US + THEM Transcript (027)
US + THEM with Jonathan Haidt (7/3/20)
DON CALDWELL: Hi, I’m Don Caldwell. And you are at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn, who was my English teacher around 20 years ago. So about five years ago, I stumbled upon a political debate on Facebook. And it led me to recommend that Peter read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. It’s a book that really opened my eyes to why people become so polarized in times like we’re seeing today. And also, it really changed my own approach with how I view political and religious disagreement, especially with how things have changed with the advent of the internet and social media. Well, it looks like Peter took my advice and not only read the book, but was able to book Haidt for an interview on this podcast! So without further ado, I give you Jonathan Haidt and Peter Horn.
PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on how politics got so tribal:
JONATHAN HAIDT: Our minds, our thinking, our reasoning did not evolve to help us find the truth necessarily; they evolved to help us adapt and survive in the complex social worlds that we’re in. And those worlds are very structured by relationships and teams and intergroup conflict. Our prime directive is not to find the truth. Our prime directive is stay popular, manage your reputation, don’t get on the wrong side of the powers that be.
[VO]: On the value of diverse viewpoints for teams and communities:
HAIDT: If everybody in a community shares the same politics, I can guarantee you, they are not able to think clearly about a complex issue. They will be experts in certain aspects of it, but they will be completely blind to other aspects of it. And that is why you need, in certain areas, you actually need a kind of an adversarial system, or at least you need other people who can challenge your confirmation bias. They don’t share it.
[VO]: How schools, universities, parents, and citizens can do something about it:
HAIDT: We have to educate for this complicated, hybrid democratic republic. And part of that is going to be, I think, educating for some sense of moral and intellectual humility: that you don’t know everything, that your group can’t possibly know everything, that we’re all deluded by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, that we actually need engagement with people who are different from us to improve our own thinking.
[VO]: Plus, some of the research he’s been doing on technology, anxiety, and depression:
HAIDT: It turns out that the number of hours that one spends on a screen every day does not predict depression or anxiety. Screen time is not the enemy in terms of depression and anxiety; social media is, and it is overwhelmingly for girls. So does it lead to depression in boys? Maybe a little bit, but it’s not so clear. For girls, across different kinds of studies, it’s pretty consistent.
[VO]: All that, and much, much more on today’s episode of Point of Learning!
[03:19]
[VO]: Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures—including the cultures of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. His goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, OpenMindPlatform.org, and EthicalSystems.org. (All those links are available on the show page for this episode.) Haidt is the author of the book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, but we’re mostly drawing today on ideas from his two New York Times bestsellers, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers.” As of this month, his four TED Talks have been viewed nearly 8 million times. He has been interviewed by Bill Moyers, Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Krista Tippett, Stephen Colbert, and Alan Alda, to name a few, so I was more than a little fired up that he accepted my invite to chat over Zoom in early June.
[05:31]
HORN: So based on your work and what you’re seeing right now, as you visit schools across the country, what are the most urgent insights you’d like to share right now?
HAIDT: You know, I wrote this book, The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff, and it’s about a variety of problems that are besetting Generation Z (kids born in 1996 and later). What is happening everywhere—every university, every high school, every middle school—is a big increase in depression and anxiety. And there have been surveys of college presidents in the last couple of years saying, “What are your top concerns?” And the number one concern across the board—the number one, the most widely cited issue is mental health services, the rise of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide. So something really big is happening to American kids. It began happening around 2012: the graphs of the rise of depression and anxiety, they just take off like a hockey stick for girls, especially, around 2012, plus or minus a year or two. It’s similar in Canada and the UK, and we can talk about other countries too. It’s very clear in the English-speaking countries. I don’t have as much data on other countries. So that is the number one concern. And that’s really my top concern about kids: something about the way we’re raising them, the way we’re educating them is creating teenagers and adults who are fragile, who are suffering, who are less effective, who are afraid to take risks, who are easily harmed by words, or by events not going their way. And it’s now filtering out into the workplace. Gen Z just began to graduate from college about two years ago. And now I’m hearing from people in the corporate world that their most recent employees are much harder to incorporate. So we have a gigantic national issue. We have extraordinary amounts of suffering and we’ve got to figure out what’s going on and then do something about it.
[07:38]
HORN: So here’s a confession: I’ve chosen to focus our conversation on ideas of yours that can improve our civil discourse because a.) it’s one deep interest of yours that I’m also passionate about, so it’s a through-line of this podcast; and b.) I needed some way to delimit the dozens of questions I’d otherwise be tempted to ask you. We’ll be talking about how we can better communicate about hard issues of shared concern using just two of your books that I had real trouble putting down, The Righteous Mind, and The Coddling of the American Mind, which, as you just mentioned you wrote with legal scholar Greg Lukianoff. I chose not to read The Happiness Hypothesis before talking to you, just to make things easier on me! To start off with a softball, drawing on Sam Gosling’s work, you’ve written that it’s possible to guess people’s political leanings at better than chance levels, just from looking at photographs of their desks. The idea subtending that claim is that liberals and conservatives are wired differently. It’s not just a matter of gravitating toward one pole or the other of a political spectrum in a given country at a given moment. There are deeper tendencies at work, right?
HAIDT: Yes. What Gosling found—he’s a personality psychologist at the University of Texas—is that back when he was at UC Berkeley, they took photographs of students’ dorm rooms. They asked the students to leave—“Don’t do anything, just step out. We’re going to take photographs of your dorm rooms. And then we’re going to have people rate them and guess whether you’re on the left or the right.” And it turns out—I don’t remember what percentage, but people are somewhat better than chance [at guessing correctly; Gosling, S. Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. Basic Books, 2008]. And the reason is because different personality types are attracted to the left and the right. Conservatives tend to be higher on conscientiousness … You know, I talk to all kinds of groups. I speak at organizations on the left and the right, but if the event is going to start on time and the food is kind of boring and predictable, and a lot of the men are wearing jackets and ties, I know it’s a right-leaning group, whereas if it doesn’t start on time and the food is more varied and there’s no dress code, then it’s probably a left-leaning group. And Sam Gosling found the same thing in the dorm rooms—not exactly the same thing, but like, conservatives had more calendars and postage stamps, and liberals had more world music and, you know, novels or something like that. So the big finding is that people on the right are more conscientious and … oh, the big one is an openness to experience. People in the left are more curious about the world, the world beyond their local environment. Conservatives tend to be more parochial, which is not an insult. It means they are more rooted. They care more about their community. They’re not going to say that they’re “citizens of the world,” they’re citizens of their town before that.
HORN: I like that you highlight, you know, conscientiousness, as one of the positive aspects of for example, conservatism, because you contend that as a starting point for more civil exchanges, it’s very helpful to recognize where liberals and conservatives each bring strengths to a moral conversation. And I want to say that also you’re very careful in your language that, for example, liberal does not equal necessarily just “the left,” or what we would consider the left right now, in terms of U.S. politics, and conservative on the right. Rather, you’re talking about these kinds of general tendencies for example, as you said, marked by “openness to experience”—would be one of those things. I noted when you were talking a few years ago with Krista Tippett, you said, “What I would like to see is a revamped civics curriculum, where we teach, very explicitly, the long tradition of left-right,” [paraphrasing] to teach what each side’s strengths are, where their excellences are, because “both are essential. One without the other creates an unbalanced American civic order. You need a party of progress or reform and a party of stability and order.” So just wanted to see if you’d be willing to riff on that for a little bit …
[12:03]
HAIDT: Oh yeah, I can riff for as long as we got on that one! So, I mean, I guess I always like to step back before I answer a question and bring in the relevant psychology. The relevant psychology here is that our minds, our thinking, our reasoning did not evolve to help us find the truth necessarily; they evolved to help us adapt and survive in the complex social worlds that we’re in. And those worlds are very structured by relationships and teams and intergroup conflict. And so, we are very, very good at finding reasons to support our team or ourself. As soon as somebody accuses you of something, your mind goes into overdrive, finding reasons why you are innocent and your spouse—if that’s the person accusing you—is guilty, or is guilty of hypocrisy as well. “And why does she say this? And yesterday, she just did that!” So we go into legal mode automatically. And when we are considering any kind of policy issues—Should we raise or lower taxes? What should we do for our immigration policy?—whatever it is, we don’t say, “Hmm, what are the arguments on both sides? What’s the evidence?” We tend to start by preferring one solution or liking one side. If it’s a politicized issue, it’s the one that our team has already staked out for us. And then we’re really good at finding evidence to support what we believe. And we’re really good at batting away any counter evidence. And this is why you can’t change people’s minds just by giving them reasons. You yourself are surely open to reasons and reasonable, but you know, all those people you talk to and argue with on the other side, they’re just so pig-headed! All right. So that’s the relevant psychology. It’s called motivated reasoning or confirmation bias. Given that, if everybody in a community shares the same politics, I can guarantee you, they are not able to think clearly about a complex issue. They will be experts in certain aspects of it, but they will be completely blind to other aspects of it. And that is why you need, in certain areas, you actually need a kind of an adversarial system, or at least you need other people who can challenge your confirmation bias; they don’t share it. And that’s why in our legal system, we instantiate the idea that there’s going to be somebody, you know, one attorney on one side, looking for evidence to defend the client. And then there’ll be a prosecutor looking for evidence to convict the accused, whoever it is. So we need other people to question, to challenge our confirmation bias. Journalists understand this. They try to get both sides of the story. You can’t understand something if you just have one side. All right. So that’s the relevant psychology. Now back to your question about a civics curriculum. So I was always on the left growing up. I’m a kind of a, you know, stereotypical, you know, I’m Jewish, raised in the suburbs of New York. I went to Yale, so I never had a conservative thought in my head, nor did I ever meet a conservative person that I knew to be conservative. I’m exaggerating. I mean, there were a couple of conservatives at Yale, but very few. And it wasn’t until I began studying political psychology in my forties at the University of Virginia when I set out to teach a graduate seminar on political psychology. And it’s only then that I actually set out to understand conservatives and I began—I subscribed to The National Review, I watched Fox News, I tried to meet conservatives and talk with them. And what I discovered is that talking to people who didn’t share my worldview was the most enlightening thing I could do. I learned more from that reading and conversation than I could from any ten issues of The New Yorker and The New York Times put together. So we actually need other people to help us see the full story. And the long tradition of left and right can be defined almost in this way: the people who sat on the left side of the General Assembly in Paris during the Revolution were the ones who wanted more change. And, you know, I don’t know if they said, “Kill the King,” but you know, “Let’s knock down this rotten structure and we need progress!” And the people who sat on the right side are the ones who said, “No, don’t rip up everything! There’s value in tradition, there’s value in order!” And that’s a perennial debate in every society. And it’s an essential debate in every society. You need a left and you need a right. Now I’m not saying that the two parties in the United States now are equally sane or equally correct. I’m just saying that if you just have one view represented, I can tell you in advance where this is going to go wrong, what kinds of excesses there’s going to be if there are not people and institutions on the other side pushing to get a balance.
[16:36]
HORN: You’ve even noted that in talking about how essential this is— Well, I have two questions. One is about our cognitive bias toward confirmation, toward finding evidence that supports our own view, but overlooking, you know, kind of cherry picking to overlook the data that that could disconfirm it, right? What would be the evolutionary advantage of that, to your way of thinking about it?
HAIDT: So let’s look at our sense perception, which is extremely good. Our eyes, our ears are amazing, and, you know, it’s not adaptive to misjudge the thickness of ice that you’re walking on or to, you know, not see a, a tree that’s in your way. So our visual systems, our auditory systems are superbly tuned to aspects of the physical world that are really there, that matter for us. Okay. But what about our social cognition? Is it essential that we understand the true nature of immigration? Or gender, is that really essential, or is it more essential that we not get kicked off the team or ostracized? The penalty for deviance is not traditionally death, it’s traditionally ostracism. You kick people out. I’m reading a lot of Roman history and the Stoics, and you know, it’s true: the emperors would sometimes demand that somebody be killed, but more typically they just say, “You’re banished! You have to go off to a little island someplace.” So this is the ancient human thing is that people who are deviants, we get rid of them and that, in the old world, meant death. So, our prime directive is not to find the truth. Our prime directive is stay popular, manage your reputation, don’t get on the wrong side of the powers that be.
HORN: That makes a lot of sense. Again, on confirmation bias, you noted that there has even been research trying to train people how to question their own assumptions, but that nobody’s really found a way to do it that works. It’s very hard to train people to do it. So, in fact, if you’re going to try to understand an issue fully from a number of different vantage points, really, you do need other people.
HAIDT: That’s right. There’s research on—the psychological term is de-biasing. Can we train people to overcome their biases? And there’s a review paper on this by Scott Lilienfeld [Lilienfeld, S. O., R. Ammirati, and K. Landfield. 2009. “Giving Debiasing Away: Can Psychological Research on Correcting Cognitive Errors Promote Human Welfare?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4:390-98.] And my recollection of this paper from 10 or 15 years ago was that there was no technique that has been shown to really work. You know, you can train people to see all kinds of biases and boy, can they detect them in others! But we’re just not good at detecting them in ourselves. We don’t want to, there’s not really any payoff for it, and so the only really reliable way is another person, and another person that you have some relationship with so that you’re not going to just reject them. So the internet, in theory, hooks us up to the world. We have the world’s information at our fingertips. It could be great for this. Unfortunately, interacting with strangers in short-term environment … Twitter is the worst possible environment. You have just, you know, 240 characters, a person who may not be using their real name, and it’s in front of an audience, so there’s a lot of incentive to do moral grandstanding, virtue-signaling. So let’s bring it back to the educational context now. If you don’t teach critical thinking, ability to evaluate evidence, and all the other skills that educators have known for so long—if you don’t teach those, people are not gonna come to them on their own, generally. These are hard skills that need to be taught, but as I understand it, the research on critical thinking—there was a lot of it in the ‘80s—I remember it didn’t come up with a lot. It’s very hard to teach these things. And so I, as a social psychologist, I tend to say, well, often the solution is not to be found in cognitive psychology. It’s to be found in social psychology. If you really want to make people into critical thinkers, don’t teach them, you know, modus ponens arguments [e.g., if P implies Q and P is true, Q must also be true], or don’t teach them six different, you know, fallacies or syllogisms. Teach them humility, teach them that you’re wrong far more than you could ever realize, teach them that it’s actually fun to learn. And the best way to learn is to approach people with an attitude of curiosity, not hatred—curiosity. Teach them a habit of seeking out other people for conversation. And that will create a person who ends up getting much closer to the truth.
[21:11]
HORN: I was naive maybe when I was teaching high school about the time—I’m going to say when I was 30, so this would be like 2005—
HAIDT: Well, what did you teach them? What did you tell them to?
HORN: Well, this was the thing. I thought if I taught kids how to construct effective arguments—it’s pretty much what you just said, like how to spot logical fallacies, you know, because it’s very difficult to teach effective reasoning in a positive direction. But if you can recognize some of the ways that reasoning is liable to go wrong, whether it’s hasty generalization or a post hoc [ergo propter hoc, i.e., this thing happened after that thing, so that thing must have caused this thing] fallacy. If you can recognize those kinds of things, then it’s possible perhaps to work backwards.
HAIDT: Right, yeah, for a different species it would be! Just like when we, you know, when my wife and I teach our kids about healthy eating. Does that have an effect? No! Because they’re not motivated to eat healthy. They’re motivated eat sugar. And salt and fat.
HORN: Well, here’s how it turned out, and we did do some of what you were just talking about, in terms of trying to find reliable information, and that includes navigating the dizzying array of internet sources. But this metaphor that you use, which is probably one of the first places in The Righteous Mind where I was like, “Oh man, that’s me!” It’s something you alluded to a few moments ago, that we all believe that we are scientists just looking for data, you know, that we believe that we have this rational mind where we go out and [seek evidence]. But in fact, what we’re doing is lawyers making cases postpositively, you know, for what we already think is true and we are establishing those justifications afterward.
HAIDT: Yep, that’s the heart of The Righteous Mind. That’s the first principle of moral psychology. That’s right.
HORN: But what I did find that helped when we would do a unit on rhetoric and argumentation was the environment that had already been established in the classroom. And so that we framed it, you know, I was very careful because high school kids in particular, if they’ve been through a certain—this was in an English classroom, I should say—you know, after they’d been through enough social studies, they can start to think that anytime you call something a “debate,” it is about, you know, points, scoring points—
HAIDT: And winning …
HORN: And losing face. But so it would always be a kind of argumentative “discussion” or “conversation.” We would use that form. But then I found that it was really the comfort level, as you said, the relationships between the kids, because it was a place—and you know I also tried to make very sure that they weren’t also trying to say things that they thought that I would agree with, because I laid out that’s the opposite of what we’re talking about here, though that’s a heavy lift, as I was talking about with Jon Zimmerman a couple of months ago, when you’re the teacher and you have the grade book and so forth—but to the extent that people were able to do it, they were able to do it because they trusted that they wouldn’t be piled on, that they wouldn’t be ostracized, there wouldn’t be ad hominem attacks coming in their direction and that we’d keep it to the ideas, but that is not something, as you said, that you can just walk up and do with somebody. It depends on a relationship that you have and some kind of trust that it’s going to be okay to do that. Cause it’s hard.
HAIDT: That’s right. And what year were you teaching? Tell me again, the years you were teaching?
HORN: They did [the rhetoric and argumentation unit] from like 2005 to, I’m gonna say up through 2015. About 10 years.
[24:46]
HAIDT: Okay, so actually, let me ask you, because the social media changed radically between 2009 and 2012. Before 2009, Facebook, MySpace, all those platforms, it was just like, “Here I am! Look at all my friends, look at the music groups, the bands that I like!” In 2009, Facebook introduces the LIKE button and Twitter copies it, then Twitter introduces the RETWEET button and Facebook copies it. And so so suddenly social media is much more engaging, addicting. They’ve got massive information about each user. They use that to algorithmatize the newsfeed. So 2009 to 2012, we go from social media being pretty benign to it being an outrage machine, facilitating call-out culture. And these are exactly the years when American teens flood onto social media. If you look at data, on what percentage they were using it—like Facebook, we know what percent were using the social media site. Every day in 2009, it was much less than half of high school students were. But by 2011 or 2012, it was a large majority were. So that’s when everything changes. And when I go around speaking at high schools, middle schools elsewhere, I always ask the students about call-out culture and they all recognize it. And they all hate it.
[VO]: For those fortunate enough not to be familiar with call-out culture, it refers to a form of public shaming that takes place online, usually on social media, especially Twitter. Call-outs often aim to hold individuals and groups accountable for objectionable statements and actions, but they usually end up raising the level of outrage for all parties.
HAIDT: So for a generation that’s been raised where one word out of place—or even not out of place, just anything you say can be taken out of context and blown up and someone can put a spin on it and put a meme next to it. So you can be socially destroyed at any time. And I do think this is part of the reason why anxiety takes off, especially for girls in 2012, because that’s exactly when they got on social media. And I think the girls really suffered from it much more than the boys. Boys are mostly doing video games, more than social media. So to bring it back to what we were just talking about, you can try to teach critical reasoning skills, but I would guess that teenagers, high school kids, are vastly more concerned about the social dynamics on social media than they are about detecting a fallacy in somebody’s argument.
[VO]: For more thoughts on establishing a classroom environment where students are inclined to develop the trust necessary for deeper conversations, check out Point of Learning episode 003 with guest Paula Roy. Also, I’m proud to announce that Point of Learning has been inducted into Lyceum, a new platform for education podcasts. Here’s 30 seconds about that from the founder of Lyceum, and then we’ll get right back to my conversation with Jonathan Haidt!
ZACHARY DAVIS: Hi, I’m Zachary Davis. I’m the host of two podcasts: Ministry of Ideas, which explores the philosophy behind everyday concepts, and Writ Large, a new podcast about the books that changed the world. I love educational podcasts. I love listening to them and talking about them. I want everyone to have that chance. And so I’ve built a new platform called Lyceum, which makes it easy to discover great educational podcasts and have conversations about them. There are more than a million podcasts out there. We’ve done the hard work of sifting through them and finding only the very best education shows to listen to, shows like the one you’re listening to right now. So if you love learning, download Lyceum today on the App Store or Google Play, or visit us at lyceum.fm.
[28:35]
HORN: So one of the things that I was trying to figure out, I think just as social media was getting nasty, was trying to think about, well, what kinds of devices would be okay to bring into the classroom, if we can’t afford yet to have a laptop on a 1:1 basis? What would it be like for kids—this is like 2013, all right—for kids to have, you know, their phones or like an iPod Touch was one of the options that some kids already had, to see how they could connect with internet media and other sorts of platforms on what was then called “2.0.” We experimented, but I kept asking students what they thought about it, what was working for them. And they were actually very honest saying that the phone is a distraction. “It is hard for me to use in this way.” And especially since hearing some of the data that you have discussed, and written about, presented on, it just becomes overwhelmingly clear that a strong case can be made for not allowing phones in particular in school during the school day. Another one of your points is of course, keeping kids off of social media before they get to high school. But I confess, this is one of the things that I was thinking about as a teacher years ago, trying to say, well, how can we take advantage of some of this new technology and some of these new ways of learning that are possible while there is this noted downside too?
HAIDT: Yeah, so let’s, talk about two different downsides. One is mental health problems and the other is distraction and learning. On the mental health side, until recently there was a big debate as to, you know, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation? Is screen time causing the rise of depression and anxiety?” And so I got into that debate because Greg Lukianoff and I covered it in our book, and we focused on social media. But when we wrote the book, we did say that limits on screen time [may be warranted because] these devices are magical. And if you let a kid have unlimited access to them, it’s gonna push out other activities, so there’s a lot of concern about screens and phones, but as I’ve dug into the debate and as I’ve engaged with critics who said, “No, you know, let’s look at the evidence,” it turns out that the number of hours that one spends on a screen every day does not predict depression or anxiety. Screen time is not the enemy in terms of depression and anxiety. Social media is, and it is overwhelmingly for girls. Does it lead to depression in boys? You know, maybe a little bit, but it’s not so clear. For girls, across different kinds of studies, it’s pretty consistent. It’s not a huge effect, but it is clearly, I believe, clearly a contributor. So there’s a really, really strong argument to be made for trying to keep kids, especially girls, from even getting a social media account until high school. They’re supposed to wait till they’re 13, but when my son entered middle school at age 11, he said, “Everybody else has an Instagram account.” Everybody just lies. This is a really, really bad idea because I think it contributes to the mental health crisis for girls. So anybody out there, especially if you’re working in middle school, remember the parents can’t just make the decision themselves because, your kid says, “But everybody else is on it, I’ll be excluded,” and no parent wants their kid to be the outcast. So we all need help from administrators, especially middle school principals and teachers to say, “Parents, please don’t even let them get an account until high school.” Right, so that’s the mental health. But what you’re talking about is more of the distraction issue and what I can report there is that I’ve always in my courses at UVA and especially here at NYU-Stern where I’m teaching MBA students in their twenties, I’ve always laid out, “Here’s the problem with distraction. We all think we can do multitasking, but we can’t. So I’m going to let you have your laptops or devices, as long as you all say out loud this pledge that you will not use it for other than class activities, that you will not shop, you’re not going to do email, you’re just gonna use it for class activities.” And I, and I’ve always done that because I want to trust my students. But only a few years ago did I think to ask, and it turns out they don’t want it! They all—not all, but you know—when I put it to a vote and I say, “Okay, how many of you think we should have just a No Devices policy?” Most of the MBA students say yes, because they know if there’s a screen in front of them, they can’t pay attention to the lecture. And even if they’re trying, the person next to them is now multitasking and they go, “Okay, why don’t I do that too?” And that’s for 27-year-olds! Think about being a 15-year-old, and this is laptops we’re talking about now. A laptop, of course, it gives you access to everything, but a touch screen gives you a reward faster. A touch screen is more immersive, more engaging than as a laptop. So I think it is really important for K-12 educators to do everything they can to keep kids away from, especially from their devices. There may be reasons why you’d need a computer at times, of course, but if they have access to their own phone, how can they possibly resist? There are so many psychologists in Silicon Valley who are experts in keeping that kid on his phone.
HORN: The “attention economy,” yeah.
[33:55]
HAIDT: So it’s crazy that schools let kids have phones in their pockets or even their backpacks. If they’re there, they’ll use them. They’ll use them during class breaks, they’ll sneak into the bathroom. So I feel very strongly about this. We need really good, clear evidence. I want schools to do clear experiments. In one school, you have a permissive policy or, you know, in five schools, in a school district—five high schools, you have permissive policy, and in five schools, you say, “No, you don’t get access to your phone except when you arrive and when you leave.” We need good data on this.
HORN: I really applaud bringing kids in on the conversation and the discussion, you know, as opposed to— There would be some administrators whose temptation would be like, “Oh, this is bad, so we’re going to ban it.” And kids wouldn’t understand why, or what was going on. They wouldn’t have heard about the evidence, let alone been involved in any kind of participatory action research that might, you know, help them understand, “Okay, well, this is what’s happening here,” because of course, if we’re trying to think about their making better decisions, but also participating as citizens in that school community, in the classroom and in the school community as agents there, I just—you know, my bias is toward trying to involve the students, especially at the high school level, as much as possible. “So this is what we think is right, and here’s why.”
HAIDT: Yes, I think it’s so important to bring the students in. One of the really good things that I’ve learned about Gen Z is that they are not in denial. I’ve spoken at a number of middle schools and high schools and of course at colleges, and you know, I lay out, “Look, here’s what's going on: high rates of depression, anxiety, fragility, overprotected, risk-averse.” You know, it’s a pretty damning portrait of their generation. I don’t blame them for it. I explain how this happened. You know, that adults following good intentions were trying to help them, protect them. So I’m not blaming them, but it is a pretty negative portrayal of their generation. And at the end of the talk, I generally say, “Okay, you know, if you’re born after 1996—if you’re a Gen Z student—what do you think? Did I largely get this right, is this a mis-presentation of your generation?” And it’s overwhelmingly—it’s almost, it’s usually around a hundred percent say, “Yes, this is right.” Because they recognize that they’re suffering from anxiety and depression. They recognize that social media and call-out culture is damaging them. They hate it. They recognize they’ve been overprotected. They don’t want to be so overprotected. And so if you bring them in on it and you say, “You know, here’s what the evidence says. What are your goals? Do you want to learn, or do you want to stay connected on social media all day long?” As long as everybody else is off. They’re like, “I wouldn’t want to be off if everyone else is on, because I’ll be left out, but if everyone is off …” And so I think we have to recognize kids are caught in a lot of—economists, call them “social dilemmas” or “cooperation games” where everybody’s better off if nobody does this behavior, but each person is better off doing the behavior. So you know, the classic example: if you graze your sheep on the town commons, you are better off. But if everybody does it, then the commons dies. And so kids are trapped in a lot of those things and you know what, in Silicon Valley, they know that and they engineered it that way. That’s the way they can get everybody on. And it’s up to us, parents and educators working together, to create a path by which the kids can get out of it. If you bring them in, it’s a great chance to explain, you know, economics, to let us explain social science concepts, if you bring them in on it and say, “Okay, let’s craft a healthy media environment. Let’s craft a healthy learning environment.” I think they’ll generally be very supportive.
[37:38]
HORN: So, rising rates of depression and anxiety, particularly in girls; the dangers of social media. These are a couple of the topics that you discuss as some of the intersecting strands at work in The Coddling of the American Mind. I wanted to talk about another one. I’m very interested in the link between free play and democratic skills, especially at this moment when we seem particularly inept at working through disagreements. So this is one of the phenomena you talk about. First, what is free play?
HAIDT: So free play is what mammals do. Mammals—all mammals—play. And if all mammals play—you know, bunny rabbits play and develop the skills that they’ll need as bunny rabbits, and wolves play at the skills they’ll need as wolves. They all play chasing games, and the wolves seem to prefer being the chaser, and the rabbits seem to prefer practicing their fleeing skills. So when I was a grad student, I lived in a neighborhood in South Philadelphia with a lot of families. And I’ll never forget one day, I was in my mid-twenties and I, you know, I’ve always loved kids and I’ve always loved playing with kids. So I was known as like the, you know, the grownup that they could play with. And I remember one day, some of the kids came, they rang my doorbell and they said, “Mr. Jon, will you chase us?” They wanted this big adult to come chase them. That was fun because they were practicing their fleeing skills.
HORN: Interesting.
HAIDT: All mammals, all mammal species practice play. It’s essential for our development of basic adult skills that we’ll need as members of our species. Okay. So, as is well known, if you give young kids a present, they might find the box more interesting. They might find the ribbons more interesting—because they’re creative, they’re taking things, they’re working it out, both with the object and with the other kids. And this is really important. One of the most essential human skills is shared representations. We work with other kids to develop like, “Okay, let’s pretend that this is the spaceship.” “Okay, yeah, and then a giraffe comes …” “No, it can’t be a giraffe!” So so they’re working out these shared representations with other kids, and this is play. And so, you know, I don’t know how old you are. I was born in 1963, and there was a gigantic crime wave from the 1960s to the 1990s. And during that crime wave, all kids went out to play. When you were seven or eight years old, you went out to play. And then, something weird happened. The crime rate plummeted in the 1990s. (There are a lot of reasons for that.) But the crime wave sort of ends in the 1990s. And just as the crime wave is ending, Americans freaked out about child abduction and we thought “Stranger danger! If you let your kid outside, she’ll be abducted.” And it’s true that a few were, but almost zero. I mean, in a country of 350 million people, there’s only about a 100-150 true kidnappings every year. It’s almost zero, but we freaked out about it just as life was getting safe. And we said, “No more unsupervised outdoor play. You have to stay where I can see you.” And at the same time, we had rising competition to get into college. And so we had—especially for the middle class and [higher incomes]—this idea of what’s called concerted cultivation parenting: your childhood is a group activity for our family to get you into the top college, which means after school, you’ve got lessons, you’ve got activities. So for a variety of reasons, unsupervised free play largely vanished for younger kids, especially, and supervised structured activities, exploded. What happened? We took young mammals and we deprived them of the activity they most needed. What they most need is not math. And it’s not violin lessons. It’s unstructured time with other kids deciding “what should we do today?” “I don’t know. What do you think?” “Well, let’s go down to the Village and see what’s going on,” or, you know, “Let’s go play ball in the park.” We took away the most nutritious activity for human development, which is unstructured free play, and we replaced it with stuff that isn’t so healthy. Soccer practice: it’s good. It’s good to do soccer practice, but there’s a coach telling you what to do all the time. It’s not free play. And this we think is one of the big reasons why the mental health of Gen Z has deteriorated so quickly. In fact, we’ve got quotes in the [Coddling]: Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College and there’s also a Norwegian researcher Sandseter. Both of them have articles around 2010-11 saying, “You know, folks, free play is declining. We’ve got to let kids play. And if we don’t let kids play, there's going to be a rise of depression and anxiety.” They literally predicted this around 2010-11, and a year or two later, boom, the rates go skyrocketing. [Gray, P. “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents. American Journal of Play, 2011; Sandseter, E., and L. Kennair. “Children’s Risky Play from an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences. Evolutionary Psychology, 2011.]
[VO]: To learn more about how to counter the culture of overprotection for kids in elementary and even middle school, visit letgrow.org. There’s a link on the show page.
[42:37]
HORN: And so as far as the working things out aspect, you know, you noted [paraphrasing Peter Gray] that free play is always voluntary, and that anybody can quit at any time, which would disrupt the activity. And because of that, children need to pay close attention to the needs and concerns of others if they want to keep the game going, as opposed to the coach saying, “Hey, you stay in there.” Right? So they’ve got to work out conflicts over fairness on their own. No adult can be called upon to side with one child against another.
HAIDT: That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. What is it the kids most want? What is it they’re most afraid of? They most want to fit in. They’re most afraid of being ostracized or kicked out. So if you’re the kid who can’t cooperate, if you’re the kid who’s always demanding to get your way, guess what? Other kids aren’t gonna want to play with you. So you learn to get along with others, you learn to self-control, you learn to regulate your demands. You learn to read other people’s faces. So the most important social skills, the skills we need, the skills we want to see in college, the skills that employers want—all of those are learned in free play. But what happens when instead of free play, they’re always in a structured environment with a coach or a teacher? What happens when there’s a conflict? Who do you go to in that situation? Kids practice skills of reporting, that is, they learn to make the best case they can to the adult that so-and-so broke the rules. “She’s wrong. I’m right. You judge.” And so this is what we’ve seen in college. This is what happened. It really swept in around 2014-15 this culture of students reporting each other for speech violations to various deans and it’s just put us all on eggshells. We’re all now much more afraid. We’re very careful what we say in class, because if we offend someone, there’s all kinds of reporting mechanisms and they were raised to do this. It’s not good for democracy. It’s not practice for a complicated, diverse society. It’s “fomenting an attitude of victimhood” is what some people say.
HORN: I can distinctly remember in kindergarten—this happened exactly once, and it was a recess. This is 1980-81; I’m 45. And it happened exactly once, because this was supervised [recess] only in the sense that if somebody starts bleeding, you know, somebody would notice or whatever. I mean, there’s somebody nearby, but who was not interacting. I decided, wouldn’t it be great when we’re playing superheroes if I could be a superhero that did not exist called the King of the Superheroes who had all the powers of every other superhero. I came up with this idea after somebody else had claimed Batman and Spiderman and so forth. I came up with this idea, and it did not go over well. And that was it. That was the end of the idea, you know, like I did not try that again.
HAIDT: [laughing] They schooled you!
HORN: I was like, “Yeah, I guess that could have been better considered …”
[45:47]
HORN: You’ve written about changing your mind quite a bit. This is a wonderful capacity, like compromise, that we don’t talk about very often. But you’ve changed your mind quite a bit since your upbringing or your growing up as a secular liberal, in terms of how you thought about morality, politics and religion. And I wanted to ask you about somebody that I’ve seen and heard you write about and speak about who helped you with this. Because this is a show about what and how and why we learn, I often ask guests about a teacher who had a strong influence on them, but in your case, I know that you’ve said some very impressive things about Richard Shweder, the professor at University of Chicago who was your postdoctoral advisor. What was it?
HAIDT: Sure. So I went to Penn [for my Ph.D.] and I had some wonderful professors there, especially Paul Rozin, a general psychologist who just had a love of learning, a love of psychology, just a rampant curiosity. And then also Alan Fiske, an anthropologist who first introduced me to cultural psychology. Fiske was the first person who assigned me to read ethnographies, full portraits of other cultures. So Rozin and Fiske really started the process and really started opening me up to the joys of psychology and cultural psychology. And both of them had worked with Richard Shweder, a psychological anthropologist at the University of Chicago. And my dissertation grew into a study of whether Rick Shweder was right in his debate with Elliot Turiel over the nature of moral knowledge. Is the moral domain limited to issues of harm, rights and justice, or is it broader in some ways? And so for a variety of reasons, I ended up applying for a postdoc to go to Chicago. And I worked with Shweder for two years. And during that time, because I was working with Shweder, he had really good research contacts in Bhubaneswar, India on the east coast of India, the capital of Odisha province. So I got an award, a grant, to travel there, and I did three months of fieldwork. And what Shweder taught me was first how to think about pluralism, that is, it’s not that there’s one morality, but it’s also not that there’s no morality or that everybody is right. Shweder’s view is pluralism: there’s more than one right way. And Shweder was very influenced by Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher. And I think those skills, the thinking about how can you live in a world where people have different values without retreating to relativism or nihilism; I learned that from Shweder. The other thing that I learned from him is how to appreciate a community that has a broader and more binding morality. Shweder wrote about the ethics of autonomy, which we all know in the West, but there’s also the ethics of community. It’s sort of a parochialism: everybody do your assigned job; it’s very clear in Hinduism. And [he wrote about] the ethics of divinity: norms about purity and pollution and how you have a sacred essence within you that you must guard, which are at the heart of almost all the American culture war issues around sexuality, drug use, flag burning—all sorts of issues that seem where the right seems irrational to people on the left. I mean, it’s often because they have a broader moral domain. [People on the right are] thinking about issues of loyalty, respect, duty, sacredness, purity. So Shweder really opened my mind to different moralities. And here I was very much on the left. I hated Republicans, I hated conservatives. And here I was now going to India, trying to understand a society that was traditional, gender- segregated, very hierarchical, very religious, and they were really nice to me! And they made it easy to like them, and in that way, they opened my heart to really listen to them. And I’d done a lot of reading, also; I was trying to understand their way of life, and Shweder really helped me with that. So when I think about my intellectual biography, and all the great teachers I had, from social studies teachers in middle school, through through my AP history teachers in high school, through wonderful professors at Yale, grad school [at Penn], and then onto Richard Shweder, they all ultimately prepared me to step out of my own moral matrix, my network of beliefs that I got from being an American progressive in the 1980s. Let’s say it all prepared me to step out of my own moral matrix and enter into the moral matrix or moral worldview of other people. And that’s a skill that has been enormously valuable, especially as American society fragments, as our culture war heats up, as we descend into increased conflict. It’s made it harder for me to be a full-throated member of any team, but I think I at least have an understanding of what’s happening to us and why we’re descending into madness. We’re not crazy. We’re not insane. But we are normal creatures who evolve for tribal intergroup conflict who had the benefit of living in a society that was able to progressively dampen down those ethnic identities and other identities—obviously not perfectly, but boy! the trajectory of late 20th century sure was a good direction. Things got better decade after decade. And now, for a lot of reasons, the benefits we had, the factors that gave us more cohesion in the 20th century, a lot of them are falling away. So anyway, I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying it’s really exciting to study moral psychology right now, because at least I have the pleasure of trying to figure out what’s going on rather than just the despair of seeing our society go to hell.
[51:37]
HORN: We started talking about the difference between liberals and conservatives, again, in these general categories. You’ve used this very interesting metaphor, and this is going back to The Righteous Mind, whose subtitle is Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. And one of the things that you helped this liberal understand is, through your metaphor or comparison to taste receptors on a tongue, being aware that there are different kinds of things, different kinds of flavors that speak to different groups, and whereas everybody, liberal and conservative, can respond to ideas of care and fairness, liberals can often stop there; whereas in addition to that, there are these other values of autonomy, loyalty, authority, purity / sanctity that are available to people on the more conservative side. And so a couple of things come from that. One is that, given the kind of bias of media and culture toward a liberal perspective, conservatives are pretty comfortable with the “liberal world.” They know where liberals come from. But so many conservative ideas don’t really make sense to liberals because they tick in these other places that are just—when you were talking about, you know, sanctity related to purity in India that was something that was difficult for you to grasp at first. And then it made sense and things began to open up because you’re looking at something that is pretty different. And so I was struck with what opens up as a result of thinking about these kinds of things, that there are different kinds of strengths or excellences that these different groups bring. But I also want to [consider] some of the images of this past week [5/28-6/3/20]: you have a Black Lives Matter slogan; certainly that talks about care and fairness, whether you’re talking about equality or equity, but then you have Blue Lives Matter responding to that, which gets at some of those same things, but also brings in this value of authority, like “we need law and order!” I’m just trying to think about some of the things that we’ve seen, you know, including our president standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, clutching that Bible by his fingertips, you know, as if he had just read like Ivanka’s diary, unloading about her narcissistic dad or something. He didn’t really seem to want to touch it, but the symbols there were very powerful.
HAIDT: No, that’s right. Yes, and I think that whenever we have a big blow-up, whenever we have a conflict that pits left and right in the United States, generally speaking, you will find the left is drawing on language and concerns about fairness, justice, equality, and also care or [its opposite] violence. So, you know, the moral language of the protesters and Black Lives Matter is incredibly powerful. It’s accessible to everybody. [From my office] I look out on Washington Square Park right now, and somebody has spray-painted on the arch “BLM. Stop killing my people.” And so it’s a language everybody understands. Now conservatives also understand [care]. They care for their children, they care for their dogs. So it’s not as though they don’t have that, but conservative morality tends not to be built on care and compassion. It tends to be built more on notions of personal responsibility and duty and respect for authority and tradition. And there are many kinds of conservatism and many kinds of liberalism. So we have you know, the spectacle of Donald Trump, who is not a religious man, who has not lived anything like a Christian life, holding up the Bible as a marketing tactic to speak to his core audience and to assure them, “I’m on your side.” So, you know, there’s a lot we could say about the ugly politics of the moment and the moral and political entrepreneurs who simply exploit it for messaging rather than actually enacting it to create a better society. I guess if we’re talking especially to educators, maybe we could wrap it up by saying, this is the messed-up world that your students are all going to graduate into. And so, to get back to your question about a revamped [civics] curriculum, I think it’s vital that we focus on educating students for democracy, which means appreciating that democracy is important and valuable and fragile. It doesn’t come easily. We thought it did in the 1990s because America won the Cold War and there was no alternative. We thought that if we just let Russia and Iran and Saudi Arabia, North Korea—just let them get market economies, let them rise in wealth, the people will demand liberties and they’ll become liberal democracies just like us. Well, we were wrong about that. It turns out democracy is exactly as hard as the Founding Fathers said. They said it was hard. In fact, they didn’t want democracy. They wanted a republic with democratic features, and they warned us about demagogues and the way that a demagogue will come and speak to the passions. So we have to educate for this complicated hybrid democratic republic. And part of that is going to be, I think, educating for some sense of moral and intellectual humility, that you don’t know everything, that your group can’t possibly know everything, that we’re all deluded by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, that we actually need engagement with people who are different from us to improve our own thinking. At any rate, I guess we’ll just close by saying that democracy is incredibly hard, and as hard as it is to believe, that you might benefit from listening to people on the other side. Often it is hard to believe that, because often the people on the other side really do some loathsome things or at least some people on the other side do loathsome things. And then we hate the whole side. I guess I would just urge that in K-12 education, especially in high school, lie the seeds of redemption for our country. We are in a very bad state, headed in a very bad direction, and we’ve got to help the next generation learn to handle this difficult democracy and thrive in it and improve it.
HORN: Jon, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
HAIDT: Peter, my pleasure.
[58:17]
That’s it for today’s show! Once again, my great thanks to Professor Jonathan Haidt for joining me. Together with co-editor Richard Reeves and artist David Cicirelli, Dr. Haidt has developed a lively new version of some of philosopher John Stuart Mill’s classic arguments for viewpoint diversity and free speech. That’s called All Minus One, and it’s available as a free download at HeterodoxAcademy.org. There are links to that, and many other resources on the show page for this episode, including two of Jon’s phenomenal books, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, co-authored by Greg Lukianoff. All music for today’s soundtrack was composed and performed by Shayfer James. Finally, thanks to you for listening, rating, and reviewing this podcast, all of which makes it easier for people to find. If you like what you heard today, please take a moment to share this episode with just one person you think would dig it. It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and produced by me here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. My name is Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with a fresh episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!
