ZadekpediaJonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author of The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff. He appeared on The Bob Zadek Show to discuss the book’s account of “safetyism” on college campuses and the psychological fragility of Generation Z. Bob Zadek introduced Haidt as one of his “private tutors,” a group of public figures whose podcasts, writing, blogs and interviews he follows, and described the book as a follow-up to an article in The Atlantic magazine titled “How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus.” Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
On the show
1 appearance, 2018.
- 2018-09-08 · Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind · 51:58 — Safetyism and the psychological fragility of Generation Z.
Their books discussed on the show
- The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) — discussed 2018, 2018, 2019
- The Happiness Hypothesis (2005) — discussed 2018
The Coddling of the American Mind
Zadek framed the book’s subject as students arriving on college campuses “ill-prepared to learn, to absorb, to learn how to process adverse points of view,” with implications for the mental health of that generation and for the political health of the country. Haidt agreed with Zadek’s framing that the sensitivity of students had increased rather than the world having become meaner, and argued that the problems began around 2011 and 2012, with rates shooting up and correlating more closely with social media than with real threats in the world. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Haidt contrasted the fears of earlier generations with the present: his and Zadek’s generations grew up fearing the annihilation of all life on earth and amid high crime rates, while children today are objectively safer, with rates of death for children having plummeted and bullying rates down. The exception, he said, is the internet. He dated the change to Facebook opening to the public in 2006, when the oldest members of Gen Z were 11, and to the iPhone’s release in 2007; by 2009 and 2010 most teenagers had one. Haidt said this exposed girls to more bullying and social comparison, while boys used the phones to play video games, which he described as not actually that harmful and often quite social. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Call-out culture and campus speech
Haidt told Zadek that the key thing to watch is not that individuals are so different, though anxiety and depression rates are up, but that students’ fears about speech and words are different, because the consequences of misspeaking have grown very large due to social media. Where a student in the 1980s might feel embarrassed after saying something stupid in class, students born after 1995 face an unlimited downside, with one wrong word potentially going viral among friends or reaching Fox News. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
He reported that professors find it harder to get students to talk in seminar classes, especially about anything controversial, and gave the example of a student who stopped himself before saying “kill two birds with one stone” and called it a violent phrase. Haidt described a “call-out culture” and read from the book a passage by a Smith College sophomore writing in 2014, who said she had learned to walk on eggshells for fear of saying something offensive and that this was the social norm there. Haidt said the call-out culture spread much more rapidly around the country in 2015 and is now present pretty much everywhere to some extent, leaving college as a place of free-flowing discussion weaker than it was four or five years earlier. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Across episodes
Haidt’s name appears in two other episodes without his participation. In the February 2018 conversation with Lenore Skenazy, she named him as a co-proposer, alongside Daniel Shuchman of FIRE and Peter Gray of Boston College, of the idea behind Let Grow, the nonprofit she presides over, which grew out of Free-Range Kids and seeks to restore unsupervised play and childhood independence. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018) In the March 2019 episode with David Henderson, host Charlie Deist noted that Bob Zadek’s book The Bubble: How Higher Education Became America’s Most Overrated Product features interviews with Haidt and links financial bubbles in student loan debt with the silencing of free speech on campus. David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019) The episodes show no development in Haidt’s own position across the episodes; only the 2018 interview presents his arguments directly.