggshells for fear that I may say something offensive. That is the social norm here.” And she’s writing about Smith in 2014. In 2015, that call-out culture spread much more rapidly around the country. And I would say that is now—that’s there pretty much everywhere to some extent. So students are much more defensive, much more afraid of disagreeing with the dominant view. The nature of college as a free—a place with free-flowing discussion and you can be provocative and you can challenge the dominant people or ideas, that is—I can’t say it’s gone, it certainly is not gone, but that is much less in evidence. It’s weaker than it was just four or five years ago.
The Immune System Metaphor [30:45]
Bob Zadek: Which is so strange because for so many college students—I certainly include myself—I grew up in my community, my world was my block in Queens and my high school. That was my world; it was pretty small. And when you go to college, for the first time, you get to experience something beyond the immediate neighborhood and to think that that opportunity to learn from all of the mainstream and not-so-mainstream people you’re thrust together with, quite by accident—it’s all random who you’re sitting next to in class—and to be denied the benefits of that has to have a profound long-term effect upon openness to new ideas and even understanding of anybody who’s not at all like you are. It’s the lack of understanding that you’re being deprived of.
Jonathan Haidt: That’s right. And so I think the immune system is a very good metaphor for us to talk about here. We open the book with the story of how peanut allergies are going up, how when my son started preschool, the school went on and on about all the things we couldn’t bring to school because some kids might have peanut allergies. We couldn’t bring dried fruit or anything because it might have been processed in a factory that produced—anyway, on and on about peanuts. And as we were doing the research for the book, we discovered that the reason why peanut allergies have gotten so much more prevalent since the 1990s is that in the 1990s, we started protecting kids from peanuts.
So the immune system has to be exposed to all kinds of dirt, germs, bacteria, parasitic worms, and all kinds of food. And in that way, it learns what it should react to and what it should not react to. And because we began to be overprotective, because there are a few kids who have peanut allergies—they were very rare in the ’90s, but they existed—so we began protecting kids from peanuts, and as a result, their immune systems were less likely to learn that the—it’s the skin on the peanut primarily, there’s certain proteins in the skin—that’s what triggers the allergy. We’ve denied a generation of kids the opportunity to have their immune systems learn that peanut proteins are not harmful, and therefore they overreact.
In the same way, if kids are exposed to teasing, criticism, hurtful words, they then—if they—most of us, we were exposed to such things, and so now if someone teases us or has a critical word, we don’t like being criticized, but we don’t have an allergic reaction. We have a negative reaction. And I’m afraid that what we’re doing by protecting our kids so much, even from exclusion—in my daughter’s public school here in New York City, kids are not allowed to exclude each other on the playground; every group has to be open—if we don’t give them practice in these things, then if they are excluded in any way in college, it will be much more painful than had they had some practice in that. So in so many ways, we are over-preparing our kids for the academic side of college, but we are leaving them unprepared. We’re denying them the experiences they need to have their social systems working properly. And as we argue in the book, and as we argued in an essay in the New York Times last week, this has very serious ramifications for democracy.
Alexis de Tocqueville, when he traveled in 1831 in our country, marveled at how good we were at the art of association. “When there’s anything to be done,” he said, “in France it would be done by the king or the government, in England it would be done by the aristocracy, but in America, they form a committee, they form an association to put on a play, to build a hospital, to start a library, for everything like the Ben Franklin sort of attitude.” And he marveled at how this “can-do, we can do it ourselves, we don’t need authorities above us”—this attitude is the secret of our successful experiment in democracy. In 1831, it was not at all clear that this experiment would work, but de Tocqueville was very optimistic. Well, given that we’re now preventing our kids from practicing for freedom until they’re 14 or 15, and even then we over-supervise them, we should expect that when they graduate from college, when they have to deal with people who are different, when they have to solve some problem without appeal to authority, they’re likely to be less skillful at it and more likely to call for the involvement of authority, such as law enforcement or attorneys who will sue for them. I think it’s—we’re going to see—however bad our political culture is now, my fear is that it might get a lot worse when the current generation is given the responsibility for guiding us.
Bureaucracy and Government Influence [35:21]
Bob Zadek: Jonathan, once again, you anticipated, as if we had rehearsed this, a question I was about to ask you. It’s magical. So I’m going to pose my question to you in a moment. But first, in an interview that I heard you participate in, you used a phrase which, of course, in part because I’m a libertarian, that really connected with me. You helped us understand that students have to be taught to cope with freedom, to cope with liberty, because it’s not just a piece of cake. We have learned that when repressive societies are—when democracy is imposed upon them too quickly, they don’t adjust and they don’t like it. We have learned that in communist countries, when communism was replaced by a more open society, many of the older members of society yearned for the good old days. They simply were unable to cope with the responsibilities both for themselves and for their society at large. And so when you use that phrase—and I’ll ask you to expand upon it—it struck me as being so much the core of what we are talking about. So explain the need to learn how to cope with freedom.
Jonathan Haidt: Yeah. So you said kids need to be taught to cope with freedom, and I would just change that to say we can’t teach them directly. The art of association, the art of freedom, is one that you must develop with practice. Now, you can have good role models, certainly; adults have a role to play. But here I’m drawing a lot on the work of Peter Gray, who is a developmental psychologist at Boston College. He’s written a great deal on the importance of play, of free play. And he points out that the best kind of play, he says, is unsupervised play outdoors in mixed age groups.
What do kids do? You know, there’s a bunch of kids in the neighborhood, there’s somebody’s backyard or there’s a park or the elementary school playground has a field, they get together and they have to decide what to do. No one says, “This is what we’re doing. Go over there.” You can’t do that in play; you can’t order people around in play. It has to be voluntary. So everyone has to be very sensitive to what everyone else is thinking, look for signs of agreement or disagreement. Somehow, a game is chosen, and if anyone doesn’t want to play, they can leave. And then the rules have to be chosen. Now, there are general rules, but maybe there’s a variation, like, “Can you throw the ball underhand or only overhand?” Well, they have to decide all the variations of the rules. They have to pick teams, and that might be painful for the kid who’s picked last, but he has to learn to deal with it. And when they’re playing, they might recognize that, you know, Bobby’s little brother’s only seven, you can’t pitch the ball so hard to him. So you have to empathize, you have to adjust.
And all of these skills are the skills of association. And as soon as you put a coach in there, as soon as you put two coaches and two teams, now the adults are making the decisions. Now it’s not voluntary. Now you can’t quit. So you don’t learn—you might learn baseball, but you don’t learn the social skills. So free play is absolutely essential—absolutely essential—for the development of the social skills of freedom and democracy, and we have systematically deprived our kids of it. Not everyone, not everywhere, but if you look at the research on time use, research on how children spend their time and where they play, the data is very clear: kids used to have a lot of time for free play, now they have very little, especially—in the working class they still do have some, but the majority of kids in this country have much less time for free play than they ever did. They’re spending much more time supervised by adults, being coached, taught, spending time in organized activities that they’re driven to by an adult.
The Rise of Bureaucracy [39:27]
Bob Zadek: Now, Jonathan, that segues into a question that I was looking forward to asking you. This phenomenon, this psychological and to some degree political phenomenon, is relatively new in the span of human experience, obviously. My question is, to what extent does it owe its vibrancy, its growth, to government embracing it? That is to say, we have extensive government endorsement of this behavior, going back to the Obama administration and its “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 to colleges urging colleges to be more aggressive in protecting—in this case, women, but it was expanded beyond that—going to the child protective services criminalizing a child walking alone without—off the parent’s property without being in plain sight of the parent. We have had government embracing this, and I go back to a comment you made earlier in this show about how this generation is looking for outside protection, not being able to find the protection within the strength of their own psychology. So how much has government been the petri dish, the fertilizer to give this more life than it would otherwise have?
Jonathan Haidt: Yeah. So in the middle of the book, we have six chapters talking about six different causal threads, and the rise of bureaucracy is one of the six threads. So if we think about—you have to take the long—the big picture here. Family size used to be very large; people had a lot of kids, the kids would play outside, and that’s the way things were for a long, long time. Then we have several things happening all at once. After World War II, we have rising prosperity. Well, all around the world, when you have rising prosperity, and especially as you have rising female employment and education, you have declining family size. So as family size shrinks, there aren’t as many kids around, and parents are investing all their eggs in one basket—or those two kids into college. So a lot of things are happening to make parents more overprotective.
Now along comes government. It’s not that government has these big evil ideas; it’s that government and bureaucracy are subject not to a logic of what’s most effective, but to a logic of “CYA” or “cover your ass”—what will we get in trouble for? So child protective services—certainly there’s a need for that, there is child abuse and neglect—they, if they don’t act on a certain case, they can get in trouble for having missed a case. They tend to be over-reactive. They start determining, you know—we get this social norm that if someone sees a kid—if you see a seven-year-old kid walking down the street, you might think, “Oh my god, he’s going to be abducted, I better call the police.” And a lot of these cases are—you see a kid in a car. Now, if it’s a baby left in a car for half an hour, of course that’s dangerous. But we have cases in the book—an 11-year-old child left in the car because her mother said, “I’m going into CVS to pick up the prescription. Do you want to come or do you want to sit here and keep listening to your iPhone?” And the kid says, “I’ll sit here and keep listening.” So she says, “Okay.” Mother goes in. Before she knows it, the police have been called. And while she wasn’t ultimately put in jail, you have to go through weeks and weeks of bureaucratic investigation just because you let your 11-year-old sit in a car. When I was 11, my sisters and I at that age, that’s when we started babysitting. And now the idea is that kids that age need babysitters. That was not caused by government, but once that social norm of incredible overprotection and underestimation of kids’ abilities—once that social norm took hold, in various ways government comes in to say, “We’re going to punish this.” And then once you can be arrested for letting your kids outside to play, then boy, parents really stop letting their kids out.
So government does play a role in the feedback loops that make things more severe. In colleges, as you pointed out, Title IX, which again, good intentions to create educational equality by gender—there was a real need for it originally, the original language of it was quite reasonable—but we get legal creep and concept creep to the point where if anything isn’t 50/50 by gender, somebody can charge gender discrimination. So colleges have to do all sorts of things. In sports, they have to cook the books to try to make it seem as though they’ve got a 50/50 breakdown in sports. All kinds of shenanigans start getting played once government comes in and makes heavy-handed rules that often are not well thought out.
Solutions and the Art of Association [44:30]
Bob Zadek: As the eternal optimist that I am—and that is a sincerely held belief of mine and how I operate in society—what are—what do you suggest? Is this passing? Is this faddish or is this permanent? And what concrete solutions, whether they are governmental, whether they’re administration—whether they’re in college campus administration, parenting—what do you hope will happen to stem the tide, if you will?
Jonathan Haidt: So given all the trends that go into causing this—there’s no one cause—almost all of the trends are irreversible. Social media is not going away, political polarization is not going away, rising competitiveness to get kids into college is not going away. So I think that if we don’t do anything, things are going to get worse. Depression rates are going to go up, conflict on campus is going to increase. I think we have a real problem here.
Now, nationally, I think our political system is in big, big trouble. Polarization will get worse. I don’t think we’re going to make much progress there. So what we have to do is we have to adapt ourselves, adapt our institutions, our corporations, our universities, for life in a time of incredible political polarization, fake news, outrage stories all over the place. Two areas that give me hope are that parents and teachers are now realizing something’s going very wrong and they’re looking for ways to change. And college presidents in the last year or two, I’m now hearing a lot of them saying their job has become impossible. They never know what blow-up is going to greet them. They wake up in the morning, turn on the email, and they find out, “Oh my god, something was served in the dining hall that one group objected to and now it’s in the newspaper and what are we going to do?” Their job has gotten very, very difficult. They too are looking to change.
So I think I’m most hopeful about change in child-rearing. I would urge all of your listeners to go to LetGrow.org. It’s a site started by Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free-Range Kids. She’s the apostle of letting kids actually have the experiences they need in order to grow up. So lots of good ideas there for how to give kids more free play, how to help them meet up in a park, how to help your school give more recess, especially before or after school starts. So lots of great ideas there. Getting over the paranoid parenting is hard to do on your own, but if you and the other parents in your community, if you agree on, say, limits on internet time, then it’s much easier to limit your kids’ internet time. But if she’s the only one—my son, I put on a program that limits my kids to two hours a day, and my son who’s 12, you know, his friends don’t have it, so it’s hard for him. But if a whole community does it, recognizing the damage of unrestricted social media and internet—anyway, so I think we’re going to see some positive changes in parenting. There’s a lot of ideas in the book, in The Coddling of the American Mind, a lot of ideas at LetGrow.org.
And then when we talk about colleges, there there’s some very simple ideas. Every university should pass what’s called the Chicago Principles on freedom of expression, in which the university says, “Our job here is to provide a platform on which people can make their case. We do not take sides in arguments.” So universities need to stand up for free inquiry, to say that they’re not political places. People are free to talk about politics as much as they want, but they’re not going to force the university to take sides. So there’s a lot that can be done at orientation, in college orientations. And even if you run a company, any organization that is facing political divisions, I urge you to go to OpenMindPlatform.org. It’s a program that I and Caroline Mehl and a few other people developed to basically teach moral psychology and teach skills for talking about politics and other divisive issues so that those discussions actually bring light, not just heat.
The Libertarian Elephant [48:30]
Bob Zadek: And I urge everybody to pay attention to Jonathan’s suggestions, lest we not have a next generation of Navy SEALs to serve us. That’s very Bob-centric, but I want people to protect me and I want them to not be fearful. Now, we have only about a minute to go. We have a caller who’s been waiting for quite some time. So let’s see if we can—Michael, if you’re still there, please pose your question to Jonathan briefly, if you will. We only have a few seconds. Michael, go ahead.
Caller (Michael): Yeah, thank you Bob. Jonathan, I have a question about your elephant and rider analogy, which I liked very much, but I’m trying to fit in one piece of data there you can help me with. And it’s the following: I’m a libertarian, and most libertarians were either Democrats or Republicans at one time. So according to the analogy, their values led them to be Democrats or Republicans. So how come they changed to something different?
Jonathan Haidt: So the metaphor he’s talking about is from my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, where I talk about how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict, like a rider, which is conscious reasoning, and an elephant, which is our intuitive processes. And people who—whose automatic—their moral intuitions are about compassion and equality tend to become Democrats. Those who value group loyalty and respect for authority and tradition tend to become Republicans. I’ve done a lot of research on libertarians. Libertarians have a different elephant. Libertarians are lower on most emotions. They’re really, really high on liberty; they love liberty. And the main emotion that they’re higher than others on is called “reactance.” If someone tells them what to do, they have a very strong negative reaction. So libertarians are a unique psychological type. Most libertarians start off in one of the two parties because that’s really all there is, but they don’t quite fit. They don’t fit well into either party now. Boy, they certainly don’t now. They used to fit into the Republican Party a little better, but I don’t think they fit into Trump’s Republican Party. So libertarians are kind of politically homeless now, I would say. Thank you.
Bob Zadek: We sure are. We sure are homeless and likely to remain so. The political structure in our country, from controlling the debates to controlling who gets on the ballot, are so stacked in a two-party system that the likelihood that there’ll be a more open political process is very low. We only can hope that we notice from Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch at Reason that the growth of independents, people who identify as independent, is growing tremendously. That tends to be a code word for libertarian anyway, so perhaps there is hope. Jonathan, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time, your valuable time this Sunday morning. We enjoyed it a great deal. Please follow Jonathan’s writings and check out HeterodoxAcademy.org. It’s a fascinating website. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Enjoy this Sunday. And so long to all my friends out there until next Sunday.