The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, 2018

This book touches on the recent developments in some American universities, and tries to identify some of the causal mechanisms that give rise to the “… new problems on campus, [which] have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.”

• Properties of the Great Untruths:
  1. They contradict ancient wisdom
  2. They contradict modern psychological research on well-being
  3. They harm the individuals and communities who embrace them
• Coddling: overprotecting, to treat with excessive care or kindness. Coddling is normally well-intended on the surface. Yet, once care is given past the point of necessity it starts to become more about the care giver, and how they wish to be perceived or the momentary praise they receive, than it is the subject receiving the care. For example, a mother who shields her child from social experiences, allowing the child to stay home from school or a sports game, because they express concern about it, does so more for the love of herself (it feels good for my kid to like me now) than love for her child (who’s future self will suffer due to hindered development)

  Part 1: The three bad ideas

  The untruth of fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker

• In the 1990s, schools banned peanut products to protect the (4/1000) students that had peanut allergies, however it was later found that exposure to peanuts reduced the likelihood of developing a peanut allergy
• “Regular eating of peanut containing products, when started during infancy, will elicit a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction” from the 2015 LEAP study. In the protected children group, 17% developed a peanut allergy. In the regularly exposed group, only 3% developed an allergy
• Hygiene hypothesis: thanks to hygiene, antibiotics, and too little outdoor play, children don’t get exposed to as many microbes as they once did. This may lead them to develop immune systems that overreact to substances that aren’t actually threatening - causing allergies. In the same way by shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all
• Antifragility: we require stressors to develop properly – like how muscles need to be used or they atrophy. Rather than being like a candle, and thus fearful of the wind, you want to develop to be a fire and wish for the wind
• Safe spaces: in a rape culture debate at Brown university, students advocated against letting a rape survivor speak who was against the idea that America has a rape culture (and argues that places like Afghanistan have a real rape culture). The president stepped in and allowed a competing talk supporting the rape culture side without debate so that students could listen in without being triggered. The university administration also set up a safe space with cookies, colouring books, bubbles, play dough cookies, pillows and blankets, etc.
• Trigger warnings are counter therapeutic, they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health through treatment via therapies. These therapies involve gradual systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes
• Children must be exposed to stressors (within limits and in age-appropriate ways), or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults who are able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their moral convictions and beliefs

  The untruth of emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings

• Rider and elephant metaphor: the rider (conscious thought) is extremely skilled at producing post-hoc justifications for whatever the elephant (primordial brain) does or believes (press-secretary/lawyer)
• 9 most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT):
  1. Emotional reasoning: letting feelings guide your interpretation of reality (I feel depressed, therefore my marriage isn’t working out)
  2. Catastrophizing: focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely
  3. Overgeneralizing: perceiving a global pattern based on a single incident
  4. Dichotomous thinking: viewing events or people on all or nothing terms (I get rejected by everyone, it was a complete waste of time)
  5. Mind reading: assuming you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts (he thinks I’m a loser)
  6. Labeling: assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (I suck, he’s a rotten person)
  7. Negative filtering: focusing exclusively on negatives
  8. Discounting positives: claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial so you can maintain negative judgement (those wins were easy, so they don’t matter)
  9. Blaming: focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, refusing to take responsibility for changing yourself
• Catastrophizing (if I fail this quiz, I fail the class, I get kicked out of school, then I’ll never get a job) and negative filtering (only paying attention to negative feedback) are hallmarks of depression and anxiety
• We can all be more thoughtful about our own speech, but it is unjust to treat people as if they’re bigots when they harbour no ill will. Doing so can discourage them from being receptive to valuable feedback, it may also make them less interested in engaging across different lines of thinking
• What really frightens or dismays us are not the external events themselves, but how we perceive them
• By encouraging students to interpret others in the least generous way possible, schools that teach students about micro-aggressions teach may encourage students to engage in emotional reasoning and other distortions, fostering high levels of distrust and conflict
• Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think

  The untruth of us vs them: Life is a battle between good and evil people

• A UofT philosophy professor teaches about the axis of privilege and oppression. They also suggest that women are a colonized population, since despite encompassing the majority of college students, they are being taught in institutions built by white men
• Since privilege implies the power to dominate the oppressed, this axis is guided towards moral dimensions - implying that one group is good (the oppressed) and one group is bad (the privileged). This fosters an us versus them mentality
• One example of this was at Brown university, where the president (female) and provost (white male) were stormed by students who were outraged that a white woman and a cis white male headed the university. When the provost asked to have a conversation, they denied him because he was a typical heterosexual white man in power. When he explained that he was in fact homosexual, a student stuttered and said it didn’t matter since he was a white male anyways
• Virtue signalling: things people do or say to display that they are virtuous. This is done to stay within the good graces of their group
• Call out culture rewards those doing the calling out with status. If they were to call them out and handle things in private, they wouldn’t receive status for it, and it could be perceived as colluding with the enemy. Social media amplifies this, as there is always an audience who are eager to shame

  Part 2: Bad ideas in action

  Intimidation and violence

• One argument for words being violent is that “words can lead to stress, prolonged stress can lead to physical harm, thus certain types of speech invoking that stress can be a form of violence.” Here’s the issue, just because words may lead to physical harm doesn’t mean it’s a violent act. When breaking up with someone, it leads to elevated cortisol levels and a horrible experience, but we don’t consider the act of breaking up with someone a violent act
• Far left protesters (antifa) justify violent protests, to prevent campus speakers with different ideologies from speaking, as self defence, since allowing those speakers to speak will lead to further violence against the oppressed. These protesters engage in dichotomous thinking, adopting an us versus them attitude, labeling the speakers as evil, and claiming to know what the speaker would say and why it must be prevented at any cost
• “I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. Put on some boots and learn to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym.

  Witch hunts

• “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil
• Common features of with hunts:
  1. They arise quickly
  2. Crimes are perceived as being committed against the collective
  3. Charges are often trivial or fabricated
  4. There is a fear of defending the accused
• Politically homogeneous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts, especially when they feel threatened from the outside. University viewpoint diversity has been decreasing as of late, resulting in an increase in campus protests and ideological groupthink

  Part 3: How we got here

  The polarization cycle

• There has been growing political divide in the US, affective polarization has been increasing, meaning people on one side increasingly hate or fear the other parts and the people in it
• As university student and faculty have shifted left, universities have begun to receive less trust and more hostility from the right
• Increases in racial and political provocation from the right is an essential part of the story of why behaviour is beginning to change on campuses

  Anxiety and depression

• Lowering the bar in applying mental health labels may increase the number of people who suffer, as applying labels can lead to changes in behaviour of those being labeled and cause a self-fulfilling prophecy
• 2 activities correlate strongly with anxiety and depression: social media use and watching TV. 5 activities that have an inverse correlation with anxiety/depression: exercise, religious services, reading books, in-person social interactions, and doing homework
• Anxiety tends to cause threats to jump out at the person, even in ambiguous or harmless circumstances. Anxious people are more likely to perceive harm in innocent questions (so they’re more embracing of microaggressions) or in a passage in a novel (hence wanting more trigger warnings) or in a lecture given by a guest speaker (leading them to want them disinvited or wanting a safe space to attend to during)
• On average, 18 year olds today have spent less time unsupervised and have hit fewer developmental milestones (first kiss, obtaining driving licence, etc.) in the path to autonomy, compared to previous generations
• Anxiety and depression rates are increasing for gen z, for girls more so than boys. This could be due to more sensitivity to social comparison, by signals of being left out, and by relational aggression, which are amplified by social media
• Both depression and anxiety increase the tendency to see the world as more dangerous and hostile than it really is, making students in gen z especially attracted to overprotection

  Paranoid parenting

• Children in GenZ have been deprived of unsupervised time for play and exploration, missing out on many of the challenges, negative experiences, and minor risks that help children develop into strong competent adults
• When children are repeatedly led to believe that the world is dangerous and they cannot be left alone, we should not be surprised if many of them believe it
• There exist large social class differences in parenting styles, the upper class uses concerted cultivation, precisely structuring the child’s life and providing constant supervision. The lower class uses natural growth parenting, more of a hands-off approach, but children in these households are more prone to toxic stress (e.g broken homes, more desperate behaviour, etc.)
• Paranoid parenting teaches the three great untruths, priming children for a culture of safetyism at college

  The decline of play

• Children deprived of free play are less likely to be physically and socially competent as adults, and are less tolerant of risk and more prone to anxiety disorders
• Decline in free play is likely driven by unrealistic fears of strangers, rising competitiveness for admission to top universities, and rising emphasis on testing and homework. Rising availability of smartphones and social media also have an impact
• Free play helps children develop skills of cooperation and dispute resolution. When citizens are not skilled at this, they are less able to work out the ordinary conflicts of daily life, and will be more likely to call for authorities to apply coercive force to their opponents - inviting a bureaucracy of safetyism

  The bureaucracy of safetyism

• As universities expand, so does the need for administrative growth. However, administrative expansion is several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring
• As administration has grown, so has the power to play a role in university governance. Administrators are more likely than professors to think that the way to solve a new campus problem is to create a new office to solve the problem
• Corporatization has followed, in which admin cater to the students, as they pay a lot of money to attend school, and adopt a “customer is always right” approach
• Administrations adopt a “cover your ass” approach, adopting regulations to prevent future lawsuits related to harms of their students - promoting the Untruth of Fragility
• Some of the regulations restrict freedom of speech, often with highly subjective definitions of key concepts. This teaches students that speech should be restricted to avoid emotional discomfort, encouraging catastrophizing and mind reading, promoting the Untruth of emotional reasoning
• Bias response teams are leading to an erosion of trust in campus communities, as it makes it always to anonymously report one another based on subjective claims

  The quest for justice

• Intuitive justice is a combination of distributive justice (the perception that people get what they deserve) and procedural justice (the perception that the process by which rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy)
• Developmental psychologists concluded that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality
• If institutionalized disconfirmation breaks down, such that professors and students become hesitant to raise alternative explanations for outcome gaps, then theories about those gaps may harden into orthodoxy
• Ideas may be accepted not because they are true but because the politically dominant group wants them to be true in order to prompt its preferred narrative and set of remedies
• When social justice efforts aim to achieve equality of outcomes by the group, and when they are willing to violate distributive or procedural fairness for some individuals along the way, these efforts violate many peoples’ senses of intuitive justice
• The correlation of a demographic trait or identity group membership with an outcome gap is often taken as evidence that discrimination (structural or individual) caused the outcome gap - whether this is true needs to be open for debate so that the community can arrive to an accurate understanding of the problem