These are kids who are about 18 to 22.
This was just a few months ago.
And then I say, how many of you had any restrictions?
Like your parents put limits.
Hardly any hands went up.
I said, how many of you, when you have kids, will let your kids use devices without restrictions?
Not a single hand went up.
They all said, no, this was wrong.
I wish my parents hadn't done this.
Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish, and this is The Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, and mental models that will help you master the best of what other people have already figured out.
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Today I'm speaking with Jonathan Hight.
John is the professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business.
John has a PhD in social psychology, is the author of The Happiness Hypotheses, The Righteous Mind, and more recently, The Coddling of the American Mind with his co -author Greg Lukianoff.
We're going to talk about how we coddle kids and what to do about it, what their video games are harmful, the variables of hierarchy for kids and their impact, the role of social media, and what we can do about it.
We also talk about the second order impacts of the new norms of self -censoring and being afraid to play with or challenge ideas.
We explore why it's important to disagree and explore how to disagree in a world where that's becoming less common.
And we explore why we need people to disagree with us.
We need others to make us smart.
And if we surround ourselves with only people who think like us, we're going to reinforce what we already think we know and slow the pace of learning.
While it's comfortable to only be around people that think like we do, it's a path to mediocrity and not excellence.
It's time to listen and learn.
So happy to be here with you, Jonathan.
I'm excited to get to talk to you.
My pleasure. One of the things that seems to be going on in society today is the coddling of children.
Is that something that's new, or is it something that every generation feels about the generation that comes after them?
I think it's something that every generation feels.
Some people have sent me quotes from ancient Greece.
I wish I had them at hand, where they complained about the kids today and how they don't respect their elders and things like that.
So partly, it is a kind of a constant generational thing.
But the reason why, Greg Luciano, and I think that this is so different, is because never before have the mental health statistics just gone haywire for generations so quickly.
So whatever we're doing, and we'll talk about how that happened, but whatever we're doing, kids born after 1995 have really high rates of anxiety, depression, self -harm, and suicide.
So this isn't just a question of, you know, we each have different goals.
This is a question of something's going wrong and we need to figure out why.
So what's going wrong in your opinion?
What's going wrong?
Well first, let's just start this right off with the stats, just so that people are on the same page here.
So when Greg and I were writing our Atlantic article in 2014 and 2015, people were talking about a mental health crisis on campus and I was in charge of finding the statistics to back it up and they were not available.
There were a lot of administrators and college counseling centers saying that they were overwhelmed, but nationally representative data weren't yet showing an increase in major mental illnesses because the data takes about two or three years.
By the time, from the time they collect.
Yeah, there's a long lag.
And so we published the article in 2015 and it really wasn't like that we proved our case.
It was we were making an argument based on a lot of stories we were hearing and plausible reasons to think that thinking in these ways and catastrophizing black and white thinking, the kinds of cognitive distortions that you learn to not do in cognitive therapy.
We made an argument that this will plausibly make students depressed, but it wasn't until 2016, 2017 that tons of data were coming in.
And so Jean Twenge in her book, iGen documents this and the graphs in that book are just stunning.
So I found the original data sources and we made graphs of our own in our book in The Coddling.
And what they show is a big rise in depression and anxiety only, there's no change in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, no other category.
It's just mood disorders.
So depression and anxiety, it begins going up around 2011.
It goes up steadily and sharply.
It goes, I should say it goes up steadily and not so sharply for boys.
It goes up steadily and very sharply for girls.
And it isn't just self -report.
It's not just that kids are talking more openly about depression these days.
It's that the rates of self -harm, that is kids who are hospitalized because they cut themselves, that's for girls only, boys are not changing on that.
That goes way up in the same pattern.
And then it's also suicide.
The boys suicide rate in the United States is up 25%.
The girls suicide rate is up 70%.
So this is not just a generational misunderstanding.
This is a generation iGen or Gen Z that is really having a tough time of it.
Can you walk me through a little bit about like, what does it mean to coddle?
And how is this manifesting itself today?
And is that getting better or worse in your mind?
Yes, so coddling just means over -protecting.
It's a word that we didn't wanna use.
Greg and I had the original title, Arguing Towards Misery.
That's what we titled our article and we submitted it to the Atlantic.
And nearing the end of the process, the editors came up with the coddling of the American mind, harkening back to Alan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind.
And we argued against it and we said, we don't like it and we don't want it to insult kids.
But we tried to find other titles and we couldn't.
It was nothing that was catchy.
It was a really good title in terms of getting people to read the articles certainly.
And once you realize that coddling just means over -protection, we had to admit, yeah, that's what our argument is, that we've over -protected kids.
And so the key thing to keep your eye on is this, that human beings learn from experience.
You can lecture your kids about the dangers of touching a hot stove.
You can lecture them about the importance of dressing warmly to go to school.
But until they touch a hot stove, it doesn't become an automatic reflex to avoid, or be careful around stoves.
And until they go to school wearing tooth in a jacket and are cold, they don't learn that they need to look out for themselves.
So kids learn best from feedback from experience.
And beginning, especially in the 1990s in the United States, and I think perhaps in Canada too, we began really over -protecting kids.
That is not giving them unsupervised time where they could learn from their own mistakes.
We've kept them under our eye because just as the crime rate was plummeting in the 1990s, we did have a real crime wave in this country in the 70s and 80s, just as the crime rate was plummeting in the 90s, we totally freaked out about child abduction.
And we literally stopped letting kids out of our sight.
If you let your kid play in a park, you could be arrested.
That didn't really happen until the early 2000s, the arrests.
But now everybody knows those stories.
And so we've denied kids, we've over -protected them, we've denied them the most important kinds of learning experiences that they need.
And as a result, we think they are more fragile and more easily hurt.
And this is a result of the best intentions of parents in terms of like trying to provide and trying to provide a safe environment for their kids and trying to make sure that nothing bad happens to them.
Is this sort of like the same thing going on with adults more and more too?
What do you mean, over -protecting adults?
Yeah, I mean, we've got airbags, we've got safety mechanisms everywhere.
Like you can be wrong, but we sort of like try to limit the variance of how wrong you can be.
Well, first let's make a very sharp distinction between physical safety and emotional safety.
So in our book, we cover statistics on just how safe childhood has become.
Kids' deaths and auto accidents from diseases, from defective consumer products have plummeted.
So that's great. I mean, we're not, we totally agree with airbags and seat belts, but a number of factors have led to a change in attitudes about children that is extremely overprotective and threat -sensitive.
So in some ways, this is just natural.
That is, as we make progress and as we take for granted that our kids are not gonna die of starvation, and then later they won't die of disease, we focus on other things.
So that's good, that's normal.
As family size has shrunk, that has a huge effect.
How does that impact things?
Well, when I was growing up, there were a lot of families in my town that had three or four kids.
So there were a lot of kids around.
And if you have three or four kids, you can't helicopter them all.
And you have kids' societies developing outside.
You can go outside after school and there'll be kids playing somewhere.
But as family size has shrunk, and this happens all over the developed world, as you get rising prosperity and increasing safety, it has huge changes.
Mostly for the good, people become more tolerant.
They begin to care more about women's rights, gay rights, animal rights, human rights.
So in some ways, society's become more progressive.
But part of that is they become more caring, softer in the sense of the old idea of, spare the rod, spoil the child, that is long gone.
And I'm not saying it should come back.
I'm just saying we develop an idea that children are precious.
There's a, oh, there's a wonderful line from a book.
It's that children have become economically worthless and emotionally priceless, something like that.
And so as we invest more and more in our children, as we invest more and more, and as college gets more competitive to get into, we see them more as an academic project.
In a variety of ways, we've deprived kids of the childhood experiences they most need and we've replaced it with too much supervision and too many afterschool activities.
Is that related, as you were saying that, I'm thinking, is that related to our identity as parents, too?
And we see sort of like our success in relation to our kids in the sense that if they get into a great school, it speaks well of us.
Yes, I think that that is part of it, the bumper stickers that show what school is your kids went to.
And then here, there are complicated interactions that I don't fully understand, in which even as women have begun working, most women now work, they are still held much more accountable for how the kids turn out.
There's an amazing statistic we found that if you look at the total number of hours that women spent doing childcare in the 1950s, when very few of them worked outside the home, and you compare that to the total number of hours of childcare that they do now when the great majority work outside the home,
the number has gone up.
Women have fewer children, many fewer children, they're working much more outside the home, and they're spending more time with kids.
Men are spending more time with kids, too.
So the bottom line is, we are basically over -parenting.
Now, again, not everybody, not in all social classes, but in sort of the common form of middle to upper middle class household, where there are two married parents and a lot of investment in kids, which generally is a good thing, but we've failed to give them the opportunities, thousands of opportunities
to learn from feedback from the world, much of which is painful.
And this is age -specific, too.
I think there's a limit to, like if you haven't done it by...
Oh, I'm sorry, yeah.
I think of it in terms of there being sensitive periods.
So if you think about language learning, so when I was growing up, we started Spanish or French instruction in seventh grade, which is ridiculous, because there's a window for phonology learning, the brain has a window for phonology learning from roughly age seven to 13.
And so if someone comes to this country, let's say, at the age of 13 or 14, they will have an accent for the rest of their lives, while their younger sister, who was 11, will speak with absolutely no accent.
So it's crazy that we don't let kids learn, we don't teach them a foreign language until just as the window is almost closed.
And I would argue that in the same way, there's a sensitive period for social learning, for learning, you go out of the, all over the world, I studied street kids in variety societies, all over the world, that phenomena starts around age eight.
So you don't have six -year -olds living on the street.
But at age eight, their brains developed enough, their social skills have developed enough that they go out, they have all kinds of adventures, they can steal food, they can run from the police, they can find a place to sleep overnight.
On a brighter note, this is when you have children's stories of just kids going off on adventures.
And so from age eight to 12, I think, is a sensitive period where kids are supposed to have adventures with other kids, they play all kinds of games, they self -organize.
And what we've done is we've taken that critical period and we've said, stop, you don't get that anymore.
We're not gonna give you freedom until it's too late.
And so when I speak about the book all around the country, I ask, at what age were you let out?
And people who were born before 1982, the answer is always six plus or minus a year.
We used to always let kids out outside with other kids at the age of six or seven.
And then I ask, just kids born after 1995?
And the answer is usually between 10 and 14.
So we've really cracked down on childhood freedom and I think we're reaping the results of that now.
You mentioned there's a difference between boys and girls.
What accounts for that difference in terms of how it's impacting the mental health?
Yeah, so rates of depression and anxiety before puberty are fairly similar.
But at puberty, there's a big divergence and depression and anxiety generally go up for girls.
So that's been long known.
Girls have more of what are called internalizing disorders, that is disorders, emotional disorders, where they make themselves miserable.
They ruminate more than boys do.
Boys have higher rates of what are known as externalizing disorders, which is they make other people miserable.
And so that's especially conduct disorder and alcoholism, criminality, things like that.
So those gender differences have long been there.
And now bring in social media and look what happens.
So if, suppose you go back to around 2009 to 2011, which is the period when iPhones and Android phones were getting so cheap and accessible that most teenagers had them.
So if you drop a whole bunch of smartphones into the pockets of kids, the boys basically just play video games with them.
And video games try not to not be all that harmful actually.
If you're addicted to them, you're deprived of other things, so that's bad.
But an hour or two of video games a day doesn't seem to really do much.
But the girls are very differently affected.
So boys hierarchy is based on, be it athletic ability or toughness or ability to dominate and insult competitions and teasing, things like that.
But girls, it's about who's in, who's out, who was included, who was excluded, who's friends with who, who knows who's secrets.
And so their aggression is relational.
Girls, when they don't bully each other physically so much, they damage each other's relationships.
And so when smartphones come in, and social media especially, now this multiplies their ability to damage each other's relationships enormously.
And so if you're a girl, even if you're not on social media, somebody says something about you, somebody posts a doctored photo of you, everybody's laughing at you, and you know this is happening, other people tell you, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
You can't even talk back or fight back.
So it's always been hard to be a junior high school kid.
It's always been harder, I think, to be a girl in middle school than a boy in middle school.
And social media has just made it a lot harder.
How do you think we should deal with that?
Oh my goodness, I think it's very clear.
I shouldn't say that, this is all complicated stuff.
But I think what I can say is this, the evidence linking social media to bad mental health outcomes is far from complete.
It's not proof positive, but it's not just simple correlations anymore.
There are now a number of experiments in which they randomly assign people to get off social media for a few weeks, and lo and behold, you see very direct improvements in mental health.
And we see this around the world, or is this very sort of like U .S.
century? That I don't know.
I know in the U .S. and U .K., things are very, very similar.
I was just in the U .K.
They're doing the same thing about restricting kids' mobility, although not as much as we do.
They're having exactly the same gigantic increase in girls' depression, anxiety, and self -harm and suicide in the U .S.
and U .K. and Canada.
We're all at record high levels for teenage, for female teenage suicide.
So this is throughout the Anglosphere.
I don't know about the continent of Europe yet or East Asia or South Asia.
I'll be looking at that next.
Again, this all just emerges in the last few years, and so countries that don't have great statistics might not know it until a year or two from now.
What's the role of somebody in university?
Actually, maybe we can walk through it from different perspectives, the role of the parents in raising kids, the role of students when they're in university or high school, the role of teachers and the role of institutions in terms of how we're all playing into creating this environment that is perhaps
creating fragile kids.
Well, first, let me first go back and drop in the piece that I should have mentioned when I said, oh, it's easy, what do you do?
So I think that if the evidence is now growing that social media directly causes or indirectly causes these terrible symptoms, especially in girls, I think we need to start treating social media a bit like smoking or drinking.
That is, it's really clear that it's bad for kids.
When the millennials got social media in college or later, they weren't damaged by it.
There's no sign that millennials had a crisis of mental health because their social nature was largely, their brains were mostly developed.
There's not that much bullying in college or late high school.
But I think the case can be made and should be made and I'm beginning to make that every middle school principal should say, parents, please don't let your kids have a social media account.
There should be no social media in middle school.
I'm not saying no screens.
Kids love to watch video.
You and me watch television when we were kids.
I'm just saying, we need to set norms, and the norms should be nobody has a social media account until high school or maybe age 16, but that's probably undoable at this point.
And the reason it's so important for the principal to say it and for the American Pediatric Association to say it is because it's a social coordination problem.
So my 12 year old son really wants to be on Instagram because his friends are, and it's really hard because I want him to be connected.
I don't want him to feel excluded, but it's so important to keep kids off of social media that I'm sticking on this.
My life would be so much easier if only half the kids were on Instagram.
Then at least he's not the only one.
And there's parenting pressure too.
I remember, I took screens very seriously when my kids were pre -five, and there was pressure from other parents.
It's like, oh, they're not gonna learn.
They're falling behind, right?
There's this implied message of like, if they don't have an iPad in their hands at three, that they won't know how to use technology.
And the use of technology is what's going to get them a job.
I think that people were thinking that five or 10 years ago back when we all thought tech was wonderful, and Google and Facebook were magical companies, and the bloom is off the rose.
We have a much darker view of media now.
There were a bunch of articles in the New York Times about how the people who created all these systems don't let their kids have them.
In Silicon Valley, the norm has been that they don't let their kids use social media, and that's been going on a long time.
So I think there's much more awareness now that social media in particular has a dark side, and that screen use above a certain, say two hours a day is bad.
So I think it's crucial.
So any parents who are listening to this podcast, I urge you to follow a few simple rules, that is two hours a day of screen time, and actually the Apple controls are very good for that.
The new ones just about a few months ago are actually very good for that.
Two hours a day total screen time, not counting homework, and no social media until high school, and lots of free play outside.
Let your kids out, especially by the age of seven or eight, let them out to have unsupervised time with other kids in a place that's physically safe.
Okay, so now back to your regularly scheduled question.
What was it? What can we all do?
So these are the different roles of everybody involved in this system, right?
Not only do we have technology, which doesn't have any sort of moral compass, but we have parents, we have institutions, and we have students.
And at what point do students take responsibility for themselves?
Yeah, so this is something Greg and I should have done more of in our book.
We are so alarmed by the trends that we're mostly hoping to persuade parents, teachers, principals, university administrators to change their ways.
And while setting limits on screen time, otherwise give kids more unsupervised time.
So that's what we're mostly doing.
I think we should have tried to speak more directly to kids themselves.
One thing I'm finding as I speak about the book around the country, I always ask when I give a talk at a university, I always ask, okay, members of iGen or Gen Z, those of you under 23, did I basically get this right or wrong?
Have I mischaracterized your generation or largely gotten it right?
And they overwhelmingly say, yes, you got it right.
That is they're not defensive.
They recognize, they know that they have huge rates of anxiety, that they know that something's wrong.
And they know, they can see that the social media sites, especially the ones where it's one to many like Facebook or especially Instagram, those are the ones that are bad for the mental health.
So I think that now that it's clear in the last two or three years, now that it's clear that something's going really wrong, I think that - Is it just an education issue?
Like if you're educated, you should be able to make informed decisions, sort of like the, or having or experiencing with nutrition, right?
Well, that's right, nutrition or smoking, that back when it wasn't clear whether these things were bad.
Now with junk food, I think people always knew.
And with cigarettes, they kind of always knew even before the Surgeon General said anything.
So now I think any conversation that parents have with kids or that's had in schools, start by asking the kids, what do you think?
I gave a talk at Auburn University and I met with about 30 students afterwards.
And I asked them, how many of you had a device and had, were on your devices from the time you were in middle school?
And almost every hand goes up.
Because these are kids who are about 18 to 22, this was just a few months ago.
And then I say, how many of you had any restrictions?
Like your parents put limits, hardly any hands went up.
I said, how many of you, when you have kids, will let your kids use devices without restrictions?
Not a single hand went up.
They all said, no, this was wrong.
I wish my parents hadn't done this.
So I think we can talk with kids now and work with them to develop some healthier practices and norms.
How does this relate to cognitive behavioral therapy?
So CBT is a central feature of our book, of the coddling of the American mind.
And that's because the origin story of the book is very much about CBT.
It is that Greg Lukyanov, the first author is prone to depression and he had the worst depression of his life in 2007.
He made very specific plans for how to kill himself.
Actually I should ask him whether he actually bought the materials to suffocate himself and take pills or whether it was just a plan.
But somehow or other, a ray of light broke through or something and he called 911 and broke down crying and got himself to a hospital.
And when he was let out, he enrolled in cognitive behavioral therapy and he credits that with saving his life, with beating back the depression and with largely immunizing himself.
He still has some, nothing like that has ever happened again.
And so he learned these techniques of catching your mind in action.
Some little thing happens, you say, oh my God, I always do that and now I'll never get a job.
And now I'll net, the overgeneralizing, catastrophizing black and white thinking.
And so he learns how to recognize these cognitive distortions.
And then he goes back to his job as the president of the foundation for individual rights and education, pushing back mostly against administrators on college campuses who are trying to restrict student speech largely to protect their own liability issues.
And in 2013, 2014, in that academic year, Greg begins for the first time really seeing students asking for protections from books and speakers and words and acting as though not just that some speaker or book will be outrageous or wrong, but that'll be dangerous and using that language of safety, of emotional
safety. And he sees them catastrophizing and overgeneralizing and using the exact cognitive distortions that he learned to not do.
And so Greg comes to talk to me in May of 2014, we'd met through a mutual friend in New York and he liked my book, The Happiness Hypothesis, where I talked about CBT.
So Greg comes to talk to me to share his idea and I thought it was brilliant.
I thought my God, this is what's happening.
I just began to see and to hear about these trends in the academy as well.
And I thought Greg's explanation made a lot of sense.
And so we set to work writing up this article, writing up this idea, we submitted to the Atlantic and it came out in August of 2015.
And that was actually before the wave of protests, before all hell broke loose, beginning at Yale at Halloween in 2015.
So CBT emerges as the most effective, well, it's not more effective than other techniques necessarily, but it's so easy to do that the success rate's very, very high and it worked for so many things.
And so Greg learning CBT is what first allowed him to recognize this new pattern of thinking on college campuses.
And it's one of the most important techniques we recommend.
Universities around the country are flooded with mental health cases.
They can't keep up with the demand.
And so we think, why not just teach everyone CBT at orientation?
Why not, for $7, you can buy David Byrne's book Feeling Good, it's a really good book, easy to read.
You can buy a subscription, there are various apps that will teach students CBT, just teach everyone CBT because it helps you think better, even if you're not depressed.
So we love CBT and we're recommending it widely.
So students are claiming, I guess, that I'm generalizing here so that we can talk about sort of like the role of the institution.
Like students are saying this is a trigger for me, this is upsetting me, this is, and the response.
Why is the response of that for the institution to be like, okay, well, we're not gonna do that anymore then versus like, the problem isn't with what we're teaching, it's your reaction to what you're teaching and we need to give you tools and skills to deal with that.
That would be kind of invalidating their experience.
So in general, when we're faced with a student requesting an accommodation, we must give them the accommodation, it's not legally must, but practically speaking, if a student comes in and says, I had a hard mental health day, I need an extension on the paper, it's very hard for us to say, well, tough
luck, toughen up. I'm not saying we should, I'm just saying, because the Americans with Disabilities Act, there's a lot of guidance.
And obviously, with rising rates of mental illness, we need to accommodate such students.
So I'm not objecting to it, I'm just saying it leads to an attitude in which everyone is afraid to judge on a case by case basis and the response is pretty much always to give the students what they want.
So individual professors do that, administrators do that.
And so if students are saying that something is threatening or violent or dangerous or emotionally unsafe, it's very rare that someone will stand up and say, is it really, tell me about that.
Let's look for evidence.
Generally speaking, administrators and professors will just say, okay.
Is that because they're following policy and then if they follow policy, they know they're not gonna get in trouble?
I think so, I don't really know.
But I think that's the case.
So we are in a time of changing norms and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Student demographics change, we're racially more diverse, there are many more people with mental illness.
The fact that people with Asperger's or autism can go to college now.
So those are generally good things, but I think we're so sensitive and careful that I think we might have slipped into norms that make it more likely that students will self -label, even students who don't have diagnoses will self -label.
And that's this wonderful term called concept creep from my friend, the Australian psychologist, Nick Haslam.
Ideas of trauma are important in psychology and psychiatry, but now trauma is expanded to mean just unpleasant experience.
I just saw an article the other day online, somebody wrote an article about for survivors of math trauma.
Now, okay, math can be anxiety provoking and I can believe people have had anxiety attacks, but to say that you're a survivor of math trauma, if you're anxious about math, that encourages people to self -label.
And if you self -label, well, a lot of what we do in the academy is we're very careful about people's use of words.
We think that the words students use can have effects on them.
And then we go and allow and encourage people to label themselves as victims, as traumatized, even as marginalized to take that as your identity, as your label, rather than looking for evidence.
Have you been marginalized?
Maybe you have, maybe you haven't, let's look.
So I think we have to be very careful with the labels that we allow or even encourage students to adopt for themselves.
It seems like we almost reward this victim mentality today more than ever.
That's, I think that's true.
Back in the 90s, there were books written about this.
So there are things that seem perennial and so the idea of a victimhood culture is something that is not new just in the last few years.
But I do think that it comes and goes, and I think it's come back in a very strong way recently.
There's a wonderful book called, I think it's called Victimhood Culture.
And there's two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, wrote a wonderful article on microaggressions in 2014, and they analyze what are the dynamics of status in a victimhood culture.
And so, because they were puzzled by why do we have at our most progressive universities, because this dialogue doesn't happen at the places where there's probably the most racism.
They tend to happen at the places that are most egalitarian.
Discourse around microaggressions and victimhood, they say reflects a new moral culture in which you achieve status, not by being strong, not by being beautiful, not by being smart.
You achieve status by emphasizing how much you've been victimized.
And if you haven't been victimized, then you achieve status by standing up for people who've been victimized.
So there is an ethical core to that, but I think it ends up creating a culture that celebrates weakness and victimhood and encourages students to label themselves as victims, which is very disempowering.
Are we going the other way now where people are just afraid to bring up anything controversial?
And then what do you think the second order consequences of that are?
Yes. So there's a whole bunch of things coming together here.
And in our book, we really try to avoid, we really try to avoid simplistic answers because it's very complicated to explain how a new moral culture began to emerge on campus in the last few years.
So we think a whole bunch of things come together in recent years.
Wait a second. What exactly was your question?
There's somebody just wondering.
Well, if the response to sort of the rewarding, this mentality is to step back, cease to push forward something that might be challenging or emotionally difficult or something we've done historically, and it's to change the curriculum or change what we would otherwise say as individuals, not only in organizations.
I mean, I think we can see it more and more in organizations too, where people are just afraid to speak their mind for fear of saying one word wrong.
That's right. And then what are the consequences of that?
Well, that's right.
So let's bring in the other major piece here.
We've already talked about social media, but one impact of it is what's called call out culture.
And so that's, as you were describing, it's a culture in which people are on the lookout for things that they can call out about another person.
And so, life is difficult enough.
Social life is difficult enough.
Diversity is challenging.
Bringing people together from around the world is challenging.
And we believe, we argue in the book, that this can work best if you have a general assumption that you give people the benefit of the doubt.
We all are human. We all make mistakes.
It's very hard to move forward if there's no forgiveness, no tolerance.
But what a call out culture does, and this was Manning and Campbell's point, is that it incentivizes people, it gives them status for finding errors in the speech of others.
And it's remarkable how often that error is a single word.
It's not usually the argument, it's not usually like a critique of someone's argument.
It really is often they use this word, and this word is either inappropriate or problematic.
And so, let me be clear.
Most teenagers, most college students are mentally healthy.
They come to college, they want to learn.
This is not a story about a generation that's lost its minds.
It's a story about a generation that has a new dynamic in which a subset, often a small subset of students, are in this new economy of prestige for calling others out and everyone else is afraid of them.
So, everyone has to watch what they say because someone in the class, someone in the group, could call you out.
And there's a world of difference between speaking in a group where you trust each other and speaking in a group where anyone could report you at any time to the authorities or shame you on social media.
And so, if you can imagine growing up where in your teen years you're always self -censoring, you're always careful.
We think this is what's happening.
This is what many students tell us it's like.
They often just accept it as normal because that's all they've known.
And this means we might have a generation that's afraid to take risks, afraid to play with ideas, afraid to challenge dominant ideas.
It's gonna lead to a lot more conformity and a lot less creativity.
Does it go further than that?
Like I'm just thinking as you're saying that, if I don't develop the skills to deal with adversity or pushback or difficult things when I'm a teenager, what happens when I'm 35 and I run into somebody at work that starts challenging me or I go through a major life struggle or?
No, that's right. So, we don't have to wait till they're 35.
We actually know the answer because the oldest members of Gen Z are 22 now or 23, turning 23 this year.
So, they've been out and they've graduated from college and they've been out in the world, in corporations for one or two years now.
When Greg and I wrote our article in 2015, a lot of people said, oh, come on.
This is just college students being college students.
When they go out to the real world, they'll have to change and now it's clear, no.
It looks like organizations are changing.
Organizations have to, so it depends on the industry.
So, I've heard from a number of people in journalism, the arts and media and tech.
In those four industries, it seems as though the organizations are changing to accommodate the students.
And again, it's not most of them.
All it takes is a couple who bring these new ideas about speech is violent, speech is traumatizing.
And so, I'm now often hearing stories about people who hired, they've hired young people and this young person hears a joke or overhears a joke.
Someone tells someone else a joke and they find the joke distasteful.
And so, they don't just ignore it.
They don't talk to the person.
They just go straight to HR and file a grievance report.
And again, running a company is very difficult and you always have blowups among your people.
If now, you have people who won't give each other the benefit of the doubt, but who take language in the worst possible way and assume the worst about each other, it's very difficult to run an organization.
So, I think leadership is needed.
And again, it's not that these are bad people or bad kids.
It's that they've been raised with a set of norms that's really bad for them, that makes them very bad cooperators.
And if you can't cooperate, you can't be employed.
So, I think leadership is needed to explain.
Yes, you're gonna hear things.
You're gonna be insulted.
We have to work on these problems as a group.
Come talk to me, but we have to do it informally, not with a bureaucratic procedure.
And we have to really try to cut each other some slack.
Is there anything related to this where it seems like we're not taught how to disagree with people, either through school or through our parents?
No, that's right. How should we think about that?
Like how should we disagree with people?
Yeah, so first, okay, so first is you have to recognize why it's so important to do so.
I recommend that everybody read John Stuart Mill on liberty, just chapter two, that's all you have to read.
Oh, and in fact, you don't have to read all of it.
At Heterodox Academy, an organization that I co -founded with some other professors, we find that Mill's classic work from 1859 is so relevant that we produced an edition which is just 50 % of chapter two.
So, you get this whole great work of Western civilization in 7 ,000 words.
If you go to heterodoxacademy .org, slash Mill, and what Mill showed, I mean, Mill can be writing today.
It's all the same questions.
What he showed is that first of all, to assume that you know that someone else is wrong, that you know, on my side is right, we have no need to discuss this because they're wrong, is such arrogance and most people who think that are wrong about many things, as will be shown in several decades later.
So, we can't be so sure that we're right.
More importantly, we need others to argue against us in order to strengthen our own thinking.
He says, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
You really can't know what you know until you've had a critic.
So, you have to seek out your critics, you have to welcome them.
So, when I give talks now, I've made it a habit to start by asking in the question period, people who disagree with me, people who have a counter -argument, please come forward first because let's get those counter -arguments out there first, because that's the only way that I'm gonna get better at what I'm thinking
and arguing about. So, first you have to accept that we actually need others to make us smart and if we surround ourselves with people who confirm our existing thoughts, we get stupid, quite frankly stupid.
And in this age of social media bubbles, that's a real problem.
So, your question was how do we learn how to argue?
Once people accept the case for why you need to be exposed to people who disagree with you and who challenge your ideas, then the question is how do you do it?
And here, I have two recommendations.
One, the one that worked for me that really helped me because I was a kind of arrogant argumentative teenager and young adult, is reading Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
And it's so easy once you read, it's a great book, it's a really fun book.
And what he teaches you is don't come out saying you're wrong and here is why.
Come out saying, oh, that's very interesting.
I think you're right about that one thing there or we have this in common or I can understand why you're saying that or here's something in my experience that confirms what you said.
And once you start by agreeing on something, then you can pivot to, but now on the other hand, it seems to me that and then you can raise your point and then you're much more likely to persuade the person.
So there are basic social skills.
If you're a homo sapien, you evolved for a group combat, you evolved for confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
We're not really evolved to be academics or scientists searching for a truth in an unbiased way.
We evolved to basically, you know, CYA and win in social competitions.
But if you learn some skills, you can actually be very effective as a teacher, as someone who persuades, as someone who changes people.
It's interesting as you say that in the context of evolution, I was thinking like, we don't often change our mind when somebody's disagreeing with us even if they're polite and they acknowledge where they might be wrong and you know, where we might disagree a little bit.
But it does have the impact of sort of signaling to your tribe that you're a member.
Yeah, that's the problem.
So in the righteous mind, in my second book, it's about moral psychology, I had a section there.
It was one thing I got really wrong.
Well, there was something that was right about it.
I talk about what would an ideal society be?
And I say, given our limitations, you know, an ideal society would be one in which all of our reputations are on the line all the time.
And I was referring back to the story of the Ring of Gyges from Plato's Republic, in which Plato asks, if a man had the mythical Ring of Gyges in which you turn the stone, the gem inwards on your hand, it makes you invisible, he asks what man would stay on the right path?
What man would not avail himself of the treasures and the women of other men?
And he says that it's only our fear for reputation that makes us ethical.
And I think there's a lot of evidence for that, that that's very powerful.
That's one of the major producers of moral behavior.
So I wrote in the righteous mind, this is in writing, this is in 2011, that would be a great society if all of our reputations are on the line at all, you know, all the time.
And now, looking back on that, seven years later, I realized why I got that wrong, because once we had social media, all of our reputations are on the line all the time, but not in a consistent or honest way.
That is, anything you say can and will be distorted, taken out of context, used against you, so you better watch what you say.
And we're finding that life where your reputation's on the line all the time is actually hell.
It's really hard for teenagers, but you know, look, it's really hard for adults, for academics.
I, you know, we used to be able to be provocative, and in academic seminars and at conferences, we could be provocative.
We could raise hypotheses that could even be upsetting to some people.
But that kind of ended in the last few years, because whatever you say, even if it's at an academic conference, if someone tweets it and takes one line, you know, then people go to town on you for that one line.
And so we're all teaching, thinking, living in a minefield.
It's getting harder to even think out loud, and sort of like hypothesize in real time about exploring different paths in the conversation.
That's right, there's a playfulness.
So it used to be really fun to be a professor.
I mean, I still, look, I still love it.
I've got incredible job security.
I get to, you know, read and think and do what I want all the time.
So I love being a professor.
But there used to be a playfulness and a provocativeness to it, to being an academic.
And I do feel, and I've heard a lot of other people say the same thing, that that kind of went out the window over the last few years.
Well, what's the best counter argument to your theory on what's happening, causing the mental sort of strain on?
In terms of what's causing the rise in mental illness, some people say that it's not a real rise, that it's just that young people are more comfortable talking about mental illness.
And that was plausible until two or three years ago.
Well, that's when the data came out.
But now that it's clear that it's not just reports of depression and anxiety, it's actual hospital admissions for self -harm.
That's not self -report, that's actual blood.
And it's actual death, it's actual bodies.
I can't remember if I said this already, but the suicide rate for teenage boys is up 25%.
The suicide rate for teenage girls in America is up 70%.
The numbers in the UK are not that different.
So that one. Do you have data for other countries?
I've just looked in the US, UK, and then Canada and Ireland also had that.
Suicide, we need to look at East Asia, where they have very high rates of device use.
But it's gonna be complicated there because suicides there traditionally at least are more about, what do you call them, Durkheim?
Anyway, they're either suicides because you're too tightly bound in and you kill yourself from shame, and that's more the East Asian situation, traditionally it was.
And then there are suicides because you're too loosely bound in, or you're suffering from an anomie or normlessness, which is more the Western situation.
So I don't know what we'll find when we really start looking at suicide stats.
Again, they're brand new.
I mean, this only really began around 2012, 2013.
So we'll have to look.
How do you use this research?
You're a parent of two kids.
How do you use it raising your kids who are nine and 12?
Yes, yeah. So I'm raising two kids.
My wife Jane and I are raising two kids in New York City.
And fortunately we met Lenore Scanezi like five or six years ago.
She's the woman who wrote Free Range Kids.
She became famous and infamous because in 2009, she let her nine -year -old son ride the New York City subway alone back to their house from Bloomingdale's in the Upper East Side to their house somewhere else in Manhattan.
And thank God we met her and read her book Free Range Kids.
I recommend it to everybody who has kids.
And she completely convinced us that overprotection is bad, that kids need more experience.
And so we were fortunate.
I mean, Manhattan's incredibly safe.
When I was growing up, it was dangerous.
I grew up in Scarsdale, a town north of the city.
And so we had a real crime wave here in this country, but it ended in the 90s.
And now it's so safe, my wife, my kids, they can walk around at night.
I don't know anybody who's been mugged in recent years.
It's really safe in Manhattan and most of New York City, much of New York City at least.
So we are fortunate to live near some beautiful parks and playgrounds.
And we encourage our kids to go to them right nearby.
So we give my kids errands.
And at first it was really scary for us.
I mean, that's the thing.
I talked to other parents about this, about the importance of letting their kids out and let them run an errand.
You can see the tent, like, but what if they hit by a car?
And of course, yes, you should think that.
But after, but then you have to think, well, at what age were you let out?
Weren't you riding your bicycle around town when you were eight?
Weren't you and your friends going to a store when you were nine?
And then the first few times your kids do it, and maybe they're five minutes late getting home and you're panicking, and then they walk in and they say, yeah, I stopped here to talk to somebody.
You realize, oh yeah, okay, this is normal.
So we are making a deliberate effort, and it is hard at times.
It is scary at times, but we're so happy we're doing it.
Our kids think of themselves as more independent.
They're proud of that, that they're more independent than other kids their age.
In New York City, my son, especially once he entered sixth grade and had to go to a middle school about a half mile away, he takes the subway all over the city now.
So yeah, Lenore has helped us to raise our kids free range.
I like a lot of those ideas and I try to put some in practice with my kids as well.
And for reasons I'll leave off the air, in Ontario, the province that I live in equivalent to a state, it's illegal to leave a child under the age of 16 unsupervised.
Now is that in your home it's illegal or you just mean like in a car or a park or what?
Oh, it's a blanket statement.
And then if you start digging into it, like child services says, you can't do it under 12, but the Red Cross offers babysitting courses at 11, like none of these things line up and it all seems so manipulable towards parents who try to give their kids more freedom.
That's right, there's the problem of law and there's the problem of other parents who will shame you.
So first I would encourage you to find out exactly what the law says because I was surprised to learn that in the United States, most states don't set an age.
There are a few states that will say 12 or something, but you have to look at for what?
And so leaving kids alone, like can you leave your kids alone at home when you go pick up something at the store?
Very few states actually set an age.
The problem is not necessarily the state laws.
The problem is often that child protective services or the local police enforce it in a certain way.
In New York state, so what I did is I gave my son when I first sent him out, I wrote up a little thing, it was like a free range kids license, which says, my name is Max Haid, I'm this old, I live here.
My parents think it's appropriate for me to learn how to walk around independently, just like they did when they were my age.
If you don't believe me, first look up New York State law such and such, which says that the state gives parents substantial leeway to make these decisions.
If you still don't believe me, please go read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then read free range kids, and then let me go.
So someone did a calculation.
A lot of the cases of arrest are when parents leave a kid in a car.
Now, if you leave a toddler in a car, I can at least understand why people are upset.
But there have been parents arrested believing an 11 year old kid in a car.
Someone did a calculation, I need to look this up, that at present rates of abduction, there are about 100 people, 100 kids abducted a year in the United States by strangers.
At present rates of abduction, you'd have to leave your kid alone in a car, in a parking lot for 700 ,000 years before they would probably be abducted.
So it's a ridiculous, ridiculous policy.
It prevents us from raising kids free range.
The goal of the law should be to stop kids who are treating their kids badly and neglecting them.
And unfortunately, the implementation recently has been if you're not supervising your kid, you're neglecting them.
And that really contributes, I believe, to suicide.
And it gets so minute, right?
Like letting a grade three or four walk to school, if it's like, I don't know, 500 meters, it's like, you can't do that.
Not only do parents look at you differently, but the school looks at you differently.
And everybody in this sort of like ecosystem is like, you're doing something that's different.
It stands out and it challenges my notion of a parent and what parenting is.
Because if you say, well, I'm raising my kid free range, I want my kid to learn how to cross streets on his own, I want my kid to learn some sense of being a self -governing, autonomous creature, that's a rebuke to them.
And then they're gonna get very defensive and they're gonna say, no, no, no, it's you, who's the terrible parent.
And that's why I'm actually optimistic that this is gonna change.
Because as I said, two years ago, we didn't know the suicide stats.
We didn't know the terrible things that are happening.
It's only in the last year or two that it's really become public knowledge and most people still don't know it.
So I'm hopeful that with our book, with Greg and I are talking about this a lot, I'm hopeful that once everyone realizes that this is absolutely horrible, especially for girls.
We could be losing a whole generation of girls to depression, anxiety and fragility.
So I think we're gonna see change because now you have an argument, oh yeah, what you think I'm the bad parent?
Here's the future for your daughters or for your kids more generally, but especially for your daughters.
What else do you do other than sort of like give them errands and more unsupervised time?
So my wife and I, I mean, look, we both backslide a lot and we often do help them out and solve problems for them, but then we'll sort of catch each other and say, let them, my parents, so my parents spoke a little bit of Yiddish as most American Jews of their generation did.
And one thing that my mother would constantly say to my father is Harold, lezam zayin, which I believe means let him be.
Just let, my dad would say, have you done your homework?
Are you ready? And my mother would say, let him be.
Let him make his mistakes.
Let him suffer the consequences.
So we just try a little harder to let our kids learn in the most effective possible way and learning from feedback from experience is 10 or a hundred times more effective than telling kids a fact.
That's another way that we coddle kids is we don't let them fail.
Like if they forget their homework, we'll drive to the school and we'll pick it up and we'll get it and we'll make sure it's done because we just don't want them to experience that sort of pushback.
That's right and it's in part for that reason.
It's also in part as things get more competitive, admission to college is more competitive.
So we especially do that when it has to do with success in school, at least in middle class and above.
So that's another factor here.
Again, there's lots of threads coming together.
There is no simple explanation for why this has happened to us.
It seems increasingly just to sort of take a sidetrack or maybe a parentheses here that we're wrapping the notion of intelligence and smarts up into grades more and more.
I'd love to hear your thoughts exploring that and what it means to be successful that we're not teaching.
Like what does it mean to be smart versus academic smart?
It seems like we're narrowing our definition of smart.
Absolutely. There's a lot of writing recently about meritocracy.
I mean, this is all just such an interesting social science puzzle.
What is happening to our society?
And in a sense, we're having this conversation on the deck of the Titanic as the Titanic is possibly going down.
I mean, the political polarization, the rise of actual Nazis marching.
I mean, the violent, I mean, there's not a lot of violence yet, but we have a lot more violence now than we did a few years ago.
So there are a lot of dark clouds.
There are a lot of bad things happening.
And let's see. Wait, I'm sorry, I lost the thread again.
What was your question?
Our notions culturally and as a society of what it means to be smart - Oh yeah, that's right.
I mean, we're narrowing that to more academic.
Okay, yeah. So there's a lot of interesting writing about meritocracy.
And there was an interesting article, especially with the death of George H .W.
Bush the other day about the old WASP aristocracy.
And a lot of things changed when Harvard changed its admission criteria to be who was your father and, you know, what kind of young gentlemen are you to SAT scores and to test scores, which are largely measures of IQ.
That started us on a path to meritocracy based on, essentially on IQ, supplemented by conscientiousness and ability to work hard or parental pressure to work hard.
And as American society has gotten more competitive, basically it's on test scores.
And so when this happens, as with all problems with metrics, if you measure X and you reward on X, then people are gonna gun for X.
But if what you really want is Y, then you shouldn't be focusing so much on X.
And unfortunately we focused on test scores.
And this is especially probably in East Asia I've noticed.
My family went, we visited a few countries in East Asia a few years ago, where the pressure in Korea in particular, but it's similar in other countries, there's so much emphasis on the test that kids have very little time to play.
So, yes, I think that we are changing the nature of childhood and we're too focused on skills that actually don't matter as much.
And what we're creating is a generation of people who do well on tests but may not have the, may not develop and not have a chance to develop the human skills that would actually be better for innovation, better in business.
Thinking out loud here a little bit, it seems to tie into what we were talking about earlier, possibly about people following policy and procedure and not knowing when to exercise judgment and overrule the policy or procedure or this is an exceptional case versus like, I know if I follow this, I'm not gonna get
in trouble. I can never get in trouble because I'm just following what I was told to do.
Exactly, so the name here, the name that everyone should know is Philip Howard.
He has a wonderful TED talk a number of years ago.
Let's see if I can find the name of his TED talk.
At any rate, it wasn't quite called Kill All the Lawyers but it was basically about how law is strangling us.
And so, Philip has written several wonderful books including The Death of Common Sense about how in many institutions, in all institutions, teachers, doctors used to have much more leeway to exercise common sense and then they could learn from feedback and they could develop skills of judgment.
But the kind of the bureaucratizing mindset, the increasing use of metrics, has led us to, in a sense, strangle judgment and put in procedures.
Barry Schwartz also has a wonderful book on practical wisdom.
So yes, these are big changes in our society that I think are robbing us of wisdom.
If we don't let people exercise common sense, we end up with all these atrocious cases of just stupid things happening, like a parent who's arrested because they let their kid play in a park.
What are the skills that you would want students to have that you're seeing come through school?
I know you deal mostly with master students but is there a change in the students over time that you're like, oh, this is probably gonna impact them later down the road?
And it'd be really advantageous for them to start learning this other than sort of like how to disagree with people and how to operate in a world that might push back and have the sort of like anti fragility of the world pushing back on your ideas or your beliefs.
Well, I think that the idea of playing with ideas that they're not personal is a very important skill.
And so what I've noticed among young people, like especially in discussions or discussions or on Twitter or elsewhere is there's an increasing use of ad hominem argument.
There's an increasing sense among young scholars, even young graduate students and people in their 20s in the Academy that what you do when you have a dispute with someone is you don't address their ideas, you discredit them.
And Greg calls this the perfect rhetorical fortress.
You have a set of arguments about the danger of their ideas and how they're giving comfort to bad people and how they're associated with bad people.
So it's a striking thing that's happened to us is when we published our article in 2015, we expected a lot of pushback and there was almost none.
That is almost nobody said we were wrong.
People said we were bad, but almost nobody said we were wrong.
And now here it is three years later and we just published this book and it's gotten a lot of press and it's gotten two really negative reviews.
It's gotten the dozens of really positive reviews, but it's gotten two negative reviews.
And in those negative views, they barely touch our arguments.
They don't really say that we're wrong.
Again, they just say that we're bad.
We're bad people. And so I think that there's a really important skill in a modern secular liberal society, especially in the academic world, that you have an ability to discuss and debate ideas without taking them personally.
And the idea that if someone disagrees with you, they're not attacking you.
So that's one that I've noticed.
I was talking to somebody from France who said that in France it's very common to assign kids in high school especially.
Here's a position, write an essay about why you think it's right and write an essay about why you think it's wrong.
Actually practice taking both sides and that's commonly done in debate.
But I think it's rarely done in our regular schooling.
Here's an issue, what do you think about it?
Go find evidence to make your case?
And that's just for your side.
And we don't expose, I think we really need to give people practice, making the case on both sides, learning from people who honestly believe something.
This was John Stuart Mill's point.
As I said, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
But then he goes on to say, it is not enough that he hear these other views from his teachers who do not believe them.
He must hear them and I'm paraphrasing, he must hear them from people who actually believe them and can give them their fullest exposition.
So I think there's a whole suite of intellectual virtues, intellectual humility, generosity of spirit, giving people the benefit of the doubt, not being overconfident.
There's a whole suite of intellectual virtues that I think have gone by the wayside.
As the emotional volume gets turned up, as the tribal necessity gets turned up, that is as the things you say are taken as gang signs, what team are you on?
So this is why, as we say a stopped clock is right twice a day but it would be very hard for people on the left to ever say that Donald Trump was right about anything.
He must be right about something here and there.
But if you say that, you could get in big, big trouble.
And I'm sure it's the same on the right.
I mean, these processes work on both sides.
It just goes back to the sort of black and white thinking.
It's a form of intellectual laziness.
It's, well, laziness would indicate that the reason you're not doing it is because you just don't want to put in the work.
But I think it's not laziness.
I think it's closer to cowardice.
I think it's, and I don't want to say cowardice because we're all suffering from it.
I think it's just life in a minefield, life in a call -out culture.
If you live in a call -out culture, you can't do nuance.
You're not allowed to do nuance.
Everything's black and white, the other side is evil and they're never right about anything.
And part of that is signaling again to your tribe.
Exactly, that's right.
So some people use the word virtue signaling, yeah.
So if you analyze speech online and increasingly speech in class, and for a generation that grew up with social media, all speech is essentially online or at least could be.
So I think we need more walls to mark off different areas of civil life.
We need spaces where different norms apply.
I wouldn't quite call them safe spaces, but I would call them domains with different norms.
And let me also be clear.
Greg and I have always been clear, I hope, that if students want to create a safe space for LGBT students or black students as a space, a social space, a space where they get together and have different norms, that's great.
That's the First Amendment right of association.
Our argument has always been that the classroom must not be a safe space.
That classrooms must be places where any claim will be challenged, not attacked, not shamed, but counter arguments backed by evidence will be given.
Tested, yes, tested.
I wanna switch gears a little bit before we wrap up here, a moral psychologist.
What is morality? Oh boy, okay, in seven seconds or less.
So I'll just jump into it.
Let's see what comes out of my mouth.
So I think of morality as a thing that people do.
That is if you have a bunch of people somewhere in the world, they're gonna have cooking and cuisine.
That's just something humans do.
They're gonna have music.
That's something people do.
They're gonna have language.
They're also gonna make judgments about each other.
If you have two people, and especially if you have three, you're gonna have people talking about or judging others.
Humans create normative worlds.
Norms emerge quickly.
How do we address each other?
What's appropriate?
Can I take that thing that you were just using?
So when you have humans interacting, they almost immediately develop norms about behavior and then they judge each other based on those norms.
That's morality. So moral psychology, at least as I've been doing it, there are many different forms.
But moral psychology as I do it looks at how can it be that morality is very different around the world?
There are feudal societies and egalitarian societies and there's so many different, there are cannibalistic societies, there are trading societies.
How can that be? Well, at the same time, the elements of morality are often so similar.
So when I was in graduate school, I read a bunch of ethnographies for the first time, that is book -length treatments of other cultures.
I was amazed, my professor Alan Fisk, a wonderful anthropologist, assigned us all these books.
I was amazed that practices around purity and pollution were common around the world.
So in the Hebrew Bible, women are supposed to avoid touching sacred objects during their menstrual period and for a month or two after giving birth.
Well, it turns out menstrual pollution and birth pollution are very common in societies that have never met.
They didn't share this idea.
Somehow it came out of the mind that the body goes through cycles of holiness or ability to approach holy objects.
So as a psychologist, I thought, wow, this is really cool.
I used to read a lot of Carl Jung when I was younger.
Carl Jung talked about archetypes and he got kind of mystical about it.
But I just took an evolutionary view, which is just as our tongues contain receptor cells for five different properties of the world, so we taste sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami, or sort of a meat substance, because our ancestors ate fruit and meat, and so we evolved to have tongues that are responsive.
And in the same way I said, what are the taste buds of the moral sense?
And I was a postdoc at the time with Richard Schwader, another wonderful anthropologist, and one of my friends, Craig Joseph, who was also working with Schwader, he and I scanned a lot of anthropological literature and evolutionary literature looking for matches, that is, for example, reciprocity.
There's a great evolutionary paper by Robert Trivers about the evolution of reciprocity, and lo and behold, it turns out that every human society does reciprocity, and that's the basis of fairness.
So we hypothesized from our reading, from an academic exercise, that the five best candidates for being the taste buds of the moral sense or the moral foundations were care and compassion, because we're mammals, we nurture our young.
Fairness, reciprocity, versus cheating, we're all sensitive to that.
Loyalty, group loyalty versus betrayal.
Authority versus subversion, where hierarchical creatures, like most primates.
And sanctity or purity, versus degradation.
Now here, we're different from other primates, we have a sense of disgust, and this was based on my work with Paul Ross and Ed Penn.
So those were the five original moral foundations, and since then, we think there are actually probably a bunch more.
The one that we think the evidence is best for is liberty or autonomy.
If you restrain a kid's arms or an animal's arms, they want to escape.
The Hebrew Bible tells the story of the Jews escape from bondage in Egypt.
So that, we think, is the sixth moral foundation, liberty, autonomy.
And so if you assume that everybody in the world, if you're a human being, you have these taste buds, you have these receptors, but your culture may or may not build on them.
So every culture builds to some extent on fairness, but then often it's different.
Like, okay, if a Hatfield kills a McCoy, does that mean that a McCoy can kill a Hatfield?
Well, in traditional societies, yes, but in a modern secular society, no.
So moral psychology, as I do it, is about this thing that people do, which is based in part on our innate evolved nature with lots and lots of different modules or innate abilities, as they develop variably in different cultural contexts.
Are there cultural specific ones as well that are layered on top of these sort of like, maybe universal human moral issues?
Yeah. Moral attributes?
Yeah, yes and no. So I would say that you can get, you can moralize something, you can make something a moral issue, but it's not gonna really stick or work unless it's at least related to one of the moral foundations.
So let's look at a few in modern times.
So homosexuality is moralized and said to be bad in many cultures, not all, but in many, most large scale societies for thousands of years.
So that was a pretty direct basis.
You know, it's treated as an abomination in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible.
And so that's clearly linked to the sanctity foundation.
So that's a kind of an easy development.
It's not innate that we dislike homosexuality.
It's a cultural development that's very common.
But in the last 30 years or so, we've had an amazing and wonderful transformation in which it's been decoupled from the sense of disgust.
And I think young people, I think older people, even if they are in favor of gay marriage and gay rights, they often have a more visceral sense because that's the way they were raised.
Those were the pairings that were made for them when they were growing up.
But now we've had made such progress on gay rights so quickly that I think homophobia has become a great, great moral sin in many subcultures in America and elsewhere.
And there, I don't think that's linked to, well, it is linked to disgust perhaps.
I think people who are homophobic are treated as contaminating, as beyond the pale.
But I would think that that's more related to compassion and fairness.
That it's wrong, it's cruel, it's unfair to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.
So I take a very dynamic view of cultural evolution.
So we have an innate human nature, but that doesn't mean that we have to live in a fixed way.
It just means the building blocks that are given to us are innate, but how we put them together can change.
And what we've seen in the last 30 or 40 years has been astonishingly rapid change in how we use these moral foundations to construct different moral edifices.
And there's nobody consciously sort of doing this, but it sounds like these things maybe are innate in us and we awaken them through culture.
And the reason that culture would do that is to get a group of people to behave in a certain way or.
I wouldn't quite say that culture wants people to behave in a certain way.
Evolution proceeds with no necessary direction.
Now, cultural evolution sometimes does have direction.
So for example, I spoke to somebody who was active in the gay rights campaigns around 2008 and 2012, and she told me that in 2008, a lot of the arguments were made based on rights.
Like, people should have rights, why don't people have the same rights to marry?
And that generally didn't work so well.
And in 2012, they focused more on compassion.
They're just wonderful moving videos.
If you Google Mainers United from the state of Maine, they put on these beautiful 30 -second ads in which people would basically testify, you know, I'm a reverent, I'm a minister at this church and you know, when I found out that my son or nephew was gay, it was hard for me at first, but Jesus told us
to love, love everyone and that means everyone.
And so they were able to use, they were able to basically appeal to other moral foundations and make really morally and emotionally elevating pitches.
So that was an example of, I would say, deliberate cultural evolution.
I mean, people, you know, in biological evolution, there's no guide, but in cultural evolution, there can be political movements that can be more or less skillful.
So yeah, I think that human intervention does happen in cultural evolution.
That's awesome. Jonathan, thank you so much for your time.
Where can people find out more about you?
I have a YouTube channel.
I forget how you find that, but there's one there.
We have a lot of stuff on the book.
If you go to thecoddling .com, Greg and I have put up some stuff.
We'll have more stuff soon.
And therighteousmind .com.
I have a lot of materials there.
Perfect, thank you so much.
My pleasure. Can I just add one thing, which is for anybody who actually wants to help a group learn how to talk across differences and learn how to gain the benefits of diversity because you learn how to give people the benefit of the doubt and ask questions in a good way, go to openmindplatform .org.
It's a resource that me and Caroline Mellon, a few others created for use in schools, in companies, in churches, in synagogues, and nonprofits.
It's really hard these days to run an organization or to be part of an organization.
There's a lot of political polarization and division, and we created Open Mind, the Open Mind platform, to help people address that.
Excellent, thank you.
My pleasure, Shane.
Hey, guys, this is Shane again.
Just a few more things before we wrap up.
You can find show notes at fernamstreetblog .com, slash podcast, that's F -A -R -N -A -M -S -T -R -E -E -T -B -L -O -G, dot com, slash podcast.
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This is all the good stuff I found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more.
Thank you for listening.
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