PDF Summary:The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
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Since the 2016 election, America has witnessed college campus protests against “controversial” or “dangerous” speakers. The Coddling of the American Mind explores this phenomenon, showing how a set of dangerous and false beliefs have taken root in the minds of today’s college students, convincing these young people that they are inherently fragile and must be protected from the allegedly harmful impacts of speech with which they disagree. This attitude threatens academic freedom, undermines democracy, and is ultimately harmful to the social and emotional development of today’s youth.
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Call-out culture has a chilling effect on free speech on campus, as students, faculty, and administrators are forced to resort to self-censorship out of fear of being socially vilified for politically incorrect opinions.
Bad Impact #1: The Suppression of Speech
These bad ideas have major consequences. Their first negative impact is that they have convinced students that violence and intimidation are acceptable—even necessary—responses to speech that they dislike.
One disturbing idea is that certain forms of speech ought to be considered a form of violence. The logic of this argument is that inflammatory speech can cause emotional distress. Emotional distress, in turn, can have harmful effects on one’s physical health. Therefore, since some forms of speech can lead to physical harm, such speech ought to be considered the moral equivalent of physical violence.
By this logic, of course, almost anything could be considered an act of violence, since anything is likely to be emotionally stressful to at least someone. This becomes an open invitation for a listener to respond to nearly any speech with which she disagrees with actual violence.
In March 2017, an outbreak of violence occurred at Middlebury College in Vermont. There, controversial right-wing author Charles Murray was scheduled to speak. Murray, in his 1994 book The Bell Curve, argued that social and economic inequality is the result of innate genetic differences that render blacks, Latinos, women, and the poor intellectually inferior to white men. Students at Middlebury responded by rioting, destroying property, and even physically threatening Murray and members of the faculty.
Bad Impact #2: Orthodoxy and Groupthink on Campus
The second negative impact of these ideas is that they have led to ideological orthodoxy and groupthink on college campuses—and the persecution of those who are perceived to be dissenters.
As opinion within academic circles has grown more uniformly left-wing, it has become less tolerant of diverging viewpoints. Scholars increasingly evaluate one another’s work not on its merits, but on the basis of whether or not it deviates from shared left-wing orthodoxy.
Recent years have seen a disturbing willingness within academic journals and publications to censor views that contradict left-wing orthodoxy, particularly when it comes to matters of race and class. One professor who merely questioned the fairness of a “Day of Absence” (during which white students were asked by activists not to come to campus for a day) was vilified, harassed, and attacked by students and even fellow faculty—and eventually forced to leave the campus.
How Young People Became So Fragile
It’s important to understand why young people have come to adopt these attitudes. In this section, we’ll explore political polarization, rising rates of depression and anxiety, the influence of social media, an inordinate concern for children’s safety on the part of parents, the bureaucratization of universities, and changing norms around social justice as possible root causes.
Political Polarization
On and off campus, the stark ideological differences between the left and right have led to "negative polarization”—political mobilization centered not on positive support for one’s preferred party, but hatred and fear of the other party.
Left-wing campus activism has invited a fierce reaction from the right, with right-wing media like Fox News often cynically amplifying and highlighting high-profile incidents of left-wing campus activism. The vicious cycle of action, reaction, and counter-reaction further divides the nation and makes it impossible to engage in any meaningful dialogue across the partisan divide.
Social Media and the Dawning Mental Health Crisis
Recent years have seen a troubling rise in the number of teens and adolescents who report feeling anxious or depressed. Suicides and self-harm are up since the dawn of the
2010s, especially for adolescent and teen girls, after remaining relatively steady for decades.
Scholars have noted that social media and excess screentime is highly correlated with depression, anxiety, and self-harm among young people.
If you are unpopular or feel that you are being excluded, social comparison sites like Facebook and Instagram provide minute-by-minute confirmation of your isolated social status by broadcasting the glamorous and fulfilling experiences that everyone else is enjoying. Saturation in the world of social media has left today’s youth more depressed, anxious, and fearful than ever.
Safety Parenting
Today’s parents limit the independent activities of their children to a far greater extent than previous generations of parents, depriving them of growth-enhancing opportunities to take risks and learn from mistakes.
This prevents young people from learning how to realistically evaluate risks when they become adults. They then carry this attitude to college and expect to be protected from “violent” and “dangerous” speech and opinions.
Bureaucratization on Campus
Because higher education is such a big business, universities now require a large, professionalized bureaucracy of administrators to manage them and ensure steady revenue.
As a result, colleges increasingly see students as customers—valuable assets whose needs must be catered to. Fearful of offending valuable customers, administrators have promulgated onerous campus “speech codes” that define what ideas and modes of expression are and are not acceptable on campus. These codes are absurdly vague, arbitrarily enforced, and deeply damaging to free speech on campus.
Evolving Norms of Social Justice
So many of these campus issues revolve around evolving notions of justice. iGen grew up during an era of immense social and political turmoil, particularly around questions of identity and racial and gender equity. As such, they are highly skeptical of traditional racial, gender, and class hierarchies.
The trouble arises when people stop focusing on ensuring equal access to opportunities and start focusing on the equality of material outcomes. Such a shift in attitudes toward social justice began before iGen. An excessive fear of groups being overrepresented or underrepresented leads to the imposition of quotas, in which individuals are judged not on their merits, but on their membership in a particular group.
Solutions: Fostering Antifragility
We’ll now focus on solutions that parents, teachers, professors, and administrators can employ to push back against the three bad ideas and their harmful consequences.
Solution #1: Childhood Independence
Parents should give their children more opportunities to exercise their independence, starting at an early age. This can be as simple as allowing them to enjoy more free and unsupervised play. When they notice conflicts arising among children during play, they should resist the temptation to intervene or make them “play fair.” Parents would also be wise to periodically ask their kids what new challenges they want to take on. Even small milestones like walking to school or friends’ houses on their own can be remarkably self-affirming for kids.
Solution #2: Break Emotional Reasoning
Parents also would do well to teach their kids not to rely on their emotions as their sole guide for interpreting reality. For example, a parent might explain that reality can exist independently of one’s feelings by pointing out that even if someone feels that it’s snowing outside, they might be incorrect—it either is or isn’t snowing. One has to appreciate facts as well as feelings.
Solution #3: Embrace Nuance
Parents should also impress upon their children that no one is purely good or evil. All of us are complex beings with the capacity to do both good things and bad things based upon our circumstances and our state of knowledge at a given time. Even when children are wrong, parents should listen respectfully to their opinions and try to use reason to guide them toward more correct and accurate patterns of thought. This will teach a child that she is not a bad or immoral person simply because she is wrong about something or is in disagreement with someone.
Solution #4: De-Supervise the Schools
Schools should put greater emphasis on recess, with less adult supervision. While kids should always be kept safe, the definition of “safety” should be narrowed to mean only physical safety. School administrators should also strictly limit the use of devices on school property, as they have been shown to disrupt the learning process and increase anxiety and depression.
Solution #5: Defend Academic Freedom
Universities can make a more robust commitment to academic freedom by eliminating campus speech codes. University administrators and presidents should also be more willing to stand up to student outrage. While protestors certainly have the right to voice their opposition to a speaker’s ideas, they do not have the right to prohibit others from hearing a speech or lecture on campus.
The Pursuit of Wisdom
Ultimately, higher education must be about the fostering of wisdom. True wisdom lies in exploring new ideas, confronting entrenched orthodoxies, and having the intellectual strength to reject wrongheaded ideas and accept new knowledge. This commitment to wisdom and truth is real social justice—and it’s what will yield the greatest good, both for students and the society to which they belong.
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PDF Summary Introduction
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Exposure to hardship and conflict is an important part of emotional development—they are experiences that young people must overcome in order to lead stable, successful, and fulfilling adult lives.
Of course, young people do face genuine struggles:
- They face enormous pressure to succeed in college and land good-paying jobs, with a much weaker social safety net to support them when they face adversity.
- They are coming of age at a time of great political polarization, which amplifies the scale of disagreement and raises the stakes of debate.
- They are more diverse than previous generations, meaning that today’s young people are more likely to have experienced racism, homophobia, sexism, and other forms of prejudice.
The professors and administrators who run college campuses must be sensitive to these experiences of today’s students and update prior assumptions and ways of working. But by building a protective bubble around the young people whose intellectual and moral development they are responsible for, these adults are doing the rising generation no favor.
Ultimately, young people must develop the skills and fortitude to feel empowered. Being exposed...
PDF Summary Chapter 1: Bad Idea #1—Avoid Adversity at All Costs
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Safetyism and the Alleged Danger of Speech
Despite the inherently antifragile nature of young people, the people and institutions that are most responsible for their healthy development—parents, teachers, schools, universities—have actively shielded them from any form of adversity. Most worrisome, this attitude has even spread to speech itself.
The idea has now taken root that offending speech is equivalent to physical violence. This is the logic of safetyism—the idea, increasingly accepted among students of Generation iGen (those born after 1995, discussed in greater detail shortly) that one’s emotional safety trumps all other moral concerns and trade-offs.
In this formulation, “safety” increasingly means being sheltered from opinions that you don’t agree with. Everyone is certainly entitled to physical safety and freedom from abuse—but you’re not entitled to safety from ideas.
The Social Media Natives of Generation iGen
It is unsurprising that this idea of safety is prevalent among the members of Generation iGen, who can best be described as social-media natives. In the online worlds of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you truly can curate a world...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Bad Idea #2—Always Trust Your Emotions
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Negative Feedback Loops
Emotional reasoning often leads to negative cognitive feedback loops. Individuals who suffer from anxiety and depression often start from a place of low self-esteem. Because they have such low self-esteem, they selectively seek out “proof” to confirm these negative beliefs.
One way they do this is through catastrophizing, turning minor setbacks into disasters.
Another symptom is generalization: taking one setback and re-casting it as a comment on one’s entire experience in life. A third symptom is mind-reading, assuming (nearly always falsely) that others have a negative opinion of them, without any proof.
These “proofs,” in turn, further reinforce the original negative beliefs. People suffering from depression cherry-pick negative experiences and discount positive interactions in order to fuel their negative self-image, in which they are deeply emotionally invested.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Emotional reasoning is totally at odds with what modern psychology says about healthy thinking. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) challenges patients to consciously question their ingrained patterns of negative thinking. Practitioners...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 3: Bad Idea #3—The World Is Black and White
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Identity politics is a form of political mobilization based on some shared group characteristic, often race, ethnicity, nationality, gender expression, or sexual orientation. This is in contrast to traditional political mobilization, which is usually oriented around some shared material goal or interest (as with labor unions or an industry lobby).
There is nothing wrong with identity politics per se—people who share common identity characteristics usually do have interests in common, and it makes sense for them to band together to advance the causes they care about.
Identity politics can be affirming and constructive when they follow the common-humanity model, most famously practiced by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although King was specifically fighting to address the legal, political, economic, social, and physical injustices faced by African-Americans since before the founding of the United States, he grounded his appeal in a universalist message that spoke to the nation’s shared sense of justice and decency.
In speaking to white Americans and to those who were skeptical of civil rights advances for African-Americans, King evoked the common “civic...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: “Violent” Speech, Violent Response
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Of course, emotional stress, even if it leads to some level of physical harm, is not the same as violence—and neither is the speech that might cause emotional distress.
“Violent” Speech, Physically Violent Response
This attitude toward speech is extremely dangerous. As we explored in Chapter 2, concepts like “white supremacy” or “trauma” have lost much of their once-objective definition, becoming largely subjective in modern left-wing discourse.
These concepts have been watered down to encompass forms of speech and behavior that never used to fall under them. This makes the evaluation of what is “hateful” or “oppressive” entirely up to the listener. Regardless of what was said, if it caused anyone emotional harm, then it can be considered hate speech.
This then becomes an open invitation for a listener to respond to nearly any speech with which she disagrees with actual violence. After all, if one is being “violently” attacked (or believes that others are), then one has a right—indeed, a moral obligation—to respond in kind. Preemptively violent responses to speech (or even intended speech) become not acts of aggression, but rather, acts of self or community...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: Orthodoxy and Groupthink on Campus
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- Arise seemingly out of nowhere
- Persecute alleged offenders for the most trivial of offenses against the group or collective
- Intimidate those who might be opposed to the persecution into silent acquiescence or even active participation, for fear of being targeted themselves
One can see similar patterns of thinking among today's students on American college campuses, with their eagerness to root out and silence perceived ideological deviations.
The Need for Viewpoint Diversity
Although we’ve focused a lot on the attitudes of students, they are by no means the sole perpetrators of this groupthink mentality on campus. In many ways, they are merely responding to the growing uniformity of opinion among their professors.
While professors have always leaned left (especially in the humanities and social sciences), leftist academics have gained a dominant position within academia, far outnumbering conservative or right-leaning professors—often by margins of five-to-one.
As opinion within academic circles has grown more uniform, it has become less tolerant of diverging viewpoints. This lack of viewpoint diversity is antithetical to the scholarly and...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Political Polarization
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In Chapter 3, we explored how this sort of us-against-them thinking represents a threat to academic freedom. It is also dangerous to healthy democratic politics.
We can even see this in the geographic and social landscape of the United States. Americans increasingly live in politically homogenous communities and have fewer and fewer cross-partisan personal relationships. Democrats and Republicans live in worlds that are becoming more and more separate. Thanks to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Americans can easily narrow their news consumption to include only slanted and partisan information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs.
(Shortform note: Want to learn more about the deeper trends driving political polarization in America? Read our summary of How Democracies Die.)
Anti-University Politics From the Right
Given this rising climate of political mistrust, hostility, and polarization, it’s no wonder college campuses (which have always been strongholds of the left) have become even more strident in their politics.
But this has invited a fierce reaction from the right end of...
PDF Summary Chapters 7-9: Social Media and Safety Parenting
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With the proliferation of iPhones and other smartphones, all of them loaded up with social-media apps, the online world is inescapable and ever-present.
Prolonged interaction with platforms like Facebook and Instagram transforms these online spaces into the “real” world for many young people. As a result, many adolescent psychologists believe that inordinate engagement online is delaying true emotional and social development is being delayed for young people, depriving them of formative experiences and relationship-building skills in the real world.
Mental Health and Social Media
Social media can be harmful for young people’s mental health, beyond its tendency to crowd out opportunities to develop social skills and independence. Scholars have noted that social media and excess screentime is highly correlated with depression, anxiety, and self-harm among young people.
Social media provides young people with a window into the lives of everyone in their peer group. More than ever before, teens and adolescents can see what their friends are up to at any given moment. This can have negative consequences for their emotional well-being.
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PDF Summary Chapter 10: Fragile Universities
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Privileged students know that their families are the financial lifeblood of the university, and as such, have come to demand white-glove treatment from the adults who run the campuses. Colleges now resemble luxury resorts, where students dine on excellent food and enjoy first-class amenities in their classrooms and residence halls.
It is not surprising, therefore, that students have developed a sense of entitlement regarding how they deserve to be treated—and what opinions and ideas are acceptable for them to be exposed to. For many students, professors and administrators are simply customer service representatives.
Speech Codes
The corporatization of university life, the interests of university administrators, and the growing fragility and entitlement of today’s students all combine to create an atmosphere on campus that is highly threatening to academic freedom.
Because colleges increasingly fear being sued by students who claim to have been offended by something a student or professor said to them or by something they may have been assigned in class, administrators have promulgated onerous campus “speech codes” that define what ideas and modes of expression are...
PDF Summary Chapter 11: Social Justice
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Two Theories of Justice
Before we delve more deeply into evolving norms of justice and equity, it’s worth exploring how people in a liberal democracy like the United States have customarily understood these concepts. There are two main theories of justice: distributive justice and procedural justice.
Distributive Justice
Distributive justice is centered around the idea that rewards or benefits received ought to be commensurate with the amount of effort or work one puts in.
If someone is undercompensated relative to their labor, this constitutes a violation of distributive justice; a violation likewise occurs when someone is overcompensated for putting in no effort.
Much of this is rooted in what social psychologists call equity theory—that people will intuitively judge an outcome to be fair if the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants. Thus, something like unequal pay for equal work (as when women are paid 70 cents for every dollar earned by a man doing the same job) offends our sense of distributive justice.
Procedural Justice
On the other hand,** procedural justice is concerned with fair and transparent rules and processes....
PDF Summary Chapters 12-13: Fostering Antifragility
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Parents should pause, take a breath, and remember that the risk of abduction at the hands of strangers is practically zero and that crime in general is far lower than when they were children.
Break Emotional Reasoning
Parents also would do well to teach their kids not to rely on their emotions as their sole guide for interpreting reality. Even teaching children the basic principles behind cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be beneficial.
To recap, CBT teaches people to break the vicious cycle of negative thinking by identifying and labeling untrue negative thoughts in order to foster more positive and realistic views of themselves. Parents can model this behavior by identifying and labeling their own negative thoughts to their children and showing them they’re irrational.
Parents can then use this as a launching pad for deeper discussions about the relationships between feelings and reality. For example, children often have a remarkable ability to understand difficult ideas through the use of metaphors and allegories. A parent might explain that reality can exist independently of one’s feelings by pointing out that even if someone feels that it’s snowing...
PDF Summary Conclusion: Cause for Hope
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Ultimately, higher education must be about the fostering of wisdom. True wisdom lies in exploring new ideas, confronting entrenched orthodoxies, and having the intellectual courage to reject wrongheaded ideas and accept new knowledge. This commitment to wisdom and truth is real social justice—and it’s what will yield the greatest good, both for students and the society to which they belong.