#Jonathan Haidt

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jon Haidt

Published: Mar 9, 2023

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. 

I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.” He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title.

After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career. 

Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker 2. Always trust your feelings 3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

Each of these untruths was the exact opposite of a chapter in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which explored ten Great Truths passed down to us from ancient societies east and west. We published our book in 2018 with the title, once again, of The Coddling of the American Mind. Once again, Greg did not like the title. He wanted the book to be called “Disempowered,” to capture the way that students who embrace the three great untruths lose their sense of agency. He wanted to capture reverse CBT. 

The Discovery of the Gender-by-Politics Interaction

In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the Covid shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.) 

I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret. 

Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition. 

Figure 1.  Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19-24, 2020. Graphed by Jon Haidt.

In recent weeks—since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens—there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction: Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major US survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89). 

Figure 2. Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).

The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g., 

Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data: 

Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.

After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.”

Journalist Matt Yglesias also took up the puzzle of why liberal girls became more depressed than others, and in a long and self-reflective Substack post, he described what he has learned about depression from his own struggles involving many kinds of treatment. Like Michelle Goldberg, he briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “we’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” to quote a tweet from the Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible. As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”

Yglesias tells us what he has learned from years of therapy, which clearly involved CBT:

It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control: • Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.” • Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.” And the question you then ask yourself is whether becoming angry made things better? Did it solve the problem? 

Yglesias wrote that “part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize.” He then described an essay by progressive journalist Jill Filipovic that argued, in Yglesias’s words, that “progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.”

Yglesias quoted a passage from Filipovic that expressed exactly the concern that Greg had expressed to me back in 2014: 

I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. 

I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control. As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.

How a Phone-Based Childhood Breeds Passivity

There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group. Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations, is full of amazing graphs and insightful explanations of generational differences. In her chapter on Gen Z, she shows that liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media (31% in recent years, compared to 22% for conservative girls, 18% for liberal boys, and just 13% for conservative boys). Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends. Twenge shows in another graph that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, liberal girls spent more time with friends than conservative girls. But after 2010 their time with friends drops so fast that by 2016 they are spending less time with friends than are conservative girls. So part of the story may be that social media took over the lives of liberal girls more than any other group, and it is now clear that heavy use of social media damages mental health, especially during early puberty. 

But I think there’s more going on here than the quantity of time on social media. Like Filipovic, Yglesias, Goldberg, and Lukianoff, I think there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups. 

The Monitoring the Future dataset happens to have within it an 8-item Locus of Control scale. With Twenge’s permission, I reprint one such graph from Generations showing responses to one of the items: “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” This item is a good proxy for Filipovic’s hypothesis about the disempowering effects of progressive institutions. If you agree with that item, you have a more external locus of control. As you can see in Figure 3, from the 1970s until the mid-2000s, boys were a bit more likely to agree with that item, but then girls rose to match boys, and then both sexes rose continuously throughout the 2010s—the era when teen social life became far more heavily phone-based. 

Figure 3. Percentage of boys and girls (high school seniors) who agree with (or are neutral about) the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Jean Twenge in her forthcoming book Generations.

When the discussion of the gender-by-politics interaction broke out a few weeks ago, I thought back to Twenge’s graph and wondered what would happen if we broke up the sexes by politics. Would it give us the pattern in the Gimbrone et al. graphs, where the liberal girls rise first and most? Twenge sent me her data file (it’s a tricky one to assemble, across the many years), and Zach Rausch and I started looking for the interaction. We found some exciting hints, and I began writing this post on the assumption that we had a major discovery. For example, Figure 4 shows the item that Twenge analyzed. We see something like the Gimbrone et al. pattern in which it’s the liberal girls who depart from everyone else, in the unhealthy (external) direction, starting in the early 2000s. 

Figure 4. Percentage of liberal and conservative high school senior boys (left panel) and girls (right panel) who agree with the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Zach Rausch.

It sure looks like the liberal girls are getting more external while the conservative girls are, if anything, trending slightly more internal in the last decade, and the boys are just bouncing around randomly. But that was just for this one item. We also found a similar pattern for a second item, “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” (You can see graphs of all 8 items here.) 

We were excited to have found such clear evidence of the interaction, but when we plotted responses to the whole scale, we found only a hint of the predicted interaction, and only in the last few years, as you can see in Figure 5. After trying a few different graphing strategies, and after seeing if there was a good statistical justification for dropping any items, we reached the tentative conclusion that the big story about locus of control is not about liberal girls, it’s about Gen Z as a whole. Everyone—boys and girls, left and right—developed a more external locus of control gradually, beginning in the 1990s. I’ll come back to this finding in future posts as I explore the second strand of the After Babel Substack: the loss of “play-based childhood” which happened in the 1990s when American parents (and British, and Canadian) stopped letting their children out to play and explore, unsupervised. (See Frank Furedi’s important book Paranoid Parenting. I believe that the loss of free play and self-supervised risk-taking blocked the development of a healthy, normal, internal locus of control. That is the reason I teamed up with Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and Daniel Shuchman to found LetGrow.org.) 

Figure 5. Locus of Control has shifted slightly but steadily toward external since the 1990s. Scores are on a 5-point scale from 1 = most internal to 5 = most external. 

We kept looking in the Monitoring the Future dataset and the Gimbrone et al. paper for other items that would allow us to test Filipovic’s hypothesis. We found an ideal second set of variables: The Monitoring the Future dataset has a set of items on “self derogation” which is closely related to disempowerment, as you can see from the four statements that comprise the scale:

I feel I do not have much to be proud of. Sometimes I think I am no good at all. I feel that I can't do anything right. I feel that my life is not very useful.

Gimbrone et al. had graphed the self-derogation scale, as you can see in their appendix (Figure  A.4). But Zach and I re-graphed the original data so that we could show a larger range of years, from 1977 through 2021. As you can see in Figure 6, we find the gender-by-politics interaction. Once again, and as with nearly all of the mental health indicators I examined in a previous post, there’s no sign of trouble before 2010. But right around 2012 the line for liberal girls starts to rise. It rises first, and it rises most, with liberal boys not far behind (as in Gimbrone et al.).

Figure 6. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study. Graphed by Zach Rausch. The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree). 

In other words, we have support for Filipovic’s “captain their own ship” concern, and for Lukianoff’s disempowerment concern: Gen Z has become more external in its locus of control, and Gen Z liberals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating. They are more likely to agree that they “can’t do anything right.” Furthermore, most of the young people in the progressive institutions that Filipovic mentioned are women, and that has become even more true since 2014 when, according to Gallup data, young women began to move to the left while young men did not move either way. As Gen Z women became more progressive and more involved in political activism in the 2010s, it seems to have changed them psychologically. It wasn’t just that their locus of control shifted toward external—that happened to all subsets of Gen Z.  Rather, young liberals (including young men) seem to have taken into themselves the specific depressive cognitions and distorted ways of thinking that CBT is designed to expunge.

But where did they learn to think this way? And why did it start so suddenly around 2012 or 2013, as Greg observed, and as Figures 2 and 6 confirm?

Tumblr Was the Petri Dish for Disempowering Beliefs

I recently listened to a brilliant podcast series, The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, created within Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling about her difficult years developing the Harry Potter stories in the early 1990s, before the internet; her rollout of the books in the late 90s and early 2000s, during the early years of the internet; and her observations about the Harry Potter superfan communities that the internet fostered. These groups had streaks of cruelty and exclusion in them from the beginning, along with a great deal of love, joy, and community. But in the stunning third episode, Phelps-Roper and Rowling take us through the dizzying events of the early 2010s as the social media site Tumblr exploded in popularity (reaching its peak in early 2014), and also in viciousness. Tumblr was different from Facebook and other sites because it was not based on anyone’s social network; it brought together people from anywhere in the world who shared an interest, and often an obsession.

Phelps-Roper interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main petri dish in which nascent ideas of identity, fragility, language, harm, and victimhood evolved and intermixed. Angela Nagle (author of Kill All Normies) described the culture that emerged among young activists on Tumblr, especially around gender identity, in this way:

There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self… And that’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique], the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity. 

Nagle described how on the other side of the political spectrum, there was “the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.” The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic, the experts on the podcast suggest, that today’s cancel culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.

I don’t want to tell that entire story here; please listen to the Witch Trials podcast for yourself. It is among the most enlightening things I’ve read or heard in all my years studying the American culture war (along with Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart). I just want to note that this story fits perfectly with both the timing and the psychology of Greg’s reverse CBT hypothesis. 

Implications and Policy Changes

In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1). 

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them. 

I welcome challenges to this conclusion from scholars, journalists, and subscribers, and I will address such challenges in future posts. I must also repeat that I don’t blame everything on smartphones and social media; the other strand of my story is the loss of play-based childhood, with its free play and self-governed risk-taking. But if this conclusion stands (along with my conclusions in previous posts), then I think there are two big policy changes that should be implemented as soon as possible: 

1) Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students

As Greg and I showed in The Coddling of the American Mind, most of the programs put in place after the campus protests of 2015 are based on one or more of the three Great Untruths, and these programs have been imported into many K-12 schools. From mandatory diversity training to bias response teams and trigger warnings, there is little evidence that these programs do what they say they do, and there are some findings that they backfire. In any case, there are reasons, as I have shown, to worry that they teach children and adolescents to embrace harmful, depressogenic cognitive distortions.

One initiative that has become popular in the last few years is particularly suspect: efforts to tell college students to avoid common English words and phrases that are said to be “harmful.” Brandeis University took the lead in 2021 with its “oppressive language list.” Brandeis urged its students to stop saying that they would “take a stab at” something because it was unnecessarily violent. For the same reason, they urged that nobody ask for a “trigger warning” because, well, guns. Students should ask for “content warnings” instead, to keep themselves safe from violent words like “stab.” Many universities have followed suit, including Colorado State University, The University of British Columbia, The University of Washington, and Stanford, which eventually withdrew its “harmful language list” because of the adverse publicity. Stanford had urged students to avoid words like “American,” “Immigrant,” and “submit,” as in “submit your homework.” Why? because the word “submit” can “imply allowing others to have power over you.” The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created.

2) The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18

What do you think should be the minimum age at which children can sign a legally binding contract to give away their data and their rights,  and expose themselves to harmful content, without the consent or knowledge of their parents? I asked that question as a Twitter poll, and you can see the results here:

Image: See my original tweet.

Of course, this poll of my own Twitter followers is far from a valid survey, and I phrased my question in a leading way, but my phrasing was an accurate statement of today’s status quo. I think that most people now understand that the age of 13, which was set back in 1998 when we didn’t know what the internet would become, is just too low, and it is not even enforced. When my kids started 6th grade in NYC public schools, they each told me that “everyone” was on Instagram.

We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It's time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms. Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up.

It’s not enough to find more money for mental health services, although that is sorely needed. In addition, we must shut down the conveyer belt so that today’s toddlers will not suffer the same fate in twelve years. Congress should set a reasonable minimum age for minors to sign contracts and open accounts without explicit parental consent, and the age needs to be after teens have progressed most of the way through puberty. (The harm caused by social media seems to be greatest during puberty.) If Congress won’t do it then state legislatures should act. There are many ways to rapidly verify people’s ages online, and I’ll discuss age verification processes in a future post. 

In conclusion: All of Gen Z got more anxious and depressed after 2012. But Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis is the best explanation I have found for Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest.

#Jonathan Haidt #Greg Lukianoff #Reverse CBT #reverse cognitive behavioral therapy #cognitive behavioral therapy #emotional fragility #fragility #emotional reasoning #external locus #internal locus #victimhood #victimhood culture #Generation Z #Gen Z #anxiety #depression #mental health #mental health issues #trauma #personal identity #hellsite #Tumblr culture #religion is a mental illness

[absurdlakefront]

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

#child development #psychology #social psychology #jonathan haidt #social development

[liskantope]

I keep hearing people like Jonathan Haidt say things like, "Millennials are doing fine; it's Gen Z that's having a mental health crisis. Something has gone terribly wrong just in time for Gen Z." (Okay, others aren't exactly saying that right out, but it's kind of implied: a lot of focus on what cohort is personally struggling singles out Gen Z.) And I find this incredibly depressing, because, I mean, we millennials really aren't exactly in the most robust mental health, you know? And it's not like we aren't visibly struggling a ton? It's just, wow, I don't know many Gen Z -ers closely (they comprise the students in my classes though), and if millennials are doing so well in comparison that millennials' issues aren't even worth mentioning in context, then Gen Z must be really screwed.

#jonathan haidt #mental illness #gen z #millennials

[archiveofkloss]

april 16, 2024 / new york city, new york

karlie kloss with nick brown, dr. samantha boardman, derek blasberg, jonathan haidt, and jessica and jerry seinfeld at the launch of “the anxious generation” by jonathan haidt

#karlie kloss #04162024 #the anxious generation book launch #new york city #derek blasberg #nick brown #dr samantha boardman #jonathan haidt #jessica seinfeld #jerry seinfeld

[les-grenades]

When you find a fault in yourself it will hurt, briefly, but if you keep going and acknowledge the fault, you are likely to be rewarded with a flash of pleasure that is mixed, oddly, with a hint of pride. It is the pleasure of taking responsibility for your own behavior. It is the feeling of honor.

Jonathan Haidt "The Happiness Hypothesis"

#the happiness hypothesis #jonathan haidt #positive psychology #unposted drafts

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

(Art: Photograph by Betina La Plante)

* * * *

Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge. 

~Jonathan Haidt (Book: The Happiness Hypothesis) ::  [Philo Thoughts]

#Jonathan Haidt #Philo Thoughts #happiness #quotes #kites #in the air

[coochiequeens]

Prove him wrong ladies

Gen Z is facing a "national crisis," according to social psychologist and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt.

Haidt told the Wall Street Journal that Gen Z women are going to be less successful than Gen Z men.

That's partly because many Gen Z women are facing mental health challenges like anxiety. 

Women still aren't earning as much as their male coworkers. As Gen Z enters the workforce, the problem could get even worse.

That's according to social psychologist, author, and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, who said that while the gender gaps across some fields have improved in recent decades, they "might begin to widen in the 2030s." 

The reason: Millions of Gen Z women — many of whom Haidt says could be depressed, anxious, and less inclined to take risks — will be flooding into the workforce. 

"Gen Z women, because they're so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen Z men," he said.

Haidt was interviewed by journalist Tunku Varadarajan as part of a sweeping Wall Street Journal op-ed published December 30th. The interview touched on the "national crisis" of Gen Z, with a particular focus on the harms of social media and its impact on the younger generation's declining mental health. According to Haidt, young women in particular are facing these challenges, which could hinder their career advancement and ultimately increase the gender pay gap in the decades ahead.

Haidt cited research from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health that found in 2020, over 25% of female teenagers had a "major depression" over the prior year, compared to roughly 9% of teenage boys. At the same age, only 13% of millennial girls and 5% of boys reported experiencing a "major depression."

With the onset of social media — especially Instagram — depression rates skyrocketed, Haidt said. At the same time, Gen Zers were spending less actual time together, with childhood experienced "largely just through the phone." Now, Haidt said, there has "never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile."

There's a similar problem in the UK and Canada, he said, and that the US's "supply of young people who are not anxious or depressed will heavily depend on taking people who are not born in an English-speaking country."

US women are still paid 17% less than men. Wage gaps are, however, smaller among younger workers. In 16 cities, Gen Z and younger millennial women actually outearn their male counterparts, according to a study of 16 to 29-year-olds from the Pew Research Center.  

That's not necessarily unusual: Richard Fry, the Pew report's author, previously told Insider "there's evidence that the pay gap tends to be narrowest early in women's careers."

However, as Pew notes, pay gaps can worsen as cohorts age. The Census Bureau finds that pay gaps got wider as women grew older, within an over $2,000 gap in monthly earnings between women and men ages 35 to 44. 

There could be some factors pushing against that historical trend and the rising mental health concerns Haidt has raised. Soaring college enrollment and a higher likelihood of completing a degree among Gen Z women could potentially chip away at pay gaps widening or appearing later in their careers. 

US women are still paid 17% less than men. Wage gaps are, however, smaller among younger workers. In 16 cities, Gen Z and younger millennial women actually outearn their male counterparts, according to a study of 16 to 29-year-olds from the Pew Research Center.  

That's not necessarily unusual: Richard Fry, the Pew report's author, previously told Insider "there's evidence that the pay gap tends to be narrowest early in women's careers."

However, as Pew notes, pay gaps can worsen as cohorts age. The Census Bureau finds that pay gaps got wider as women grew older, within an over $2,000 gap in monthly earnings between women and men ages 35 to 44. 

There could be some factors pushing against that historical trend and the rising mental health concerns Haidt has raised. Soaring college enrollment and a higher likelihood of completing a degree among Gen Z women could potentially chip away at pay gaps widening or appearing later in their careers. 

#jonathan haidt #NYU #wage gap #women in the workplace #gen z #one step forward one step back

[porterdavis]

Here's an excellent #longread on why America has become so fractured and ungovernable.

Hint: the main reason is social media. The main conclusion is not hopeful.

#the atlantic #social media #jonathan haidt

[kitapsecimi]

"Hesabımız, yaygın bir şekilde bilinen ama yeterince takdir edilmeyen iki hakikat üzerinedir. Bunlardan biri Altın Kural'dır. İnsanlarla iyi geçinmenin en önemli aracı mütekabiliyet (karşılıklılık) ilişkisidir.(...) ikinci hakikat, doğamız gereği hepimizin iki yüzlü olduğumuz gerçeğidir."

#Mutluluk Varsayımı #Okunur #alıntı #Jonathan Haidt #Hil Yayınları #Psikoloji #Altın Kural #İkiyüzlülük

[seasurfacefullofclouds1]

Honestly, I don't know about you but I'm sick and tired of this charts thing, from whatever artist it is, there's sh*it like "this person is the first artist in history to ever have 2.6 songs with 2.92 minutes charting in the top 4 hottest countries in the world" it's past the point of being ridiculous, they all want so be to be successful and praised so bad that it's losing meaning. Capitalism washed our minds to a level (especially pop culture ofc) that even though you make good art it's not important if it didn't make numbers (I'm not talking just about louis and harry or the people from one direction), these stan twitter accounts show every day deeper stupidity, there's a lot of people out there making good sounds, out of this sick bubble, they're praising people that is already rich for multiple lifetimes and it's just mid but everyone is having their back so they keep being "icons". It's like they don't even listen to what they enjoy or let themselves have the opportunity to get to know new things, because what is in the media 24/7 is the only thing worth it. I'm not trying to be different or "not like the other girls", I consume I lot of pop culture all the time, but we have to be critical sometimes and this is a weird behaviour that we need to talk about at some point.

I’ve been listening to an excellent podcast episode with Lex Fridman talking to Jonathan Haidt about the nature of viral social media and the bad effects on mental health (especially for young girls age 10-14) and for democracy.

The manipulation of social media and pop media in our culture has skewed culture toward “viral” and “not viral,” in lieu of any other criteria: good or bad, enriching or not, creatively interesting or not, inspirational or not, fair or not fair.

So we get “viral” songs that are completely meaningless, mindless synth bits that are heavily promoted, but basically junk. They add nothing to life. They’re not going to last. No one will care about it in two years. But they’re popular right now!

It started with Facebook, but now Tiktok has distilled the formula to its most toxic form. This started around 2010. Mental health, depression, anxiety, and self-harm have also correlated since that time.

Kids need to go offline and actually learn how to socialize with people, how to decide whether art is good or bad, how to make friends in real life, doing offline things.

Ok, a few lines from Justice John Roberts:

From time to time, and for years to come, I hope you’ll be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal, because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time, so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again from time to time, so you will be aware of the role of chance in life, and understand that your success is not completely deserved, and that the failure of others is not completely deserved, either. and, as you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope your opponent will gloat over your failure, as a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored, so you understand the importance of listening to others, and I hope you’ll have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish for these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from these things or not will depend on your ability to see the message in your misfortune.



#self harm tw #social media #listen to the podcast #john roberts #lex fridman #jonathan haidt #on empathy #a message for #harry styles

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jonathan Haidt

Published: Dec 22, 2023

[Note: this is post #1 of a pair of posts. The second post gives the text of chapter 3 of The Coddling of the American Mind.]

In the days after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, university campuses immediately distinguished themselves as places set apart from the rest of American society—zones where different moral rules applied. Even before Israel began its military response, the loudest voices on campus were not university leaders condemning the attacks and vowing solidarity with their Jewish and Israeli students. Instead, the world saw faculty members and student organizations celebrating the attacks. 

Political commentator and Atlantic author David Frum summed up the moral uniqueness of the academy in this tweet, four days after the attack: 

Since then, there have been hundreds of antisemitic incidents on campuses including vandalism of Jewish sites, physical intimidation, physical assault, and death threats against Jewish students, often from other students. The response from university administrators has often been slow, weak, or entirely absent. 

[ Image. The scene on the exterior wall of my office building at NYU on the morning of October 17, 2023. NYU students had posted fliers about Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. Other NYU students tore them down. Other NYU students posted more of them. ]

Why is the culture of elite higher education so fertile for antisemitism, and why are our defenses against it so weak? Don’t we have the world's most advanced academic concepts and bureaucratic innovations for identifying hatred of all kinds, even expressions of hatred so small, veiled, and unconscious that we call them “micro-aggressions” and “implicit biases”? 

Yes, we do, but it turns out that they don’t apply when Jews are the targets,1 and this was the shocking hypocrisy on display in that Congressional hearing room on December 5. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked the President of the University of Pennsylvania “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” President Magill was unable to say yes. When the question was asked in various ways to all three presidents, none could say yes. All said variations of “it depends on the context.”

Now, as a social psychologist who studies moral judgment, I’m all for context. Technically, those presidents were correct that students chanting “from the river to the sea” may or may not be advocating killing all the Jews in Israel. Those chanting “globalize the intifada” may or may not be calling for terrorist attacks on Jewish sites around the world. And even if they were, such political speech is protected by the First Amendment unless the speech is made in a context that is likely to incite actual violence, constitutes a “true threat,” or rises to the level of discriminatory harassment. Those three presidents could have said that their universities are bastions of free speech where everyone lives and dies by the First Amendment.

In fact, they tried to say that, and this is why they were so widely pilloried for hypocrisy. Like most elite schools, Harvard, Penn, and MIT have spent the last ten years punishing professors for their research findings and disinviting speakers who questioned the value of DEI. (See The Canceling of the American Mind for dozens of other examples.) As has been widely reported, Harvard and Penn are the top two schools in America for creating terrible speech climates, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. 

What on earth happened to the academy? As Fareed Zakaria recently asked: How did America’s elite universities go from being “the kinds of assets the world looks at with admiration and envy” just eight years ago, to becoming objects of ridicule today? How did we bungle things so badly?

Greg Lukianoff and I wrote a book that tried to answer that question in 2018, as it was happening. 

The Coddling of the American Mind tells the story of how American universities lost their collective minds, beginning around 2014 when student demands for protections from speech seemed to appear out of nowhere, including calls for trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias response teams, and mandatory trainings around language use. The students were supported by some faculty members and some administrators, and their combined force pressured many university leaders to accede to their demands even though, privately, many had misgivings.2

The new morality driving these reforms was antithetical to the traditional virtues of academic life: truthfulness, free inquiry, persuasion via reasoned argument, equal opportunity, judgment by merit, and the pursuit of excellence.  A subset of students had learned this new morality in some of their courses, which trained them to view everyone as either an oppressor or a victim. Students were taught to use identity as the primary lens through which everything is to be understood, not just in their coursework but in their personal and political lives. When students are taught to use a single lens for everything, we noted, their education is harming them, rather than improving their ability to think critically.

This new morality, we argued, is what drove universities off a cliff. For a while, the descent was gradual, but at Halloween, 2015, in a courtyard at Yale, the free fall began. Students and administrators espousing the new morality demanded reforms at Yale and, over the next few months, at dozens of other schools. With a few exceptions, university leaders did not stand up to the new morality, critique its intellectual shortcomings, or say no to demands and ultimatums. 

You can see the fall of higher ed in data from Gallup. The figure below shows that as recently as 2015, most Democrats and even most Republicans had high confidence in higher education as an institution. (Independents were evenly split). A mere eight years later, higher ed had alienated not just Republicans, but also independents. The trend for Democrats was down as well. The survey was fielded in June of 2023, well before the current mess. 

[ Figure 1. Percent of U.S. adults with "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education. Source: Gallup (2023). ]

The good news is that the academy’s free fall is now over. American higher ed hit rock bottom on December 5, 2023 in that Congressional hearing room. Anyone who wants universities to bounce back and regain the trust of the American people must understand this new morality and ensure that it never holds sway on campus again.

The key chapter for understanding the new morality is chapter 3. I recently re-read that chapter and thought it would be of help to those who are struggling to comprehend the enormity of the culture change on so many campuses since 2015. Greg and I explained the transformation as the triumph of a cognitive distortion—binary thinking—such that students learn to slot everyone into one of two boxes: oppressor or victim.3 This mindset is the psychological basis of one of the three “Great Untruths” that we found flourishing on college campuses in the 2010s: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.4 We said that this was a terrible thing to teach students, and we explained why we expected that students who embraced this untruth would damage their mental health. (Subsequent research has confirmed this prediction.)

The central portion of the chapter describes two different kinds of identity politics, one of which is good because it actually achieves what it says it is trying to achieve, and because it brings both justice and, eventually, better relationships within the group.  We called this “common humanity identity politics.” It’s what Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela did by humanizing their opponents and drawing larger circles that appealed to shared histories and identities. The other form we called “common enemy identity politics.” It teaches students to develop the oppressor/victim mindset and then change their societies by uniting disparate constituencies against a specific group of oppressors. This mindset spreads easily and rapidly because human minds evolved for tribalism. The mindset is hyper-activated on social media platforms that reward simple, moralistic, and sensational content with rapid sharing and high visibility.5 This mindset has long been evident in antisemitism emanating from the far right. In recent years it is increasingly driving antisemitism on the left, too.

Common enemy identity politics is arguably the worst way of thinking one could possibly teach to young people in a multi-ethnic democracy such as the United States. It is, of course, the ideological drive behind most genocides. On a more mundane level, it can in theory be used to create group cohesion on teams and in organizations, and yet the current academic version of it plunges organizations into eternal conflict and dysfunction. As long as this way of thinking is taught anywhere on campus, identity-based hatred will find fertile ground.

With permission from Penguin Press, Greg and I present a condensed version of chapter 3 in a linked post, here:

What is the victim-oppressor mindset and how did it conquer the academy?

Please do go read that post, and then come back here. 

OK, if you don’t want to do that right now, here is the ending of the excerpt, which offers a partial summary. After describing the social psychology of tribalism and ideas about power (from Marx, Marcuse, Foucault, and Crenshaw), we analyze an intersectionalist text in which the author (Kathryn Pauly Morgan) asserted that because men created educational systems, girls and women in those systems today are essentially a “colonized population.” Here is our response:

Morgan is certainly right that it was mostly white males who set up the educational system and founded nearly all the universities in the United States. Most of those schools once excluded women and people of color. But does that mean that women and people of color should think of themselves as “colonized populations” today? Would doing so empower them, or would it encourage an external locus of control? Would it make them more or less likely to engage with their teachers and readings, work hard, and benefit from their time in school? More generally, what will happen to the thinking of students who are trained to see everything in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each axis is marked “privilege” and the other is “oppression”? Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people down below are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males. [...] In short, as a result of our long evolution for tribal competition, the human mind readily does binary, us-versus-them thinking. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity. Instead, some theoretical approaches used in universities today may be hyper-activating our ancient tribal tendencies, even if that was not the intention of the professor. Of course, some individuals truly are racist, sexist, and homophobic, and some institutions are too, even when the people who run them mean well, if they end up being less welcoming to members of some groups. We favor teaching students to recognize a variety of kinds of bigotry and bias as an essential step toward reducing them. Intersectionality can be taught skillfully, as Crenshaw does in her TED Talk. It can be used to promote compassion and reveal injustices not previously seen. Yet somehow, many college students today seem to be adopting a different version of intersectional thinking and are embracing the Untruth of Us Versus Them.

So, how well does our analysis from 2018 hold up in 2023? Does chapter 3 help us to understand the recent explosion of antisemitism on campus?

Unfortunately, the analysis works perfectly. Many students today talk about Israel as a “settler-colonialist” nation.6 That is straight oppressor/victim terminology, from post-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon. It treats Israel as if diaspora Jews were 19th century England or France sending colonists to take over an existing society, motivated by monetary greed. Once that frame is applied, students’ minds are closed to any other understanding of a complicated situation, such as the view that Jews are the original (or indigenous) inhabitants of the land, who had a continual presence there for 3,000 years, and whose exiled populations (many in Arab lands) had nowhere else to go after being decimated by Hitler’s version of common enemy identity politics.7 The French in Algeria could return to France, but if these students get their wish and Hamas gains control of all the territory “from the river to the sea,” it’s not clear where seven million Jews would go, other than into the sea.8

[ Image. Pro-Palestinian supporters march after a rally in New York City, October 9, 2023. Photo by Lev Radin, Shutterstock. ]

Direct evidence of the link between the oppressor/victim mindset and antisemitism was published last week in a poll from Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll. The survey was fielded on December 13-14.9 The survey asks about Americans’ beliefs not just about Israel but about Jews in America and on campus as well. I’ll summarize a few of the items, which you can check out in the report, and I'll expand on three in particular, which document the wide reach of the oppressor/victim mindset and its role in causing young people to embrace antisemitism.10 

The Harvard-Harris survey found that Americans side strongly with Israel against Hamas in the current conflict––except for Gen Z (here operationalized as the 18-24-year-old age bracket)11, which is evenly divided between support for Israel and Hamas. (See p. 47 of the report.) 

I should note that some have rightly criticized the Harvard-Harris poll on methodological grounds, especially for forcing respondents into binary choices, rather than offering a “don’t know” or “undecided” option. When such options are offered many people choose them, sometimes more than half, so the numbers you’ll see below probably overstate the prevalence of antisemitism, in absolute terms. Zach Rausch and I have been collecting all the recent surveys we can find on attitudes toward the Gaza conflict in this Google doc. Many other surveys have confirmed that there is substantially more support for Hamas among Gen Z than among older generations, although some studies find that Gen Z still tilts slightly toward Israel. It is the pattern of responses across questions and generations that I am drawing on, rather than the absolute numbers.

The survey found that Gen Z is not much different than older generations in agreeing that 1. Antisemitism is prevalent on campus (p. 50), 2. Jewish students are facing harassment on campus (p. 50), 3. Calls for “the genocide of Jews” are hate speech (p. 51), and 4. Calls for “the genocide of Jews” are harassment (p. 52).

Yet, despite agreeing with other generations that antisemitism is prevalent on campus, that Jews are being harassed on campus, and that calls for genocide are both hate speech and harassment, Gen Z is evenly divided as to whether campus protesters have a right to call for genocide against Jews. You can see the exact question below the table in Figure 2. As you can see below, all older generations favor disciplinary action as the proper response to students who publicly call for the mass killing of Jews. Only Gen Z does not.

[ Figure 2. “If a student calls for the genocide of Jews should that student be told that they are free to call for genocide or should such students face actions for violating university rules?” Harvard-Harris Poll, December 2023, screenshot from p. 51, with additional annotations by Haidt. ]

Why is Gen Z so tolerant of hate speech and verbal harassment of Jews, when it shows the lowest tolerance for such speech against other groups? The next three items show that the oppressor/victim mindset and common enemy identity politics are at work, but only for Gen Z. One item asked “Do you think that identity politics based on race has come to dominate at our elite universities, or do they operate primarily on the basis of merit and accomplishments without regard to race?” (p. 55). All generations agree that identity politics based on race is now dominant, but Gen Z, which has the most experience with current campus culture, agrees more strongly (69%, tied with those over 65).

The big difference between generations is that only Gen Z endorses this kind of identity politics. One survey item asks: “There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology?” [p. 56] 

[ Figure 3. “There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology?” Harvard-Harris Poll, December 2023. ]

Gen Z, and only Gen Z, agrees with the “ideology that white people are oppressors.” The direct line linking this explicit form of common enemy identity politics to antisemitism is found in the responses to the next item: “Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?”

[ Figure 4. “Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?” Harvard-Harris Poll, December 2023. ]

Gen Z, and only Gen Z, agrees. As I said earlier, the absolute numbers would be lower if a neutral or “don’t know” option were presented, so I do not believe that two out of every three Americans in that age range truly believes that Jews are oppressors. But even if half of the respondents chose a third option, the balance of those who believe it to those who reject it would still tilt toward “oppressors,” and more strongly than for any older generation.

In other words: While all generations agree that race-based identity politics now dominates on campus, only Gen Z leans toward (rather than away from ) endorsing such politics, applying it to Jews, and agreeing that we should treat Jews as oppressors—that is, treat them badly and not protect them from hate and harassment because they deserve what’s coming to them. 

I should offer a few clarifications. 

First, it is understandable that there is an age gradient, with older generations strongly pro-Israel and younger generations becoming increasingly supportive of the Palestinian cause. Older generations were raised by parents who remembered the Holocaust and understood the context within which the state of Israel was created. Older generations remember the frequent attacks on a vulnerable Israel in its early years. Younger generations, in contrast, have only known a strong Israel that occupied Palestinian territory (at least in the West Bank). There are two sides on this issue. I’m on one side, but I understand that there are good reasons for taking the other side. Opposing Israel or hating the Israeli government is not automatically anti-semitism. What concerns me is that anti-Israel sentiment seems to be increasingly closely linked to hatred of Jews and physical attacks on Jews and Jewish sites. Such attacks may seem morally justified, even virtuous, to those who believe that Jews are “oppressors.” 

Second, the Israeli military response has not been “surgical”; its bombing campaign has killed thousands of Palestinians who are not members of Hamas. Young people, most of whom are on TikTok, are probably more exposed than older people to videos of horrific suffering among Gazans. So again, I don’t criticize anyone for protesting Israel or the war, and I hope that universities respect pro-Palestinian students’ First Amendment rights to speak and protest. But the displays of support for Hamas began even before Israel had responded, and part of what was so shocking in the first week after the October 7 attack was the relatively muted and delayed expressions of concern by university leaders and campus organizations. Whatever has caused today’s campus antisemitism, it was already baked in before Israel’s military response began.

Third, I cannot say how much of today’s antisemitism comes from college classrooms (and K-12 classrooms as well), and how much is driven by social media, particularly TikTok. The rapid transition to the “phone-based childhood” that happened around 2012 is a crucial part of the story, which Greg and I discussed in The Coddling. As I have argued elsewhere, social media has introduced dangerous new dynamics into society, including explosive virality and the fragmentation of shared understandings (i.e., the collapse of the Tower of Babel). But given that today’s campus antisemitism is so closely linked with the oppressor/victim mindset, and given that Greg and I (and many others) have been warning about the dangers of teaching this mindset since before TikTok was created, I am confident that American higher education bears a substantial portion of the blame.

I do not believe that those three presidents, testifying before Congress, were antisemitic in their hearts. But in their heartless and gutless responses to a question about when it violates their campus’s rules for students to call for genocide against Jews, all three presidents validated the now-prevalent campus antisemitism. All three presidents essentially said: Jews don’t count, it’s OK to call for their deaths, as long as it does not “turn into action.”

According to those who embrace common enemy identity politics and its oppressor/victim mindset, all members of victim groups are justified in “punching up,” pulling oppressors down, vandalizing their buildings and symbols, and perhaps even raping their women and killing their children. At least, that is the implication of tweets from various professors who praised the Hamas attack, saying versions of “this is what decolonization looks like.”

Conclusion

In the tweet I quoted at the top of this essay, David Frum pointed out that elite college campuses have diverged from the rest of the country. Frum urged those of us in the academy to reflect upon why college campuses are so rife with antisemitism, in a country that is, according to public opinion data, very positive toward its Jewish citizens. I have tried to do that in this essay, concluding that it is our own fault for embracing and institutionalizing bad ideas, rather than challenging them. I have shown a direct connection between the oppressor/victim mindset and the willingness of many in the current generation of students to espouse overtly antisemitic beliefs (even if it is not truly a majority of them).

American higher education is now in a code-red situation. It’s not just Jewish donors and alumni who are withdrawing their support. As you saw in Figure 1, a majority of Americans had low confidence in higher ed before October 7. In the wake of the December 5 congressional hearings, it is now surely a supermajority, including perhaps most Democrats as well. Efforts in red-state legislatures to constrain, control, or defund higher ed will now find a great deal more public support than anyone could have imagined before 2015. 

If they are to regain public trust, university leaders will need to understand the victim/oppressor mindset and how their own institutions are encouraging it. Then they will need to take bold action and make deep changes. You can’t just plant a new center for the study of antisemitism in soil that is ideal for the growth of antisemitism. You have to change the soil, change the culture and policies of the institution.

Greg and I have an entire chapter (13) on how to do that, how to create “wiser universities” by enshrining free inquiry, changing the standards used to hire faculty and admit students, and then orienting students for productive disagreement. A wiser university would make students less susceptible to the oppressor/victim mindset even if they are exposed to it in a few of their classes. I will offer many more ideas in future posts. For now, I list organizations that specialize in improving the culture of universities, and I list essays that offer what I think are good ideas. I’ll keep the list updated for a while, so if you find good essays, please post links to them in the comments.

I close this essay with the quotation that opens Chapter 3 of The Coddling, from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of the wisest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet:

There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically... divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other.

Universities can and must free students from pathological dualism.

#Jonathan Haidt #The Coddling of the American Mind #antisemitism #oppressor vs oppressed #oppressor #oppressed #oppression #pathological dualism #dualism #intersectionality #postcolonial theory #postcolonialism #colonialism #academic fraud #Hamas supporters #terrorism supporters #pro hamas #palestine #israel #pro palestine #free palestine #islamic terrorism #academic corruption #ideological capture #ideological corruption #religion is a mental illness

[alchemisoul]

Big Think | Antifragility: How to use suffering to get stronger

#jonathan haidt #self improvement #philosophy #antifragile #antifragility

[luvsjimmyreed]

I do find the moral foundations theory to be useful in a strictly descriptive sense... in that it does help a bit to explain why people of... of different ideologies are often... uh, not on the same wavelength... when it comes to a sense of morality. With that said, I do disagree with Jonathan Haidt on various issues. I disagree with him when he starts to take a more prescriptive stance, and insinuates that... that everyone *should* value all five... or six... moral foundations. There are, in fact, very good reasons as to why some of us might... reject three of the six moral foundations. I would even go as far as to argue that ‘fairness versus cheating’ and ‘liberty version oppression’ are actually subsets of ‘care versus harm’.

Jimmy Reed, On Moral Foundations Theory and Jonathan Haidt

#jimmy reed #Blues #politics #society #sociology #jonathan haidt #antiauthoritarian #anarchism

[mafaldaknows]

#jonathan haidt #when critics go silent groups get stupid #social psychology #youtube

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

(Photo courtesy of ashokboghani via Flickr/Creative Commons)

* * * *

"Just look at your stream of consciousness when you are thinking about a politician you dislike, or when you have just had a minor disagreement with your spouse. It's like you're preparing for a court appearance. Your reasoning abilities are pressed into service generating arguments to defend your side and attack the other. We are certainly able to reason dispassionately when we have no gut feeling about a case, and no stake in its outcome, but with moral disagreements that's rarely the case. As David Hume said long ago, reason is the servant of the passions.”

—From Jonathan Haidt’s "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion” in the online magazine “The Edge” (2007). Haidt is a social psychologist studying the psychology of morality and the moral emotions at New York University.

(Traversing)

#quotes #Jonathan Haidt #Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion #The Edge #ashokboghani #Traversing #stream of consciousness #the passions #feeling

[passionthatmoves]

When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.

Jonathan Haidt, ‘Why the past 10 years of American Life have been uniquely stupid’ (11 April 2022) The Atlantic

#jonathan haidt #why the past 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid #the atlantic #readings