Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author. He appeared as a guest on The Bob Zadek Show to discuss The Coddling of the American Mind, a book he wrote with Greg Lukianoff, which followed an article in The Atlantic that Bob Zadek described as having been said to be the most widely read article in the history of the publication. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
The Coddling of the American Mind
Bob Zadek introduced Haidt as one of his “private tutors” — public figures whose podcasts, writing, blogs and interviews Zadek follows. Zadek said the book followed up on an article in The Atlantic entitled “How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus,” and that Haidt writes about how students are arriving on college campuses ill-prepared to learn, to absorb, to learn how to process adverse points of view. Zadek said this has had and will have profound implications for the mental health of that generation, for the mental health of future generations, and for the political health of the country. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
Haidt framed the central question as whether the world has become meaner — so that the environment, not the victims, has changed — or whether sensitivity has increased, producing an inability to cope with the same level of danger. Zadek put the latter reading to Haidt as the point of the book, and Haidt agreed. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
Social media and Generation Z
Haidt said the problems began around 2011 and 2012, when the rates began shooting up, and that they are much more closely related to social media than to real threats in the world. He acknowledged school shootings as a new threat, noting that until a year before the conversation those had still been very few and far between, and that after Parkland he thought kids were really scared. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
Haidt contrasted the safety of the present with the fears of earlier generations. He said his and Zadek’s generations grew up fearing the annihilation of all life on earth, and that there was a hell of a lot of crime back then, with kids dying in accidents. He said the world has gotten amazingly safe, that rates of death for children have plummeted, and that rates of bullying are down. The only exception, he said, is the internet. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
On the timeline, Haidt said Facebook opened up to the public in 2006, when the oldest members of iGen or Gen Z were 11, and that the iPhone came out in 2007. By 2009 and 2010, when the oldest members of iGen were around 15 or 16, most teenagers had one, and these kids were immersed in social media. He said this exposed girls to more bullying and social comparison, while boys used the iPhones to play video games all day; he said video games are not actually that harmful and many are quite social. For girls, he said, it is a lot of social comparison, very painful to teenage girls, especially younger teenage girls. He tied the rapid change on college campuses around 2014 to the arrival of the first members of iGen, whose childhoods had been changed by what he called a giant experiment of social media. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
Call-out culture on campus
Haidt told Zadek that the key thing to watch is not that individuals are so different, although anxiety and depression rates are up, but that students’ fears about speech and words are different. The consequences of misspeaking have gotten very large because of social media: where an earlier generation could say something stupid in class and feel embarrassed with little chance of it ruining their life or reputation, kids born after 1995 face an unlimited downside, and one wrong word could go viral among their friends or even make it to Fox News. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
He said professors find it harder to get students to talk in a seminar class, especially about anything controversial, and that students are much more defensive. He gave the example of the woman who runs Heterodox Academy, an organization he co-founded to promote viewpoint diversity in the academy, who had been a professor at Harvey Mudd College. A student who began to say “kill two birds with” stopped and put his hand over his mouth; asked why he would not say the phrase, he said it was violent. Haidt described a real sensitivity, a hypersensitivity around things like that. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
Haidt said the spectacular things — the protests, the calls for faculty to be fired — often revolve around a single word, and that what students have now is called a “call-out culture.” He read a passage from the book by a sophomore at Smith College in Massachusetts writing in 2014, who described conversations consisting of one person telling the other that their opinion was wrong, with the word “offensive” almost always included; within a few weeks members of her freshman class had assimilated to this new way of non-thinking, and she began to voice her opinion less often to avoid being berated and judged by a community that claims to represent the free expression of ideas. Haidt said that in 2015 the call-out culture spread much more rapidly around the country and is now there pretty much everywhere to some extent. He said the nature of college as a place with free-flowing discussion, where you can be provocative and challenge dominant people or ideas, is much less in evidence and weaker than it was four or five years earlier. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
Let Grow
In an episode with Lenore Skenazy, who described herself as president of the nonprofit Let Grow, Skenazy said the organization was an outgrowth of Free-Range Kids, which itself began with letting her son ride the subway and getting blowback because she had let a nine-year-old be part of the world. She said that after 10 years of lecturing and writing on her blog, a proposal came from Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, Daniel Shuchman, head of the organization FIRE which fights for free speech on campus, and Peter Gray, who wrote Free to Learn and is a professor at Boston College. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
Skenazy said Let Grow became the “let’s get something started” arm of Free-Range Kids, and described two projects: the Let Grow Project, in which teachers tell kids to go home and ask their parents if they can do one thing on their own, such as walk the dog or make dinner, and the Let Grow Free Play Club, in which schools stay open after school for kids to play on their own, organizing their own games and rules. She said the aim is to give kids independent opportunities without parents freaking out. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
Across episodes
The excerpts show Haidt’s work treated in two registers. In the 2018 episode devoted to him, Haidt himself develops the argument about social media, iGen and call-out culture. In the earlier 2018 episode with Lenore Skenazy, Haidt appears not as a speaker but as a co-proposer of Let Grow, the nonprofit Skenazy describes as putting independent opportunities back into kids’ lives. A third episode, with David Henderson, mentions the book only in a closing note: the host filling in for Bob Zadek says a free PDF of Bob’s book The Bubble: How Higher Education Became America’s Most Overrated Product features interviews with Brian Caplan and Jonathan Haidt, and that it links financial bubbles in student loan debt with the brewing atmosphere of silencing of free speech on college campuses. David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019) The excerpts show no development or revision of Haidt’s position between episodes; the later treatments restate the book’s themes rather than extend them.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Haidt’s institutional affiliation, his field beyond the label “social psychologist,” or any biographical dates. They do not give the title or holding of any case, the name of any statute, or the text of any amendment. They do not describe the contents of The Coddling of the American Mind beyond the themes quoted, nor the argument of The Bubble beyond the one-sentence summary in the Henderson episode. Where an excerpt ends mid-sentence or at a section break, the discussion that followed is not available here.
Episodes
1 appearance, 2018–2018.
- [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind]] (2018) — Safetyism and the psychological fragility of Generation Z. Social Psychologist and Author